KENTVILLE, N.S. — Being among the first selected for the Rising Star program has inspired a Kentville author to continue working toward success and to hope that other good things will happen.
Dana Mills is among the first recipients of the annual Writers’ Trust of Canada Rising Star program. It involves five established Canadian authors selecting emerging writers whose work shows promise.
The program has several components, including a $5,000 grant, mentorship and a writing residency. Mills will have his two-week residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity next March. He said connections he is making through the program will be beneficial.
“It’s definitely an opportunity that I feel very honoured to be offered,” Mills said.
Mills’s first collection of short stories, Someone Somewhere, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2013. He was chosen for the program by fiction writer and Canadian senator David Adams Richards of New Brunswick, who won the Giller Prize for his novel Mercy Among the Children.
Mills recently spent two days at workshops in Toronto, meeting with agents and editors. It culminated with an event at the Art Gallery of Ontario where the emerging writers read from their work.
Mills said he has never experienced anything like the event at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He was somewhat nervous about reading his work on stage, as he tends to be somewhat shy and introverted.
He went on a reading tour of Ontario and Quebec after his book was published but he knew there would be a much larger crowd at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The public side of the writers’ program is something he has had to adapt to.
Mills said choosing the right piece was important to him. He spent a lot of time the day of the reading preparing and going over it.
Mills said he didn’t apply for the program and the opportunity just “kind of fell out of the sky.” He was at work one day when he received a call from the Writers’ Trust.
“I just thought they were calling me to update my address or something,” Mills said.
Adams Richards will provide mentorship as Mills works to develop his next manuscript. Mills has been working on a manuscript for the past few years and said being able to send his work to Adams Richards for feedback is “excellent.”
In a recent news release about the program, Adams Richards said Mills is a “truly exceptional writer.” He said Mills’s “brilliant and moving” short stories affirm this in “startling and profound ways.” Each of Mills’s stories demonstrate “a grasp of his art and his understanding of humanity.”
Last year, Mills started a writers group at the Kentville Library and he plans on facilitating a one-day workshop there this fall. This summer, he is facilitating a writers’ group at the Wolfville Library for teens with autism.
Mills works in the Annapolis Valley Regional Library’s administrative office in Berwick and delivers books to branches between Windsor and Annapolis Royal.
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