For readers to keep reading our work instead of doing all the other things they could be doing, we as writers need to give them a reason to. That reason comes in the form of stakes: essentially, the answer to the question, “Okay, you’ve set up and explained the situation to me. But so what?” Alicia will be explaining stakes and giving examples that hopefully will help each writer understand their importance, and give them something concrete to think about when approaching their own work.
Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. She’s had essays nominated for National Magazine Awards for three straight years, winning Gold in 2017, and her short fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018, Best Canadian Stories 2018, and Journey Prize Stories 30. She was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller. Her most recent novel, And Then She Fell, which was published this fall, is also a national bestseller.
