KATHY NGUYEN | «The Writer's Room»

OPEN STUDIO | 25-27 July 2024, 14:00 – 20:00

ARTIST TALK | 26 July 2024, 14:00

We are thrilled to invite you to the open studio of Kathy Nguyen, a young Canadian fiction writer, currently in residency at Zaratan.
The Writer's Room is a space for stories. In here you will find words from (only a few of) the books that have influenced her over the years, her thoughts on writing and current artistic preoccupations, and samples of her short fiction collection-in-progress, This is Water.
Viewers are also invited to contribute to this space by sharing the stories that have influenced influenced them, participating in a collaborative writing exercise, and taking home a small story fragment. The Writer's Room is thus a contemplative place where we celebrate the stories that have shaped us, the stories we have yet to tell, and the richness of writing—and, ultimately, storytelling—as an art form.

On July 26, at 2PM, Kathy will also give a talk under the title “An Alternate Way of Seeing: A Meditation on Writing in 3 Parts”, that will delve a little into her own life, work, and artistic preoccupations but will be general enough to interest anyone with their own enthusiasm for and aspirations in writing.
What happens when we try to render a highly visual world through less visual artistic practices such as writing, and what can this type of art say about ourselves and one another? During this encounter, writing will be discussed through the lens of the optical, making the case for writing as its own unique and powerful mode of seeing. We will not only talk about world-building, a foundational technique for constructing imaginative but nevertheless believable worlds in fiction, in particular speculative fiction, but also how this technique gives writing its ability to be both an inward-looking as well as outward-looking art form. We will explore, too, how writing allows us to see more slowly and what value that provides. An experience that is in equal parts craft lecture, meditation on writing’s purpose, and invitation to create your own art. We will hopefully emerge from this shared moment together with a greater understanding of writing’s capacious artistic potential in interpretation, self-expression, communication, and connection and become better writers and readers in the process.

BIO: KATHY NGUYEN is a Canadian speculative fiction writer currently at work on a short fiction collection. Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, and her writing has been supported by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Summer and Winter Workshops, Writers' Union of Canada BIPOC Writers Connect, and Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She has received grants and scholarships from the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and Clarion Foundation. In 2021, she created the Storyteller’s Spell Room, a speculative fiction writing program supporting BIPOC teen girls in British Columbia, which was funded through a Creative Spark Vancouver grant. She was born and raised on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, British Columbia). She lives in a liminal space now, soon to relocate to the United Kingdom.