Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society (SCWS) is gearing up for its third annual Art and Words Festival, which takes place from August 22 to August 25 at Gibsons Public Market. This year, the festival opened up submissions to include qathet-based artists and writers.
On Friday, August 23, writer and musician Pat Buckna, who lives on the northern Sunshine Coast, will host a memoir writing workshop titled: Writing a Memoir with Pat Buckna, beginning at 10:30 am, in the coastal room at the market in Gibsons.
Buckna also has a written piece at the main gallery exhibit, where visual artists and writers have been matched to create a collaborative work together; that will be on display at the Gibsons Public Market atrium.
"I did some work with Roger Hort, a photographer from Texada Island," said Buckna. "We took one of his photographs, of a bridge at Point No Point in Sooke on Vancouver Island, and I wrote a little piece around it."
Buckna is also a longtime musician and has a studio on Texada. He said music and songwriting have always been a part of his life, but writing a memoir has been a way for him to explore his childhood, family history and then adulthood experiences on a deeper level. His book, Only Children, a family memoir, was published in 2019, after he participated in the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.
"It took me close to 18 years to finish it," said Buckna. "I thought I was going to be writing a personal memoir, which is more or less the backstory to my first record album that I created when I was living up north in the early 1980s."
Buckna said that over time he ended up writing something completely different from what he had envisioned.
"Each chapter was going to be a song, and [the writing] was going to be the story behind the song," said Buckna. "But after a couple of months, I ran out of material, and I realized I had to go back further into my own life, and as I was doing that [the story] morphed into a family memoir."
Buckna said his research led to uncovering some family secrets.
"I was raised, sort of more or less as an only child, but I have four siblings," said Buckna. "My parents each had two kids from previous relationships and so I called the book Only Children, because all five of us were never raised together; they were raised in separate families for a variety of reasons."
Buckna said his parents never spoke about his siblings but he had random meetings with some of them.
"When I was 13 years old, we were on summer holidays [in Vancouver from Calgary], and one day we drove downtown to the Woodward's store, and my dad started yelling at a clerk who turned out to be my sibling," said Buckna. "That afternoon a young woman knocked on the door of our hotel room and introduced herself as my sister."
The memoir writing workshop, Buckna said, will be an hour and a half long and designed for people who have started their memoir but might be a little stuck.
"I've been lucky to have had a lot of really good mentors and editors who I had a chance to work with," said Buckna. "I run a writing group here in town once a week at the Powell River Public Library. It's an informal group and we have a variety of different writers who get together once a week and workshop writing with each other."
Buckna said memoir writing is different from other types of nonfiction writing.
"Sometimes there's just a bunch of seemingly disconnected events taking place in your life, and it's finding the threads or the themes that tie those things together," said Buckna. "One tip is to just start writing it down and not worrying too much, and then going back and revising it."
One thing Buckna said he has learned about the writing process is that the process of revision is really at the heart of the writing.
"One of the other big things is not worrying about what you're writing about, not worrying about if people are going to get offended by digging deep into the stuff that's uncomfortable," he added. "If that's what you want to write about, that's often where the truth or the heart of the story is."
For the first time, the Art and Words Festival will kick off with a book and art fair on August 22, where participants can sell their art and books.
President and founder of the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society Cathalynn Labonté-Smith said about 4,000 people went through the doors last year.
"The festival, plus the published anthology [Arts and Words], is a way to give local artists and authors from the Sunshine Coast a chance to be represented and show their work," said Labonté-Smith in an earlier conversation with the Peak.
The festival has longer hours, more artists, photographers, writers and workshops than previous years, including teams from the qathet region. To sign up for the memoir workshop with Pat Buckna or view the Art and Words Festival schedule, go to eventbrite.com/cc/art-words-2024-3196309.
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