The Program
VMI is a global and local literary mentoring service based in Vancouver, Canada. We work with writers in all genres and writers with all levels of experience — writers who are published authors, writers who have had training in creative writing programs, and writers who have been working mostly on their own. You may have a complete draft, partial draft of a manuscript, or a body of work that may be the basis of a manuscript. Your manuscript might be a collection of personal essays or short stories, a cycle or group of poems, or chapters from a fiction or nonfiction manuscript.
All VMI mentoring options are structured to ensure a personal and highly supportive one-to-one mentorship that will help you further develop your manuscript. We match each of our participants with a talented (often award-winning) professional author who has substantive editing skills in their genre. We keep participant numbers intentionally small. Typically a mentor works with just one to two writers at a time. This ensures that you have productive, focused time dedicated to your manuscript.
The Results
By the end of the six-month VMI program, few VMI writers’ manuscripts will be ready to submit immediately to a publisher. The arduous process of creating the new writing needed, and revising your previous writing, takes longer than we imagine it will — whether it is your first or fourteenth book! By the end of VMI, you will know what steps are yet to be taken to create a publishable manuscript.
At the completion of the six-month program in June, we hold a celebratory public reading for VMI writers on Zoom.
The results speak for themselves: VMI graduates have secured book deals with publishers throughout Canada and a number of VMI writers’ books have been nominated for, or won literary awards.