Anna Camilleri

BOOKINGS

Anna has performed and read at many venues in Canada and the US: Atlanta's Seen + Heard Festival, San Francisco's National Queer Arts Festival, Canadian National Library Archives, Edmonton's Exposure Queer Arts and Culture Festival, Toronto's Mayworks Festival, Boston's Centre for New Words, University of Regina, Queen's University, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, York University, University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Winnipeg, and George Brown College. Academic presenters have included Women's Studies, Sociology, English Literature, Gender Studies, Education, Dramatic Arts, and student group presenters have included LGBTT Student Affairs Offices/Associations, Women's Students Graduate Caucuses, Equity Offices, and Women's Centres.

Anna speaks on topics including writing (stage, print, and radio; memoir and fiction) and feminism to gender, femininities, and performance, with a style that's down to earth, welcoming and engaging. She will customize an engagement (performance/reading/guest lecture/artist talk or combination thereof) according to the presenter's needs. She also designs and facilitates workshops for groups of eight to 20.

To book Anna for a university or festival event or find out more information, email reddressproductions@gmail.com

To find out where Anna is next performing, subscribe to her newsletter at reddressproductions@gmail.com

WORKSHOPS

Anna designs and facilitates custom workshops independently, and with various organizations. All workshops listed are offered as daylong or weekend intensives, and as four or six-week courses. To inquire about or register for a workshop, email Anna Camilleri at reddressproductions@gmail.com

Blue Shoes

Memoir writing can be an overwhelming task. Where to start? Where to stop? How to shape the story? The past hangs over us in a thousand shimmering fragments, defying us to bring form to it.

Blue Shoes is a six-week writing intensive designed to explore pathways into working with life experience and seemingly random memory—like those patent leather blue shoes in your mother’s closet that you coveted but weren’t allowed to touch. Based in facilitated exercises in a supportive group setting, participants will generate new writings working with memoir elements including the first-person voice, image and details, characterization, irony, conflict, narrative arc, and plot. We will also look at ethical and practical concerns such as working with emotionally charged material, managing the inner critic, working with personal truth and disputed events, documentation versus story, and transforming personal experience into distilled narrative that reveals the complexity of the human condition.

Blue Shoes is for writers, and for those who wish to write memoir.

Creative License

Do you want to write but are having trouble breaking through the "noise"?

Creative License is a four-week workshop intensive that contextualizes writing as a sensory practice that calls upon writers to imagine, explore, intuit, and craft. The initial stage of writing-opening our selves and our imaginations-can be frustrating, terrifying, and lonely. Just the mention of the "first-draft" inspires a litany of Bs: blank, blocked, and bland.

Creative License is a workshop environment designed to encourage word/text exploration in a supportive group setting. The emphasis is on mining our imaginations, experimenting with voice and form, and generating new writings. Based in a series of facilitated writing exploratory exercises and group dialogue, this intensive is designed to offer participants tools for entering the writing realm with curiosity, and creative license.

Creative License is for writers, and for those who wish to write.

Anthology Incubator: From Pitch to Print

Do you have an idea for an anthology, and don't know what to do with it? Anthologies are an exciting way of locating, extending or disrupting ideas on our cultural map. In this 6-week course, which includes hands-on workshop/lab components, we'll focus on:

Clarifying your idea through research, brainstorming and creative exploration;
Writing a proposal that will inspire a publisher's interest and confidence;
The various stages of creating an anthology including production elements, calls for submissions, and soliciting material;
Approaches to editorial engagement (substantive/developmental and line/copy editing), working with contributors, and shaping your manuscript;
Financial aspects including contracts and contributor fees, managing files and information flow between you, contributors and your publisher, and reducing administrative backtracking.

We'll also touch down on visual treatment and design, promotional materials (book jacket, publisher catalogue, media release, and web page), annotated table of contents, query letters, and the dreaded one-sentence description. Anthology Incubator: From Pitch to Print includes a 50-page Resource Guide.