Event Details
Where fear meets resistance: reclaiming power, challenging expectations, and redefining horror.
Event Details
Where fear meets resistance: reclaiming power, challenging expectations, and redefining horror.
Speakers for this event
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Alison Gadsby
Alison Gadsby
Alison Gadsby, a first-generation Canadian writer, lives in a multigenerational home on Treaty 13 land in Tkaronto. Author of story collection Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026), other fiction appears in Literary Heist, The Temz Review, The Ex-Puritan, failbetter, and more. Dreams of the Weary, her debut novel, is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press (2028). She holds an MFA from the UBC, and an HBA in English & Creative Writing from York University. She is the host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series, and co-host on HOWL, a literary radio show on CIUT, 89.5 FM.
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Katie Underwood
Katie Underwood
Katie Underwood is an award-winning journalist and the current managing editor at Maclean’s magazine. Previously, she held editorial positions at Chatelaine and The Grid, and her byline has appeared in such fine publications as The Walrus, Toronto Life, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. She just got into audiobooks.
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Vivek Shraya
Vivek Shraya
Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, TV, film, and fashion.A three-time Canadian Screen Award winner, Vivek is the creator and writer of the CBC Gem Original Series How to Fail as a Popstar, which had its international premiere at Cannes. She was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize and has collaborated with musical icons Jann Arden, Peaches, and Jully Black. Her best-selling book I’m Afraid of Men was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel.”Vivek has been a brand ambassador for MAC Cosmetics and Pantene, a guest host on The Social and CBC’s q, and she is a director on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation.Most recently, Vivek released an alter ego visual album entitled VIVICA and her 13th book, a speculative novel, The Hystericals, will be published in Fall 2026 by McClelland & Stewart.
Books
Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive
Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, psychological fiction, and speculative realism. A collection of loosely connected short stories that bear witness to the desperate loneliness of mental illness and the simmering silent trauma of childhoods barely survived. Stories that weave together the mundane and the larger than life, the sacred and the profane, where a woman learns to swim while her humanoid husband becomes needier and more demanding; a dying mother recycles time in a desperate attempt to save her child from sadness; a woman is abducted and thrown into a trunk, satisfied her life is finally over, and mothers suffer postpartum depression and grief.
AuthorAlison Gadsby
PublisherGuernica Editions
The Hystericals
When Sarah Munroe is sexually assaulted on her university campus and her attacker walks free, she makes a devastating choice: she publicly takes her own life in a final act of defiance against a regime that has stripped women of their rights.
Her final message ignites a radical movement called #FreeToo. Soon, masses of women are taking up “Sarah’s Call” and “freeing” themselves as extreme acts of protest. As these deaths multiply across the state, the government declares the movement a contagion. Overnight, all women are reclassified as “hystericals.”
Forced into a new reality where her very existence is criminalized, Sarah’s sister, Kennedy, struggles with her own grief, guilt, and anger. And as the regime tightens its grip, she will have to reckon with her sister’s legacy—and decide whether to surrender or survive.
AuthorVivek Shraya
PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
Partners
Penguin Random House Canada
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