About the Episode

Today on our show, we bring you a story by Alison Colwell. At age 8, Alison was responsible for making sure her mother’s epileptic seizure didn’t kill her. In this essay, Alison takes us to a moment in the hospital where if she’d looked away, her mom might have died. Alison’s essay is an excellent example of hot topic cold prose and is contained in a very short moment. We will go into detail about what we mean by hot topic cold prose and why the tool is so effective. Alison’s essay is called Look Away.

Alison Colwell graduated from the BFA program at UVIC and is now the Executive Director of the Galiano Community Food Program, a charity focused on increasing food security on Galiano Island. She is a single working mother of two children with mental health challenges and a survivor of domestic abuse, all of which inform her creative writing. Alison was recently awarded a Canada Council for the Arts Grant to work on a series of interconnected essays that weave fairy tales with memoir. 

 Alison has been published in Rising Tides, Folklife Magazine, The Fieldstone Review, the NonBinary Review, The Fourth River, The Humber Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Crow & Cross Keys, The Drabble, and Tangled Locks Journal and is forthcoming in Two Hawks Quarterly and Hippocampus Magazine, 

Writing Class Radio is hosted by Allison Langer and Andrea Askowitz. Audio production by Matt Cundill, Evan Surminski, and Aiden Glassey at the Sound Off Media Company. Theme music is by Justina Shandler.

There’s more writing class on our website including stories we study, editing resources, video classes, writing retreats, and live online classes. Join our writing community by following us on Patreon. 

If you want to write with us every week, you can join our First Draft weekly writers groups. You have the option to join Allison on Tuesdays 12-1 ET and/or Mondays with Eduardo Winck 8-9 pm ET. You’ll write to a prompt and share what you wrote. If you’re a business owner, community activist, group that needs healing, entrepreneur, or scientist and you want to help your team write better, check out all the classes we offer on our website, writingclassradio.com.

Join the community that comes together for instruction, an excuse to write, and the support from other writers. To learn more, go to www.Patreon.com/writingclassradio. Or sign up HERE for First Draft for a FREE Zoom link.

A new episode will drop every other WEDNESDAY. 

There’s no better way to understand ourselves and each other, than by writing and sharing our stories. Everyone has a story. What’s yours?

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