DEB ELKINK

 

BIO:

 

Deb Elkink grew up in the urban Manitoba home of a visual artist mother and a creative house-building father. She married a cowboy and moved to an isolated Saskatchewan cattle ranch, where she raised three kids before earning her M.A. in Historical Theology. Deb now lives near Medicine Hat in southern Alberta and has professionally edited academic doctoral work since 2001. She writes both fiction and nonfiction; her debut novel (The Third Grace) won the 2012 Grace Irwin Award, and her second book has just come out (Roots and Branches: The Symbol of the Tree in the Imagination of G. K. Chesterton). 

 

Pas that Faux: Catch Your Mistakes Before the Editor Does

 

Don’t let technical habits of punctuation, grammar, or syntax earn you a story rejection! In this hands-on workshop, we’ll learn to produce excellent copy that will catch any editor’s fancy.

 

We’ll become more confident about comma usage, maintaining consistent voice, identifying wordiness, and so on by using Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (you can buy this must-have bookshelf item from me for $10, or else bring your own copy).

 

Registration is limited to 12 participants, who are asked to send me (deb@rolledscroll.com) three double-spaced pages of your best writing at least two weeks before the conference. I’ll critique these privately for you and use them as the (anonymous) basis for our workshop focus.

 

 

 The Apostles’ Creed: What We Believe

 

You’d never sign a contact without understanding it, would you?

 

Every member of Inscribe signs on to the Apostles’ Creed. What does this statement say, why does the organization ask for our agreement as a condition of membership, and how does the creed influence our relationships as writers as well as our production in writing?

 

This session will look at the meaning behind each phrase in the creed to discover the foundational doctrinal beliefs that cross all denominational boundaries. We’ll come away with a clearer definition about what a “Christian writer” is and leave with a sense of unity-in-diversity.

 

 

Writing Through The Senses: Tasty, Fragrant, Tactile, Beautiful, Melodic Story

 

In this interactive workshop for writers of all genres, we’ll explore the five senses and write pithy descriptions that translate our readers into the very sensuous core of our experiences. Powerful physical samples will stimulate the tongue, nose, skin, eye, and ear; then we’ll enter a time of furious writing and sharing our perceptions with one another. Participants will leave with a heightened sensitivity to our surroundings and the importance of capturing the senses in words.

 

 

Layers of Meaning: How to Build a Symbol

 

Writing is like creating a collage; we start with basic colour and composition (or setting and theme), and then build thickness (or meaning) to create depth.

 

This workshop will explore how to deepen meaning in our fiction and poetry through the use of symbolism. It’s a difficult area for many of us, but a beginning study in literary analysis can help us along towards writing more complex, multi-layered stories. Looking at biblical symbolism as well as the fictional work of one British writer (G. K. Chesterton), we’ll come up with some great ideas for developing our own symbolic imaginations, and ideas on how to work a symbol or two into our next pieces.