The class that rewrote her story

When Ming Louie Stein and her husband retired to Port Moody in late 2022, she didn’t know a single person here. In January 2023, on a whim, she signed up for a creative writing class at the Port Moody Recreation Centre. She had always been creative, she says — but that part of her had been buried for most of her life.

Three and a half years later, she’s published two adult books and a children’s picture book — including Kintsugi: A Woman, the book she started writing in that very first class. She credits the Rec Centre’s writing program, and the community of professional writers and fellow students she found there, for much of it.

Since then, she’s become a fixture in the Tri-Cities creative scene: a member of the Tri-Cities Wordsmiths, co-host of an author reading at the Port Moody Arts Centre last February, and organizer of regular book-talk gatherings at Grit Studio. “Port Moody did not simply become the place where I retired,” she told us. “It became the place where my creativity was rediscovered, my authentic identity reclaimed.”

What to watch next: Ming’s next Coffee Talk gathering at Grit Studio is July 25, open to writers, editors and readers alike.