TWS Community Workshop: Writing Dialogue with Emi Sasagawa

Writing Dialogue

Great dialogue doesn’t just fill silence. It reveals character, builds tension, and leaves space for what can’t be expressed out loud. In this workshop, we’ll dig into subtext, rhythm, conflict, and the power of what goes unsaid. You’ll write, revise, and listen between the lines, because the best dialogue isn’t just heard, it’s felt.

About Emi Sasagawa

Emi Sasagawa is a settler, immigrant and queer woman of colour, living and writing on the traditional, ancestral and stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Selilwitulh Nations. Emi made the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize shortlist for Dad’s the Word and the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist for Lessons from a Peach. Her debut novel Atomweight, from Tidewater Press, was selected by CBC Books as one of the 86 works of Canadian fiction to read in the first half of 2023 and dubbed by The Tyee as “a propulsive exploration of growth and becoming.” Emi is a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, and has completed MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

About TWS Community Workshops

The TWS Community Workshops are planned and developed, and often hosted, by alumni of the Writer’s Studio at SFU. The proceeds from the workshops support writing scholarships in the Studio’s year-long cohort program. If you would like to know more about the Writer’s Studio, please visit our website. If you would like to submit a workshop idea, please email us at write@sfu.ca.