Creative Writing Workshop for Law Students

In these online, one-hour sessions, you can expect to enter a facilitated space where you are invited to write with the support of prompts, techniques and strategies to dive deeper into your stories, your ideas, your power and your voice. There will be opportunities to share your work, but never any obligations. No writing experience is required! If you are looking to exercise your creativity, great! If you don’t identify as a creative person, this is still the right place for you! We will co-create the space in which we write, and we will experiment with different ways to find your flow. You can use pen and paper, keyboard and laptop, or draw pictures with crayons if you don’t feel like writing. As a facilitator, Preeti strives to take a trauma-informed approach that centres your agency (i.e. you are never required to follow the prompt, perform the exercise or share your work but will always be invited to listen to your body and make a decision that’s best for you). Activities will focus on creative writing but may also include brief experiential activities or mindfulness and breathing techniques. 

Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal (she/her) is a critical race feminist, writer, lawyer, college prof and facilitator who grew up on the traditional territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Tsawwassen and Musqueam First Nations (also known as Surrey and North Delta, British Columbia). Before leaving her legal career to pursue a Master of Laws, Preeti articled at a boutique litigation firm in Tkaronto and clerked at the Federal Court of Canada. In her LLM, she used theatre, creative writing and performance art to investigate how law lives in the body, with a focus on race. She then pursued an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph where she completed her manuscript for a hybrid novel. Preeti’s writing has appeared in PRISM international, Looseleaf Magazine, the Community Building Art Works Anthology: We Were Not Alone, the Festival of Literary Diversity’s program, alt. theatre magazine, Theatre Research in Canada and No Foundations, amongst other publications. 

With over 15 years of facilitation and teaching experience, Preeti is committed to arts-based methodologies as a source of personal and collective empowerment, transformation and social change. She has taught creative writing at Guelph-Humber College, led arts-based workshops across the country, and firmly believes that stories change the world by altering our ways of seeing, feeling and being with one another and the planet. In her non-writing time, Preeti loves to hang out with moss, sit with the ocean, collage and sing.