‘Fire up your fiction’ at the Lois Hole Library

By Trevor Robb

EDMONTON- Some people go out of their away to avoid conflict, but Edmonton resident Marty Chan likes to put himself right in the thick of it.

As the new Edmonton Public Library’s ‘Writer in Residence‘, Marty Chan hosts writing seminars at  different public library branches across the city. On Thursday at the Lois Hole Library, Chan hosted ‘Fire up your Fiction’, a writing seminar intended to help writers spice up the conflict in their stories.

“The greatest thing about doing these kind of workshops is that it forces me to, sort of, re-examine what I think I know about writing,” said Chan. “Every time I teach these workshops, I learn something new about how I write.”

Chan graduated from the University of Alberta with a major in English and a minor in drama. He begun his career as a playwright, but later he shifted his focus to fiction, namely children’s fiction.

“The residency is set up so that 40  per cent of my time is for public programming like this and one-on-one consultations,” said Chan. “The other 60 per cent of my time I’m allowed to work on my own projects.”

Chan is set to release a series of children’s books in the fall surrounding the title character ‘Barnabus Bigfoot’, a Sasquatch who has unusually small feet for a Sasquatch.

Offering advice

Heather Miller was one of several local writers who attended the workshop. Miller is originally from Winnipeg but has called her Callingwood residence ‘home’ for the past 14 years. She enlisted the help of Chan as part of  his one-on-one consultations.

Miller, a former journalist now freelance writer and author, traveled the country writing articles for a provincial aboriginal newspaper called the Windspeaker. Miller hopes to use her experiences as a journalist and combine all her articles into chapters for an upcoming book she’s working on, with the help of Chan.

“He (Chan) helped me thread them all together by helping me choose the character, the reporter – which is not me – although certainly the experiences are based off what I saw and did there,” said Miller. “It’s a fictionalized account of a true experience.”

Miller is a member of a local writers group, called the ‘West End Writers’. The group meets every month to share story ideas and support each other’s writing. Miller said that each of the groups dozen writers offers their own unique advice on writing.

“I think we’re all teachers for each other, because we all have had different experiences,” said Miller.

Fringe Festival

Chan’s main office is in the Stanley A. Milner library in downtown Edmonton. The library is home to its own theatre and Chan pitched the idea of writing a play for the upcoming 30th annual ‘Edmonton International  Fringe Theatre Festival’.

“As part of my residency, one of the pitches I had was, well we you guys have got this library theatre here, there’s a fringe that is now expanding beyond Old Strathcona, why not just have the library theatre as a fringe venue and I’ll write a play for it and we’ll see who comes out?” said Chan.

Chan wrote, what he describes as a political satire play called ‘Mothership Down’.

“It sort of pokes fun at the notion of how we see political leaders, and whether our votes actually matter or not, why we vote and what impact our vote actually has,” said Chan.

It will mark the first time a ‘Fringe’ play has been shown outside of the Strathcona region. The festival has become a huge summer attraction for arts lovers in Edmonton.

Chan is set to host a ‘Writers Corner’  workshop at the Stanley A. Milner library on May 29, 2011. Guest speaker Douglas Smith is set to attend and co-head the workshop.