I love how many Canadian writers have shared prompts with me, and I can’t wait to share them with you and your families. This message came in from the magical Monique Polak. Enjoy! And seek out her great books–she has one upcoming that we can’t wait to read:

Monique Polak:

Here’s my prompt. I started doing it with my daughter (now 36 years old) when she was just a little girl.

This exercise is super short, but powerful. It can be done with very young children. But it works for older kids and adults too!
It can be done directly on a calendar, or else you can start a diary and do it there.
You only need to write TWO WORDS.
One word describes how your day was. Example: fun or tiring or crazy or whatever other word you can come up with!
Now come up with one word to describe how you want your tomorrow to be!
Not only does this exercise build vocabulary. It also helps us reflect on our days, and think about what we need for our tomorrows.

That’s my tip.

Okay I’ve got a few more tips while I’m at it! Wash your hands, be kind to each other, and READ AND WRITE.
Over and out from Monique Polak in Montreal
www.moniquepolak.com

I got this in my inbox today, from One Story. I love them and their stories and I thought one of you might like to try for this opportunity:

Together with the Talve-Goodman Family, One Story is pleased to announce the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship. This educational fellowship will offer a year-long mentorship on the craft of fiction writing with One Storymagazine. The first recipient will be for the year 2019.

This fellowship calls for an early-career writer of fiction who has not yet published a book and is not currently nor has ever been enrolled in an MFA program. One Story is seeking writers whose work speaks to issues and experiences related to inhabiting bodies of difference. This means writing that explores being in a body marked by difference, oppression, violence, or exclusion; often through categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, illness, disability, trauma, migration, displacement, dispossession, or imprisonment.

Adina Talve-Goodman was raised in St. Louis and attended Clayton High School and Washington University. When she was 19 years-old, Adina received a heart transplant, due to a congenital heart condition, and began writing about it. Adina started working at One Storymagazine as an intern in April 2010 and later became Managing Editor. She supported emerging authors, helped organize donations to prisons, and had a strong interest in issues of embodied difference, illness, and suffering. In 2015, Adina won the Bellevue Literary Review’sNon-Fiction Prizewith her essay, “I Must Have Been That Man.”She left One Story in 2016 to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was working on her first book when she was diagnosed with cancer. Adina passed away on January 12th, 2018. She was 31 years old.

The 2019 fellow will receive:

• Free tuition for all One Story online classes and programming offered in 2019.
• Travel stipend ($2,000) and tuition to attend One Story’s July 2019 week-long summer writers’ conference in Brooklyn, which includes craft lectures, an in-person intensive fiction workshop, and panels with literary agents and publishers.
• A full manuscript review and consultation with One Story Co-Founder & Executive Editor Hannah Tinti.

Applications are now open and will close November 15th, 2018. The winner of the 2019 Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowshipwill be publicly announced on January 3rd, 2019. For complete details visit our website.

If any of you are coming to Word on the Street here in Saskatoon on September 16th, here are the details for you

And if you want to hear about the authors coming, along with the book I’ve been reading this month, then here I am on #CTV sharing my interest in Brian Goldman’s book The Power of Kindness.