
John Vaillant
Governor General’s Award winner
John Vaillant is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside, among others. In 2014, he was awarded the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize for Non Fiction. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Norton, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction (Canada). His most recent book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), is also an award-winning bestseller. Of particular interest to Vaillant are stories that explore collisions between human ambition and the natural world. His first novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was published in January, 2015.
2021 Virtual Workshop:
Writing the Immersion Paragraph
Descriptive writing succeeds when it gives us that “you are there” feeling, when we’re not only thinking and seeing, but feeling the story. In this workshop we will explore and practice the crafting of immersive paragraphs utilizing all aspects of our sensory experience to convey mood, place and atmosphere powerfully and efficiently. This workshop will include time for writing and sharing.