Day of Stories on Deer Lake

Author panel, generative writing, and story sharing circle

Calling all writers! You are invited to an afternoon of writerly discussion, generative writing, and artistic community building in a welcoming space. Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho, the Deer Lake Writer-in-Residence for April 2025, will facilitate a stimulating, interactive afternoon for writers of all levels, including a panel of authors on what makes for a sustainable writing practice, small group breakout discussions, generative writing in the garden (weather-permitting), mingling time with snacks and music, and a story sharing circle at the end.

The writing journey can feel long and lonely. Writers sometimes get stuck and need an external nudge to keep going. This event is specifically curated to help reinvigorate your writing practice. Leveraging on the shifting energy of spring, participants will cross-pollinate new ideas and strategies to support creative writing, meet fellow artists in the community, and write – all in a beautiful, inclusive space.

Generously sponsored by the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and the Deer Lake Artist-in-Residence program, this event is free but registration is required and space is limited.

Bios of panelists:

Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Her award-winning short stories and personal essays have appeared in River Teeth, Ricepaper magazine, ROOM, PRISM international, Pulp Literature, WordWorks, and several anthologies. A strong champion of writing communities, Wiley is a member of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, the Federation of BC Writers, and the North Shore Writers’ Association, where she regularly helps to organize community events. Wiley is in the throes of completing a geopolitical memoir about her “astronaut” family, separated between Taiwan and Canada.

Renu Parmar is a writer, psychotherapist, and teacher. Her coming-of-age novel The Colour of Snow (2019) explores identity, grief, addiction, and ancestral trauma. She was featured in Situate Magazine as best emerging writer, and the book was a finalist for the Independent Authors Network “Best Book of the Year” award in 2020. Currently, she is exploring different genres of writing - essay, prose poetry and short stories.

Jonathan Poh is a Singaporean-Canadian writer and former fashion editor of the global lifestyle and culture publication, HYPEBEAST. In 2020, he won the CBC Nonfiction Prize for his story “Value Village” and is a multiple-time recipient of Canada Council for the Arts grants (2021, 2023). His work-in-progress, How to Dress an Immigrant, is a humourous memoir-in-essays that uses his life-long affair with clothing and personal style as a revelatory lens to explore Asian masculinity, beauty, identity, belonging, and the immigrant experience.

Thi Tran is a Vietnamese Canadian writer, editor, and artist. A graduate of SFU’s The Writer’s Studio (2017), her manuscript The H is Silent challenges reductive portrayals of Vietnamese culture, bringing nuanced diaspora stories to the forefront. Through personal narratives, she explores identity, memory, and belonging—beyond war, nail salons, and ph?. Her work received the Canada Council for the Arts Creation Grant (2021, 2022).