How do you capture the essence of your subject—their triumphs and failures, beauty marks and warts—without losing their trust in you as a journalist or ghost-writer? How do you build rapport, manage their egos, surprise them with fresh questions, ask uncomfortable and hard-hitting questions, and just open up your subjects to imagining their lives as narratives? In this bootcamp with Omar Mouallem, a National Magazine Award-winning profile writer and ghost-writer of two bestselling memoirs, writers will learn and practice interviewing techniques with each other. Expect interviewing and writing exercises with your peers, plus lessons on structural techniques, secondary-sourcing, reconstructing memories as scenes, and fact-checking. You’ll leave with the skills to produce an unflinching and honest profile that your subjects may not like but can’t disagree with.  

This camp will be held in our brick-and-mortar school/studio space, which now allows us to host hybrid sessions! We hope you’ll join us IRL if you’re in Edmonton on July 4 and 5.