Join creative nonfiction writers from across Canada for a festival devoted to the courage behind telling true stories. In addition to a keynote speech by award-winning author, Ayelet Tsabari, Courage and the Writing Life features sessions on finding your voice, embracing risk, and writing from lived experience. Join us for nine sessions over three days November 4-6, 2026. Festival pass includes all sessions. Recordings will be available to attendees for one month after the festival.

 

Festival Passes

 

Member $175

Non-member $275

 

CNFC memberships are $60/year ($30/year for students)

Learn how you can join the CNFC

 

 

Wednesday, November 4

 

Keynote: Ayelet Tsabari (60 minutes)

Fear of writing is one of the biggest roadblocks we experience as writers, and it’s something we rarely speak about. Writing is scary, and writing CNF comes with its own set of scary stuff. The exposure is so much more on point; we cannot hide behind the guise of fiction. Our fear of writing may manifest in many ways—censorship, over-editing, distanced tone—and can even stop us from writing altogether. In this lecture, Ayelet Tsabari will share her own story of overcoming fear and writing in difficult times, and discuss strategies for writing past our anxieties, and telling our truths with courage, confidence, and resonance.

(1:00pm Atlantic/12:00pm eastern/11:00am central/10:00am mountain/9:00am pacific)

 

Ayelet Tsabari is the author of Songs for the Brokenhearted, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for fiction, The Canadian Jewish Literary Award for fiction, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award. Her memoir, The Art of Leaving, was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Ayelet teaches creative writing at The University of King’s College MFA and at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing.

 

~

 

Chronic Courage: Staying True to Writing & Wellness – Lana Cullis & Set L. Shuter (90 minutes)

(4:00pm Atlantic/3:00pm eastern/2:00pm central/1:00pm mountain/12:00pm pacific)

This interactive workshop tackles how to maintain one’s writing life when chronic circumstances – such as illness, injury, or disability – impact writing practices and publishing pursuits. This session covers the hard stuff like adapting writing practice to pain, crushing fatigue, unforeseen and almost insurmountable stress, technology pitfalls, and “able-bodied” writing culture. Also addressed: Current publishing trends, like “identifying clauses,” strategies for employing, and dismissing disclosure opportunities. Participants will explore what it means to harness courage and pursue a restorative writing life. Attendees will gain practical, effective, and specific strategies to ensure their writing dreams flourish.

 

Lana Cullis is an ardent writer, a fledgling ukulele player, and a wandering house and pet sitter. Her writing draws on waking dreams, voices, and visions that reveal the tender places where human truth, individuality and courage intersect. She is a co-author of The Spiritual Life Writing Workbook: From Concept to Bookshelf (released, 2025). Her distinctive narratives appear in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Globe and Mail, CBC, and Truck Loggers BC Magazine. Lana believes in the restorative power of storytelling and facilitates spiritual life writing in diverse community settings. Lana lives and plays in q̓at ̓ᶿət on the Sunshine Coast of BC. 

 

 

Set L. Shuter is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and storyteller from Toronto. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The University of King’s College, and her essays have appeared in The Toronto Star, Chatelaine, Understorey Magazine, CBC, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, and in the anthology Bad Artist: Creativity in a Productivity-Obsessed World. Set has told her stories for the RISK! podcast, True Stories Told Live Toronto, Replay Storytelling, But That’s Another Story, and more. When she is not on stage or working, she is in Nova Scotia, writing her days away by the ocean.

~

 

Identity maps + lyric essays: Empowered approaches to creative nonfiction – Nicole Breit & Rowan McCandless (90 minutes)

(8:00pm Atlantic/7:00pm eastern/6:00pm central/5:00pm mountain/4:00pm pacific)

For many writers, the call to creative nonfiction sparks a journey of healing through story. Storying our lives can be deeply transformational, yet far too many writers attempt this healing work without knowing there are gentle ways to approach their material.

In this 90-minute workshop, award-winning authors Nicole Breit (Bloom: Letters on Girlhood) and Rowan McCandless (Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments) will guide participants through an identity-mapping exercise and a generative writing prompt. 

Together, they’ll explore:

• Narrative therapy principles that creative nonfiction writers can bring to their storying
• An identity mapping exercise that will help participants re-frame their most vulnerable parts as the source of their writing power 
• Examples of different lyric essay forms that can help writers write the deeply personal from a position of brave truth-telling. 
• An abecedarian writing prompt that will provide writers with the opportunity to practice exploring vulnerable material

 

Nicole Breit (she/her) is a queer, award winning poet and essayist, co-author of Bloom: Letters on Girlhood and founder of the R/evolution Story Lab. Her work has been published in Brevity, Hippocampus, Fiddlehead, Room, Pithead Chapel, Event and anthologized in Swelling with Pride: Queer Conception and Adoption Stories, Awfully Hilarious: Pillow Talk and Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction. She is at work on a multimedia memoir about the intersections of queerness, polyamory, neurodivergence, kink and attachment theory in a digital romance. Nicole is based on the unceded lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh people on Canada’s Sunshine Coast.

  

Rowan McCandless lives and writes from Winnipeg, which is located on Treaty 1 territory, the ancestral and traditional homeland of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Dakota, Dene, Métis, and Oji-Cree Nations. She is the creative nonfiction editor for The Fiddlehead. She is also first chair with The Writers’ Union of Canada. Her writing has appeared in print and online journals such as The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Room, Skin Deep, and The Nasiona, as well as in numerous anthologies, including Black Writers Matter. In 2018, Rowan’s short story, Castaways, was long-listed for the Journey Prize. In 2020, she received a gold medal and an honourable mention at the National Magazine Awards. Her memoir-in-essay, Persephone’s Children, launched in 2021 with Dundurn Press Rare Machines Imprint, was a 2021 Governor General’s finalist. She teaches, offers workshops, coaches, and mentors writers. She also loves her bulldog, Novi, and a good chai-latte.

~

 

Thursday, November 5

 

You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: Writing, Memory, and Resistance – In Conversation with Saeed Teebi (90 minutes)

(1:00pm Atlantic/12:00pm eastern/11:00am central/10:00am mountain/9:00am pacific)

Join Saeed Teebi in conversation with CNFC Chair Nancy Dutra as they discuss You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times. Together, they will explore Teebi’s reflections on memory, identity, and the long and sometimes difficult path to writing, including how silence, self-understanding, and lived experience shape the work that eventually makes its way to the page. The conversation will also consider how art, language, and storytelling can become acts of courage and resistance.

 

Saeed Teebi is an award-winning writer and lawyer. His latest book, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times, was an instant national bestseller and a finalist for the 2026 Trillium Book Award. His non-fiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail and The New Quarterly, and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Saeed’s debut short story collection, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for several awards, including the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Award.

 

~

 

(4:00pm Atlantic/3:00pm eastern/2:00pm central/1:00pm mountain/12:00pm pacific)

Chyana Marie Sage is a Cree, Métis, and Salish award-winning writer from Edmonton, Alberta. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University, where she was the first Indigenous graduate, and lives in Toronto working as the Storyteller and Content Writer for Indspire. Her debut memoir, Soft As Bones, became an instant national bestseller. Sage’s writing weaves together Cree histories, myths, and teachings as modes of healing throughout her work.

~

 

A Case Against Courage – Brenda Miller & Susan Olding (90 minutes)

(8:00pm Atlantic/7:00pm eastern/6:00pm central/5:00pm mountain/4:00pm pacific)

The words “courageous” and “brave” are by now standard on cover blurbs of autobiographical writing that reveals intimate details of the author’s life. But is it courage or craft that empowers writers to circumvent shame or fear to express their heart’s truths? In this 90-minute interactive and generative workshop, Brenda Miller and Susan Olding will show how sustained attention to the artifact one is creating can elicit deeper, more resonant writing, making the question of courage less important or even irrelevant.

 

Brenda Miller‘s new hybrid collection, Love You, Bye: A Daughter’s Journey in Essays and Poems, is just out from Skinner House Books (April 2026). She is the author of six additional essay collections, including A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, and An Earlier Life, winner of the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She co-authored, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and, with Suzanne Paola, Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, now in its third edition. She coined the term “Hermit Crab Essay.” Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com.

 

Susan Olding is the author of Big Reader: Essays, a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Fred Kerner Award and the Alberta Publishing Awards Trade Nonfiction Book of the Year, and Pathologies: A Life in Essays, selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals including Arc Poetry Magazine, Juniper, The Malahat Review, and Prairie Fire. A novel for young readers is forthcoming in 2027. Currently, Susan teaches in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.

~

 

Friday, November 6

The Sound of Courage: In Conversation with Natalie MacMaster (90 minutes)

(1:00pm Atlantic/12:00pm eastern/11:00am central/10:00am mountain/9:00am pacific)

Join fiddling sensation Natalie MacMaster in conversation with CNFC Chair, journalist, and former singer-songwriter Nancy Dutra about MacMaster’s memoir, I Have a Love Story. In this conversation, MacMaster will reflect on the experiences that shaped her memoir and her life in music, and on the ongoing process of growing as an artist while navigating both performance and writing. MacMaster and Dutra will also explore the ways stage and home life intersect, and how these shifting worlds inform I Have a Love Story. Their discussion will offer an intimate look at a life in music and memoir, and how stories take shape through lived experience and creative work.

 

Hailing from Cape Breton Island, Natalie MacMaster received her first fiddle at the age of nine, launching a career that has lasted for over three decades. Her first recording was released when she was only sixteen years old. Fifteen albums later, Natalie is a Grammy nominee and a two-time Juno winner. Natalie has received a host of awards in the US and Canada. She has recorded and toured with some of the world’s greatest performing artists, including Allison Krauss, Carlos Santana, The Chieftains, Thomas Dolby, Raffi, Sharon Lois & Bram and Yo-Yo Ma. In 2002, she married renowned fiddler Donnell Leahy of the Leahy family band and moved to Lakefield, Ontario. They have seven children and have performed and recorded together as a duo, and with their children, who also play fiddle, in their performances. I Have a Love Story is Natalie’s first self-written publication and has been a bestseller in Canada. 

~

No Fear: Four Generative Exercises to Increase Bravery – Becky Blake & Iryn Tushabe (90 minutes)

(4:00pm Atlantic/3:00pm eastern/2:00pm central/1:00pm mountain/12:00pm pacific)

Writing is always an act of daring, but it takes a special kind of courage to turn our lived experiences into stories for others. Common worries that can crop up for CNF writers include: will anyone care about my story? What if I’m misremembering something? What if the people I write about get upset? What if this never gets published, and I’m just wasting my time? In this session, we’ll work to challenge these types of unhelpful concerns via generative writing prompts. Come away with a revived sense of bravery and some new writing too.

 

Becky Blake is a two-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize (for nonfiction in 2017 and short fiction in 2013). In 2019, the RBC Taylor Prize featured her work as part of their Emerging Nonfiction Writers program, and her debut novel, Proof I Was Here, was published by Wolsak & Wynn. In 2021, Ian Brown selected her essay “Ingenue,” as the winner of the Creative Nonfiction Collective’s CNF contest. For almost a decade, Becky taught Creative Nonfiction at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She now mentors emerging writers and publishes a monthly newsletter called Truly Important about the value of writing true stories.

  

Iryn Tushabe is a Ugandan Canadian writer and independent journalist living on Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan. Her debut novel,Everything is Fine Here, was named a CBC Best Book of 2025, won a Saskatchewan Book Award, was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and longlisted for Canada Reads 2026. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The Walrus and in the trace press anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories volumes 30 and 33. She was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021 and is a 2023 winner of the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She’s currently writing a memoir.

~

 

Writing into a Revolution: How to Dance Through a Book-World War Zone – Ken McGoogan (90 minutes)

(8:00pm Atlantic/7:00pm eastern/6:00pm central/5:00pm mountain/4:00pm pacific)

The digital revolution has engulfed the Book World. Hybrid publishing is here to stay. Amazon looms like Godzilla over the bookselling landscape. Scam-artists target writers on the Internet. And how do we respond to the advent of AI? Challenges abound. But here’s the good news: writers of Creative Nonfiction are well-positioned to survive in this Book-World War Zone. Why so? Because by working in our chosen genre, we have already trained as guerrilla-writers. We have already committed to challenging conventions, taking chances, blazing trails – and having fun while we are at it. This one-hour slideshow presentation moves from personal experience to creative risk-taking, pointing the way to telling true stories that sing and dance – and that people want to read.

 

Ken McGoogan is the globe-trotting Canadian author of seventeen books – mostly creative nonfiction. His titles include Shadows of Tyranny, Searching for Franklin, Fatal Passage, and Flight of the Highlanders. Ken’s accolades include the Pierre Berton Award for History, the Writers’ Trust Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, and an American Christopher Award for “a work of artistic excellence.” Originally from Montreal, Ken earned an MFA in creative writing from UBC, worked as a Calgary-based literary journalist for two decades, and taught CNF for ten years each at the University of King’s College in Halifax and the University of Toronto. His work appears regularly in leading newspapers and magazines. Ken has served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission and is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and The Explorers Club. www.kenmcgoogan.com.

~

 

The CNFC would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for supporting the 2026 Online Festival.