Event Details
What holds us together when the world pulls us apart? An exploration of intimacy, solitude, and the stories that shape how we belong.
Event Details
What holds us together when the world pulls us apart? An exploration of intimacy, solitude, and the stories that shape how we belong.
Speakers for this event
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Jadine Ngan
Jadine Ngan
Jadine Ngan is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist and the digital editor at Maclean’s.
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Lee Arden
Lee Arden
Lee Arden is originally from Algonquin land in the Ottawa Valley, and now calls Montréal/Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang home. They are the author of many zines, including PALS: The Radical Possibilities of Friendship, Surprisingly OK: What Healing Trauma Feels Like, and the novella Summer Shade.Lee founded and runs Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distributor focused on beautiful, affordable work by creators who face barriers such as transphobia, ableism, and poverty in their practice. They’re also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run library in Montréal that specializes in the literary, political, and artistic work of trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit authors, and a past intern and forever collective member for the Queer Zine Archive Project. Lee is white, trans, an anarchist, a Quaker, and a deeply imperfect friend, but they try.
URL http://leee.ca
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Téa Mutonji
Téa Mutonji
Téa Mutonji is a writer based in Toronto. Her short collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty (VS. Books/Arsenal Pulp Press) was a finalist for Canada Reads (2024) and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019), and won the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji received the Jill Davis Fellowship (2021) at New York University where she completed her MFA in fiction. My Person is her debut novel.
Books
My Person
Best friends of over twenty years, Tania and Margot are preparing to host their monthly Sunday Loaf dinner party, when Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore—they’ve been entangled for too long and she wants to “unknow” her. But how do you extricate yourself from someone whose family owns the apartment you live in, who has taken you in as their own, even claims you as their “person”?
As Tania attempts to live her life loudly on the outskirts of Margot’s bubble, Margot’s past betrayals become increasingly clear. But she means well, doesn’t she? They’d felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania just been blind to Margot’s antics?
Set in the framework of a tense will-they-won’t-they break-up, Tania and Margot get entangled in a rigorous revision of history, their once delicate dance intensifying toward a frantic finale and forcing them to reckon with where it all went wrong . . . or whether they were simply wrong for each other to begin with.
AuthorTéa Mutonji
PublisherPenguin Random House Canada
The Politics of Lonely: Why Is Friendship So Hard?
Why is it hard to make and keep friends as an adult? Even if you finally find time to see each other, can you connect more deeply than just catching up over coffee? How many do you count as ride-or-die pals who’ll always show up with effervescent banter and deep conversation — your “chosen family?”
Widespread loneliness reflects a world of crappy jobs and unaffordable housing that makes it almost impossible to have close, interwoven friendships. A dwindling social safety net takes a toll on us and on our relationships. Particularly for queer people, friendships can be crucial relations of equality, constancy, and care. Still, we disappoint each other and fall into irreparable conflict.
A less lonely world is possible. Through interviews, research, and personal narrative, this book shows how people build tight connections despite living in the austere conditions of colonial capitalism — boldly weaving a new social fabric as this one unravels.
AuthorLee Arden
PublisherFernwood Publishing
Partners
Penguin Random House Canada
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