Finding the Life Story you Need to Write, with Marjorie Simmins
Location
Online via Zoom.
Everyone’s life story is different, and everyone has a different reason to write memoir. Often, the place where need and desire intersect, is the place where the most beautiful memoirs are created. Why do you need to write a memoir? Let’s discuss motivation and our individual superpowers, which also support our storytelling. What is behind the compelling need to share our life journeys, and our deep desire to create something meaningful, resonant, and of universal interest? Join us for an online workshop on Thursday, March 4, 2027, and let’s talk about finding the memoir you need to write. Please bring a pen and paper, as we’ll be sharing our ideas.
MARJORIE SIMMINS
Journalist, Author, Teacher
mls@marjoriesimmins.ca
www.marjoriesimmins.ca
Marjorie Simmins is the author of a trio of memoirs, Coastal Lives (2014), Year of the Horse (2016), and In Search of Puffins: Stories of Loss, Light, and Flight (2025), and two non-fiction titles: Memoir: Conversations and Craft (2020), and Somebeachsomewhere: The Harness Racing Legend from a One-Horse Stable (2021). As an author and as a journalist, she is experienced with all forms of creative non-fiction, both short and long form.
Simmins began her career as a freelance journalist in Vancouver, appearing regularly in the Vancouver Sun and writing for trade magazines. She also published numerous essays and articles in magazines and newspapers across Canada, and in the United States, and has stories in Canadian and American anthologies. She has won a Gold Medal at the National Magazine Awards for “One-of-a-Kind Journalism,” and two Gold Medals at the Atlantic Journalism Awards for Best Atlantic Magazine Article, and in Arts and Entertainment, Any Medium.
In November 2020, she was awarded the prestigious Established Artist Recognition Award by Arts Nova Scotia.
Simmins has written for provincial and national magazines in Canada, trade magazines in the United States. She has also written feature interviews for The Reporter, the community newspaper in Port Hawkesbury, NS.
Currently Simmins heads an ongoing Coast to Coast to Coast memoir writing workshop via Zoom, offers other Zoom presentations on writing for Nova Scotian libraries, and presents in-person workshops around the Maritimes, most recently at the Truro Library, the George Wright House in Halifax, and Thinkers Lodge, in Pugwash.
We gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of:
