Yesterday I made arrangements for the cabin Ted and I will be staying while I am a ‘mentor’ at the SFU Mystery Writers Retreat on Salt Spring Island at the beginning of June. We are still deep in winter here, so Cedar Beach Resort with its improbably blue waters and endless sunny beaches looks like paradise to me.
The company we’ll be keeping seems very appealing too: Margaret Cannon, the crime fiction columnist for the Globe and Mail; Dinah Forbes, executive editor in part responsible for M&S’s crime fiction program and that includes me; Linda L. Richards, author and founding editor of January magazine; literary agent, Carolyn Swayze; Michael Slade, a criminal lawyer and author of 14 bestselling mystery thrillers, and William Deverell, also a lawyer and a terrific novelist.
As stellar as our group is, Margaret Cannon sent me a note last week saying how much she is looking forward to meeting the writers who will be our groups from June 6 to June 11. I think that’s true for all of us.
The emerging writers who come to retreats are always a surprise and inevitably a pleasant one. As I told Margaret, in a group of 7 students I once had at Banff, two were Freudian analysts. There were many significant silences in that class, and after we all overcame our fear of having our inner Dexter revealed, there was also a great deal of laughter.
All of us who do writing workshops have heard horror stories of mad men and seductresses, but so far none have come my way. I did hear of a writer who did not take kindly to her mentor’s comments about how her manuscript could be improved and stomped out of the class, saying “I am a WRITER NOT A RE-WRITER.” But in my experience, emerging writers are eager to hear thoughtful assessments of their work and they are generous in suggesting strategies to other writers.
I have never once finished a workshop without a sense of excitement about how far the writers in the group have come. Sometimes writers who have been in my group have been published; sometimes they have self-published; sometimes they continue to write for the same reason I write: because they have to.
If any of you have a hankering to take a great class in mystery writing at Salt Spring, please check out their website. The best parties will be in Cabin 18.