Home Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Creator Type: Author
Genres: Middle-grade fiction / YA fiction
Website: www.michaelfstewart.com
Tour Region: Quebec (Montreal Region & Western Quebec)
Target Audience: Grades 5 - 12
Cost: $300* (for one 60-minute presentation)
*(The author collects $250 of the fee and $50 of the fee covers The Canadian Children's Book Centre's administration fees for coordinating Book Week).
Taxes charged on presentations: NO
BIOGRAPHY
Michael Stewart is the multi award-winning author of dozens of books from illustrated chapter books and graphic novels with Rubicon Publishing (Savvas); to young adult, including Heart Sister, out through Orca Books; a middle grade novel in verse, Seeking Draven, with Red Deer Press; a forthcoming young adult urban fantasy with Renaissance Press, Turn to Burn in Fall 2025; and an adult memoir in verse with Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Eat. forthcoming in Fall 2025.
PRESENTATION DESCRIPTIONS
Let’s Write a Story – Write NOW (Grades 7-12)
Preferred Group Size: 5-30
Maximum Group Size: two classes
In this freewheeling, interactive workshop Michael introduces the concept of a writer’s room to the students, in which we will create a story together.
We start with brainstorming a character and their goal, individually and then collectively. Then we proceed to shape each, by making the character a less likely candidate to achieve the goal, and by making the goal harder to achieve. Once we have what seems a truly impossible scenario, and the students have had a chance to develop their own ideas, we brainstorm ways our hero might struggle to achieve their impossible goal. In between the status quo and the goal lies story. How do genre and age group choices influence the story? What if we switched it to a horror story? A romance? A fantasy? If stuck, we apply different structuring techniques to find the story. We consider themes that could fit with the story. We learn the three and five act structures. We develop our ending and work backwards, using the five-act story structure to hang pieces of the story upon. When we have established how each act ends, we write a pitch for the story as if we were pitching an editor at a publisher. We discuss the pitch as a powerful tool in writing, marketing, business, and positioning ourselves to the world. Students leave with the bones of their own exciting projects.
Required equipment: Projector for Powerpoint and appropriate dongle, whiteboard/markers or equivalent for brainstorming
Required materials: Students should have paper and pen/pencil. Writing surface, such as a desk and table, is required for ALL students.
Let’s Write TERRIBLE Poetry – Write NOW (Grades 5-8)
Preferred Group Size: 5-30
Maximum Group Size: two classes
We discuss the role of emotion in our lives. How it is the root of all action or inaction. Using Seeking Draven as a model, we discuss the differences in writing for a prose-based story vs one in verse, and how to use emotion as a central building block of a verse.
Students will take a moment of powerful emotion in their lives, or the lives of a character, then brainstorm words and imagery they associate with that feeling. With these words as prompts we then write terrible poetry. Truly terrible. The worse the better. After, we discuss the tools of poets, and complete a poetry bingo game to reinforce the exercise during which I read short passages from Seeking Draven and the student listen to identify the tools used on their bingo cards for prizes. Finally, the students look for signs of any of these tools in their own pieces and attempt to develop them, using at least three. When complete the students have some terrible poetry that contains some of the tools we discussed. And hopefully feel a little less self conscious about writing poetry.
Required equipment: Projector for Powerpoint and appropriate dongle, whiteboard/markers or equivalent for brainstorming
Required materials: Students should have paper and pen/pencil. Writing surface, such as a desk and table, is required for ALL students.
Nonfungible You (Grade 5-6)
Preferred Group Size: 5-30 / Maximum Group Size: two classes
Using Seeking Draven and its companion resource www.seekingdraven.com, this presentation is about scaffolding the students’ understanding of the internet. Using Seeking Draven’s poems as a guide, we start with platform digital literacies, exploring how the internet works and compare it to fungi networks which create the ‘Woodwide Web’. We talk about how people forage for and identify edible and poisonous mushrooms, and what that means to how we search for and evaluate ‘edible’ information on the internet. Using games, we mirror how social media works and come to understand the psychological conditioning these platforms use to engage us and keep us engaged. We touch on what internet addiction can look like and how we want to cultivate our digital presences online. What we can do when we find ourselves in sticky digital situations and what the differences are between online life and In Real Life, if any.
Required equipment: Projector for Powerpoint and appropriate dongle, whiteboard/markers or equivalent for brainstorming
Required materials: Students should have paper and pen/pencil. Writing surface, such as a desk and table, is required for ALL students.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Young Adult Novels:
Assured Destruction (2013)
Assured Destruction: Script Kiddie (2013)
Assured Destruction: With Zombies (2014)
Counting Wolves (2017)
Ray Vs the Meaning of Life (2018)
Heart Sister (2020 Orca Book)
How to Save the Universes (2021)
The Momentous Expiration of Tremmy Sinclair (2021)
Turn to Burn (2025 Renaissance Press)
Middle Grade Novels:
Keep in a Cold, Dark Place (2017)
The Riverkeepers (2017)
The Boy Who Swallows Flies (2018)
Middle Grade Novels in Verse:
Seeking Draven (Red Deer Press, 2024)
Graphic Novels:
Four graphic novels, part of the Boldprint Graphic Novel Series (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, Savvas 2023), translated into French.
Illustrated Chapter Books:
Three published via Pearson USA in 2018 (Savvas 2023): The Vole of Rektorfor (translated into Spanish), Welcome Citizen, When Mountains Move
Interactive Media:
Story editor for Wasabi Entertainment’s Weirdwood Manor Vol 1. (2018) And the co-writer of Weirdwood Manor Vol 2. (2023-4), Shadowrail Circus, and a new interactive volume set in the universe of a major franchise.
Non-Fiction:
Two contributions to Scholastic Canada’s Issue 21 Series, Children’s Rights, Corruption (2013).
Short Story:
“Ancestration”, a YA short for the I’m Here Anthology out through Red Deer Press, Fall 2025.