WordsWorth is a sleep-away creative writing residency for young writers ages 11 – 19 who believe in the power of creative expression through words. For one week away from home, participants are encouraged to take part in screen-free activities that span genres, forms, and creative skill levels all in the format of a 5-night sleep-away camp. Writers get to experience the benefits of community and camaraderie at WordsWorth: having accommodation in a dorm room, taking group meals in the cafeteria, and taking part in evening social activities with other campers. This year, camp will take place in Red Deer, Alberta, on the college campus of Red Deer Polytechnic.
Immersed in the creative environment of the camp, youth writers have the opportunity to explore and discover their talents through diverse writing-based workshops that are curated by the WordsWorth Director and Creative Team every year. Guided by established and well-respected artist-instructors, participants experience writing through fiction, poetry, music, spoken word, movement, drama, filmmaking, nonfiction, cartooning, and more.
Besides writing classes, WordsWorth is also a place where young writers can come together to celebrate their shared interests and love of writing. Together, they go through a number of rousing extracurricular activities and special events including campfires songs and stories, concerts, open mic nights, nature walks, and exploring other creative activities both outdoors and indoors. Campers often develop meaningful friendships from WordsWorth with other young aspiring writers, and return year after year.
Each year we strive to offer the best rate we can to for our campers. This year we are able to offer an early-bird registration rate as well as a regular rate that will be available on March 16, 2026 at 10:00 AM MT.
Early-bird registration ends May 1, 2026.
Registration includes:
Campers will be expected to be dropped off at Red Deer Polytechnic at 3:00 PM on the Sunday of your selected week, at which times dorm rooms will be assigned. Pick-up will take place on Friday, where parents are invited to take part in sampling the works of participants from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM.
Please note that our cancellation policy applies. Please email [email protected] with any questions.
A limited number of bursaries are available for participants in financial need at the time of registration. We can typically offer 25% to 75% off the WordsWorth registration fee depending on need and availability. To apply for a WordsWorth bursary, please fill out the section of the registration form for bursary applications. The form will ask for the following:
| Cancellation Policy | |
| If you cancel: | You will receive: |
| more than 6 weeks before program start date | 100% of the registration fees refunded minus a nonrefundable $50 administration fee |
| 6 – 3 weeks before program start date | 50% of the registrations fees refunded minus a nonrefundable $50 administration fee |
| 3 weeks or less before program start date | No refund |
Inclusivity at WordsWorth: Wordsworth is committed to creating a safe, inclusive and diverse learning community that allows the campers to learn and interpret the world in which we live through dialogue, social interaction and hands-on activities.
As we get closer to WordsWorth 2026 some of our specific details may change, but generally follow past WordsWorth camps. Read below to get a sense of a day at WordsWorth, schedule information, and previous years’ handbooks, and make sure to check out our Youth Programming FAQ.
One of the first things you’ll notice when you arrive at WordsWorth is that the days are full. A Creative Team Member will wake you bright and early for breakfast. After breakfast, you will attend a day of amazing classes with breaks for writing, exploring, chilling and playing.
The evenings don’t slow down either! Jam sessions, followed by nightly shows, campfires and bedtime stories are what to expect each night. Your Creative Team have many exciting extra-curricular activities planned. In other words, be prepared for busy, full days!
Located near the outskirts of Red Deer, RDP has great facilities, access to hiking trails, and plenty of open space for activities. The location offers apartment style accommodation and a large cafeteria. All residences and activities at RDP are supervised by our highly-qualified Creative Team.
In the week prior to camp, all registrants will be sent a WordsWorth Handbook, which provides details about class schedules, registration, drop off and pick-up times, what to bring, camp rules and regulations, and contact information for the camp.
**Times subject to change**
Drop-Off: Please aim to be at RDP at 3:00 pm on the Sunday of your week at WordsWorth. Dorms will be assigned at that time.
Pick-Up: Parents and guests are invited to our final WordsWorth Camp Life Sampler Platter on the Friday of your week at camp. The experience runs from 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm..
"Like everyone else who comes back to WordsWorth year after year, to me it's a home. The community, the atmosphere, and the people, whether it's the Creative Team members, Colin Matty - our wonderful Director - or the instructors, who are unabashedly kind, hilarious, intelligent, and sweet. Here, I'm home."
While our programs are still being finalized, we are excited to welcome our returning and new team members so far. You can learn about them below.
Ugochi Okoli is a writer and communications professional whose work spans poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her writing explores themes of identity, womanhood, and belonging.
With experience at the intersection of storytelling, leadership, and community engagement, Ugochi currently serves as a Communications Coordinator with a school division, where she brings creativity and purpose to her professional practice. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Botany and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing.
Marin Perlette is a visual artist whose practice includes, but is not limited to storyboarding, illustration, zine making, and animation. They’ve freelanced as an illustrator and designer for organizations across Alberta and BC and have recently started peddling their prints and poetry zines at local art markets. When they’re not at their drawing tablet, Marin enjoys baking sourdough, slinging coffee, and playing the bass to varying degrees of success.
Kaja Pedersen is a fiction writer who grew up on the traditional lands of the peoples of Treaty 7, which include the Blackfoot confederacy, the Tsuut’ina First Nation, the Stoney Nakoda, and the Region 3 Metis Nation. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in creative writing from the University of Victoria, where she served as a fiction editor for The Warren Undergraduate Review. She can usually be found in forest dwellings near you.
Henry (they/any) was born between two mountains in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta at the age of zero. They spent their formative years drawing and writing and watching so many cartoons they had to find out where cartoons came from and how to make them. After graduating art school with a degree in animation and working in the industry for a few years, Henry’s settled for the time being working as the main soil person in a garden centre, in Kelowna BC and making their own independent cartoons!
Émanuel Dubbeldam is an artist of Dutch-immigrant and Acadian-settler descent, living and working in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). His writing and theatre work often centre around the interplay between his identities as queer, trans, and francophone. Within that, he likes to explore the absurd, the campy, the surreal, and the too-real. Émanuel mainly writes short stories, plays, screenplays, and novels; he also translates and edits in all these formats. When he is not writing, Émanuel can be seen performing on stages across Canada in both French and English
Marc Herman Lynch is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. He loves to work in hybrid forms blending poetry, mythology, creative non-fiction, and fiction to create surreal and odd generic amalgamations. His first novel, Arborescent, a surrealist horror set in Calgary, came out with Arsenal Pulp Press in 2020. He is the recipient of multiple prizes including the Literary Kaleidoscope, Carol Honey Award for Creative Writing (2021) and Grain magazine’s Kloppenburg Hybrid award (2023).
Shima Aisha Robinson is an amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton) born student, community builder, poet and spoken word artist who embodies, with every literary and scholarly effort, the ancient meaning of her chosen pen name. Dwennimmen is the name of an ancient African Adinkra symbol, which means strength, humility, learning and wisdom. She is the author of two books including HORN, 2016, Denseverse (self published), and Bellow, 2022, Glass House Press. Shima is the 10th Edmonton Poet Laureate.
Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His debut collection of short stories, Hello, Horse, was published by Biblioasis in 2024. He is also the author of I Am Herod (available on audiobook), the poetry collection Caribou Run, and the stage play Amor De Cosmos: A Delusional Musical.
Marin Perlette is a visual artist whose practice includes, but is not limited to storyboarding, illustration, zine making, and animation. They’ve freelanced as an illustrator and designer for organizations across Alberta and BC and have recently started peddling their prints and poetry zines at local art markets. When they’re not at their drawing tablet, Marin enjoys baking sourdough, slinging coffee, and playing the bass to varying degrees of success.
Lindsey Walker’s most recent release, Something Real, is a trio of moody and anthemic tracks that will simultaneously make you want to grab your lover and run full-tilt into the darkness. Pulsing bass meets angelic harmonies as Lindsey’s powerhouse vocals soar over top. This long-awaited release has been looming since her award-winning album this desolate bliss. was released in 2017. Lindsey Walker has not been taking it easy in that time, composing musicals (ren + the wake, Amor de Cosmos: A delusional Musical), soundtracks (Natural Life podcast, themes for the audiobook I Am Herod) and dipping her toe into theatre (a founding member of the sketch comedy troupe Sketchy Broads, and a principle player on the improv soap opera Die-Nasty!). She has been holding her cards close to her chest with this much-anticipated release, and is set to go all in.
Telling the stories closest to your heart – of communities you care about, of loved ones near and dear to you, or even your own truths – asks you to hold those stories steadily, lightly, and artfully. Playing across writing mediums, this class will explore research for community engaged work and autofiction (telling your own story creatively) through collaborative and individual writing exercises, discussions, and experimentations. If you go (re)searching, what will you find? What story will you tell when you return?
Readers and writers alike are drawn to dystopian narratives because they so often mirror our fears about the future: ecological collapse, societal dissolution, moral decay. In writing these types of narratives, we learn to tease out what drives readers to fear and what drives them to hope. For this class, students will examine and write their own dystopia-style narratives, focussing on world building and characters in extreme circumstances. Students will learn to recognize and play with genre clichés, focussing on fundamental questions of storytelling: What makes a good scene “tick”? How can we suspend our audience’s disbelief? What makes a character feel alive in the world? This class will be organized in the form of a “writers room,” where students will get the opportunity to storyboard/outline then pitch ideas to their peers to get help fleshing out their worlds. By the end of the class, students will have a fully fledged, dyspotic short story and the uncanny feeling that the frightening realities that they created might not seem as far removed as once thought.
Animation inhabits a unique niche as a medium for storytelling as it gives its practitioner the ability to depict movement through space and time. Every animation exists at the intersection of writing and the visual arts, from the simplest of flip-books, to the complex animated productions we enjoy in theatres. It can be argued that we have been animating since the inception of human intelligence. It is also just a lot of fun to make drawings move. In this class we’ll delve into the basic principles that drive all animation and explore the diverse practice of sequential storytelling. We’ll draft our writing into storyboards, unlock the power of key-frames, and examine the vast potential of every image that comes in-between.
Learn how your characters can say more with less. In this dialogue-focused class, we’ll work on writing between the lines to charge every word with meaning. Through games and exercises, we’ll explore pacing, rhythm, and tension. We’ll play with extremes; how much or how little can we say before we lose track of the conversation? If you’ve ever read dialogue that made you go, “No one actually talks like that,” then this is the class for you!
The tormented artist trope can make us believe that our writing has to focus on suffering (whether our own or that of others) in order to be valuable. “Writing Joy” will give you the tools to profoundly move your reader through your descriptions of connection, pleasure, and joy. In this class, you can expect to think slowly, share freely, and touch grass.
This course will dive into the dark, dramatic, and dastardly world of literary villains. Students will explore famous villains from classic literature and uncover what makes them so unforgettable. We’ll analyze their motives, their methods, and the chaos they create.
Using what we’ve learned, students will design their own original villain. They’ll craft a sinister backstory, develop their villain’s personality and goals, and write a scene where their character unleashes their grand plan. Clever schemes, dramatic speeches, and questionable morals await!
The development of imagery in poetry and an introductory performance poetry workshop that allows the campers to experiment with embodiment of their spoken words and the development of confidence in performance. We will be exploring the outdoors together to get inspiration for writing with reference to the five senses (and beyond). We will be using simple exercises developing word banks, building new poems working collaboratively and individually, as well as potentially performing new works for the group.
The Writers’ Guild of Alberta (WGA) increasingly relies on the generosity of individual members and sponsors to accomplish our mission. Donating to the WGA directly supports the development of Alberta writers from all backgrounds through the variety of programs and resources we offer. The WGA is a registered charity and donations are tax-deductible.
Read more about ways to donate here.
The Writers’ Guild of Alberta offers free membership to students, which entitles them to receive our weekly newsletter WriteClick. We also encourage youth writers and youth writing programmers to register for WriteOn, our youth newsletter exclusively for youth writing opportunities and WGA news. This is free to subscribe to with no membership required.
