I’m back from an eventful week at the Community of Writers in California. I am grateful to the conference for awarding me the James Houston Memorial Scholarship. It turns out that the mentor I was paired to have my one-on-one with, Krys Lee, received the same scholarship when she attended the conference for the first time! I also took part in a fiction workshop that was run by a different staff member each day. Jonah Straus, literary agent at Straus Literary, led the workshop the day we examined an excerpt from my novel in progress.

I’m grateful to the Ontario Arts Council, thanks to whom I was able to attend Community of Writers this summer as well as the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Summer Workshop last year.