This two-hour workshop with Elee Kraljii Gardiner will shake up habits and attitudes about writing and prompt participants out of creative ruts.

We’ll discuss strategies for unblocking writer’s block and together try some of the writing prompts Elee has honed in seven years of facilitating workshops.

Everyone is welcome: suitable for all genres and experience levels.

Elee Kraljii Gardiner directs Thursdays Writing Collective, a program of free, drop-in creative writing classes in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. She is the editor and publisher of six chapbooks from the Collective and the coeditor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award. A frequent collaborator, Elee leads workshops on creativity and social writing. Her writing appears in anthologies and varied publications and has earned the 2011 Lina Chartrand Poetry Award.

Join Billeh Nickerson, celebrated author and editor, as he reveals the trade secrets of getting your work published in literary journals.

Learn valuable tips from an industry professional, including the key do's and don'ts of cover letters and what writers can learn from rejection letters (believe it!). This workshop is as fun as it is instructional.

Billeh Nickerson is the author of four poetry collections—The Asthmatic Glassblower; McPoems; Impact: The Titanic Poems; and Artificial Cherry—and the humour collection Let Me Kiss It Better. He is also co-editor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets, and past writer-in-residence at both Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon. He is a former silver medalist at the Canadian Gay Curling Championships and the current Chair of the Creative Writing department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He lives in Vancouver.

Read his Geist work at geist.com, and visit him online at billeh.com.