Events for September, 2005

Wednesday, September 28
Authors Steven Heighton, Lisa Moore and Jaclyn Moriaty read at The Table - 7:30 p.m.

In 1871, the US government sent out an expedition to plant the American flag at the North Pole. But the voyage floundered, and half of the survivors — nineteen in all — were cast adrift on an ice floe off Ellesmere Island. Steven Heighton, author of The Shadow Boxer, has taken this piece of history and fashioned Afterlands, a novel that follows the stories of three of the participants over the six month ordeal and the shadows it casts over the rest of their lives.

Steven Heighton is a poet and fiction writer. His first novel was the critically acclaimed bestseller The Shadow Boxer, which went on to be published in five countries. His short story collections include Flight Paths of the Emperor (Trillium award finalist) and On earth as it is. His poetry collections include The Address Book, Foreign Ghosts and The Ecstasy of Skeptics (which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award). He lives in Kingston, Ontario.

In Lisa Moore's Alligator, we meet Madeleine, the driven aging filmmaker whose mission is to complete a Bergmanesque magnum opus before she dies; Frank, a young man of innocence and determination whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers; Valentin, the sociopathic Russian refugee whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters; and Colleen, at seventeen a hard-edged female Holden Caulfield, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive.

Lisa Moore's Open was a finalist for the 2002 Giller Prize and a national bestseller, and her work has also appeared in Canada's most prestigious literary magazines. She lives in St. John's with her husband and two children.

Jaclyn Moriarty's I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes is the story of the Zing family, who live in a misguided world of spell books, flying beach umbrellas, and state-of-the-art covert surveillance equipment. There's a slippery Zing, a graceful Zing, and a Zing who runs as fast as a bus. But most significant of all, there's the Zing Family Secret: so immense that it draws the family to the garden shed for meetings every Friday night. The two youngest heroines, Listen and Cassie, shoulder the biggest role in piecing together the mystery that saves everyone in the end.

Jaclyn Moriarty is from Australia, and she and her husband, writer Colin McAdam, live in Sydney and Montreal. Jaclyn's young-adult novels, Feeling Sorry for Celia and The Year of Secret Assignments, are both international bestsellers.

The Table Restaurant is located at 1230 Wellington St. (at Holland). Dinner will be served as usual before the reading.

Sunday, October 16
Launch for Kissing the Damned by Mark Foss at Collected Works - 2:00 p.m.

Meet Murray Lockhart, a 37-year-old direct-mail writer for Friends of Africa-a foreign aid group. He can write emotional pitches for money in the voice of an African woman, but can't quite locate his own feelings. Lisa is a 29-year-old social work student, Lisa is trying to break free of Brie, a lifelong friend who's recently come out. As Murray tries to usurp Brie's place, and keep Lisa on the straight and narrow, he struggles with Burt, his aging father who has never let go of his own best friend lost in the Second World War. The 13 linked stories of Kissing the Damned-alternately dark, comic and elegiac-meditate on love, loss, friendship, meaningful work, and how to cut the lawn with an electric mower without running over the cord.

Ottawa's Mark Foss has worked for two foreign aid groups, and continues to write professionally about international development. His short fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, B&A New Fiction and other Canadian and American literary journals and anthologies. CBC broadcast his first radio drama in 2001. Kissing the Damned is his first collection of stories; he is currently at work on an historical novel.

Wednesday, October 19
Author Tracy Quan reads at The Table - 7:30 p.m.

Diary of a Married Call Girl is an irreverent take on infidelity and modern marriage, as newlywed topflight prostitute Nancy Chan finds herself struggling to adjust to the realities of domestic bliss. She’s honing her respectable image as the wife of investment banker Matt, cooking fashionable meals and taking his shirts to the cleaners. But now that she and Matt share a home, it’s getting harder to keep her career as an exclusive call girl a secret. Nancy fears what might happen if Matt finds out, but she can’t quite bring herself to give up her financial independence. And now Matt wants to start a family. Motherhood could jeopardize her business—and what will it do to her body?

Tracy Quan lives in New York City and grew up in Ottawa. Her previous novel, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, was acquired by Revolution Studios for a major motion picture, to be produced by Darren Star, creator of HBO's Sex and the City. Her writing has also appeared in South China Morning Post, The Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Table Restaurant is located at 1230 Wellington St. (at Holland). Dinner will be served as usual before the reading.

Thursday, October 20
Wellington Street Readers meet at Collected Works - 7:00-9:00 p.m.

The book club discusses Atonement by Ian McEwan. Meetings are open and new members are welcome at any time. If you have any questions about Wellington Street Readers activities, please contact Evan at evan@magma.ca.

Friday, October 21
Poets Allan Briesmaster and Colin Morton read at Collected Works – 7:30 p.m.

Allan Briesmaster is a poet, editor, micro publisher, book packager, and literary consultant who lives in Thornhill, ON. He has published seven books of poetry, and his work has been widely anthologized. From 1991 to 2002 he was one of the chief organizers of the weekly Art Bar Poetry Reading Series in Toronto, and since 2000 has been the main editor for Seraphim Editions, a literary press based in Hamilton. Allan has given readings of his poetry from Halifax to Victoria. His two most recent books are Pomona Summer, from Hidden Brook Press, and Galactic Music, from Lyricalmyrical, both published earlier this year.

Colin Morton was born in Toronto, grew up in Calgary, and lives in Ottawa, where he is a freelance writer and editor. His poetry and fiction have appeared in diverse literary journals including Descant, The Fiddlehead, Arc, Grain, The Malahat Review, Ascent, and The North American Review. He has performed his work with the word-music intermedia group First Draft and the jazz ensembles SugarBeat and Sonic Circle, and in the award-winning animated poetry film Primiti Too Taa. Colin has received numerous awards for his writing including the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry.

Sunday, October 23
Launch for Chris Robinson's Stole This From a Hockey Card at Collected Works - 2:00 p.m.

Stole This from a Hockey Card is a thinking-fan’s hockey book that strikes just the right note for those disillusioned by today’s NHL. Chris Robinson pushes the bounds of both hockey writing and creative non-fiction in this hard-boiled contemplation of where hockey fits into a man’s life—whether he be a casual beer-league player who first embraced the game to avoid a difficult home-life, or one of the most celebrated defencemen in the history of the game. Partly a fragmented biography of legendary Montreal Canadiens defenceman Doug Harvey, Stole This from a Hockey Card probes for answers to how one of the game’s greatest defencemen could also lead one of the most tragic and mysterious personal lives.

Chris Robinson is an author, freelance writer and the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival. He writes the “gonzo” column “The Animation Pimp” for Animation World Magazine. His writing has also appeared in Salon.com, Take One, Cinemascope, Montage, Stop Smiling, the Ottawa Xpress and many international publications. His other books include Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy: A Story of Estonian Animation, Ottawa Senators: Great Stories from the NHL’s First Dynasty, and Unsung Heroes of Animation. Robinson lives in Ottawa with his wife, Kelly, and son, Jarvis.

Thursday, October 27
Authors Howard Akler and Adrian Michael Kelly read at Collected Works - 7:30 p.m.

Set in 1930s Toronto, Howard Akler's The City Man follows Eli Morenz, reporter for the Toronto Daily Star, as he tracks the movements of a stealthy band of pickpockets led by the beguiling Mona Kantor. While following Mona through the city, Eli comes to realise that what was once a lust for the story has slowly become a lust for the subject at the centre of it. With prose as deft as a thief's fingers, The City Man paints a portrait of Toronto as it was at its centenary, reviving arcane slang and nooks of the city long since lost. Similar in its evocation of a lost Toronto to Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, THE CITY MAN brings the city's history to life in a dynamic and enigmatic way.

Also set in Ontario, Adrian Michael Kelly's Down Sterling Road follows eleven-year-old Jacob McKnight as he tries to keep up with his dad, running up and down the steep, slushy hills of small-town Glanisberg. Jacob hates running because it gives him time to think, mostly about his brother's accident, his parents' shattered marriage - he'd rather be drawing the invincible bodies of superheroes, forgetting about the looks people give him when he walks through town, and about how much he misses his brother and his mum. Down Sterling Road is Adrian Michael Kelly's first novel, a contagiously quirky and poignant book that will leap into the hearts of everyone who picks it up.

Sunday, October 30
Poets Oana Avasilichioaei and Richard Harrison read at Collected Works – 2:00 p.m.

A strong debut collection from a Montreal poet, Oana Avasilichioaei's Abandon is filled with the richness of a country's history. The poet melds the legends of Romania with its new reality in her vivid and insightful poetry. Dragons rub shoulders with Mountaineers with bad teeth. Women was carpets in the river, and builders wall women in Monasteries. This is a rich collection and a very promising new voice in Canadian poetry.

Oana Avasilichioaei is finishing her MA in English at Concordia University. She was born in Romania but grew up from the age of ten on the west coast of BC. Oana draws inspiration from both of these landscapes. Some of Oana's work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Vancouver Sun and Matrix. A collection of translations was published by ITP.

Governor General Award-nominated poet Richard Harrison's latest collection, Worthy of His Fall, is a meditiation of fathers, fatherhood, God and war. Powerful images of aging and death are cut with bright slivers of childhood, all set against the backdrop of the war in Irag, and the questions war and death raise. Harrison's transparent verse and beautiful ability to capture the voices around him draw the reader into what may be his best collection yet.

Richard Harrison is the author of 5 books of poetry including Hero of the Play: 10th Anniversary Edition, and Big Breath of a Wish which won the City of Calgary/W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry for 1999. His forthcoming book, Worthy of His Fall, featuring poems on faith and violence, will be released by Wolsak & Wynn in 2005. Richard lives in Calgary with his wife Lisa and their children, Emma and Keeghan, and he teaches English and Creative Writing at Mount Royal College.

Wednesday, November 2
Author Peter Hessel reads from The Mystery of Frankenberg's Canadian Airman at Library and Archives Canada - 7:30 p.m.

Growing up in Hitler's Germany, Peter Hessel witnessed the Allies' ruthless bombing of his hometown, Chemnitz. Nearly sixty years later in Canada, Hessel heard about a brutal, fatal beating of a nameless Canadian POW in the streets of a small town just a few blocks from where Hessel's own family had taken shelter. Who was this "unknown Canadian airman," and who were his murderers? Canadian authorities had forgotten the deed and never completed their investigation. Hessel felt compelled to reopen the file. His search for answers to these troubling questions would take him back and forth between Canada and Germany, as he combed through stacks of wartime records and tracked down eyewitnesses.

Library and Archives Canada is located at 395 Wellington St.

Thursday, November 3
Author Shyam Selvadurai reads at Collected Works - 7:00 p.m.

The setting is Sri Lanka, 1980, and it is the season of monsoons. Fourteen-year-old Amrith is caught up in the life of the cheerful, well-to-do household in which he is being raised by his vibrant Auntie Bundle and kindly Uncle Lucky. He tries not to think of his life “before,” when his doting mother was still alive. Amrith’s holiday plans seem unpromising: he wants to appear in his school’s production of Othello and he is learning to type at Uncle Lucky’s tropical fish business. Then, like an unexpected monsoon, his cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith’s ordered life is storm-tossed. He finds himself falling in love with the Canadian boy. Othello, with its powerful theme of disastrous jealousy, is the backdrop to the drama in which Amrith finds himself immersed.

Shyam Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka and came to Canada with his family at the age of nineteen. Funny Boy, his first novel, was published to immediate acclaim in 1994, was a national bestseller, and won the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. In the U.S., it was the winner of The Lambda Literary Award, and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Cinnamon Gardens, his second novel, was shortlisted for the Trillium Award. It has been published in the U.S., the U.K., India, and numerous countries in Europe. He is the editor of Story-wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. Shyam Selvadurai lives in Toronto.