Event Details
Personal stories of loss, resilience, and remembrance reveal how grief can reshape families, identities, and futures.
Event Details
Personal stories of loss, resilience, and remembrance reveal how grief can reshape families, identities, and futures.
Speakers for this event
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Arizona O’Neill
Arizona O’Neill
Arizona O’Neill is a Montreal-based author and illustrator. She is the illustrator of Nelly Arcan’s L’enfant dans le miroir, and Heather O’Neill’s Valentine in Montreal. Her comics have appeared in Hazlitt, Exclaim! and Canadian Geographic. She has created animated videos for many outlets including CBC. Opioids and Organs is her debut graphic novel.
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Kate Cayley
Kate Cayley
Kate Cayley’s first novel, Property, is published by Coach House Books. She has also published two short story collections and three collections of poetry, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US and the UK. She has won the Trillium Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, and the Mitchell Prize for Poetry, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the CBC Short Story Prize. She is a frequent writing collaborator with immersive company Zuppa Theatre, most recently on The Archive of Missing Things, This Is Nowhere and HereNowThis. She has been a writer in residence with Tarragon Theatre, McMaster University, Sheridan College, the Toronto Public Library and York University. Her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, Best Canadian Poetry, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, Lit Hub, The New Quarterly, North American Review, and The Walrus. She lives in Toronto with her family.
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Laurie D. Graham
Laurie D. Graham
Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 Territory, outside of amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), and she now lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 Territory, where she is a poet, an editor, the publisher of Brick magazine, and an advocate for the literary arts in Canada. Her books are Rove, Settler Education, Fast Commute, and Calling It Back to Me.
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Richard Harrison
Richard Harrison
Richard Harrison is the winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. Richard’s writings have been published across Canada as well as in the United States, England and Italy. His individual poems, and two books, have been translated into six languages including Spanish, Farsi, French and Arabic. This year he was honoured with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Golden Pen for Lifetime Achievement. Professor Emeritus of English at Mount Royal University, currently Richard is a full-time poet, essayist, editor and writing mentor in Calgary, where he lives with his wife, Lisa.
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Tyler Pennock
Tyler Pennock
Tyler Pennock is a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Métis family around the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. Their first book, Bones (Brick Books), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry, was released in 2020, and their second book, Blood, was released in 2022. Tyler was the inaugural FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) Indigenous Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University in 2023, and is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. They live in Toronto.
Books
Calling It Back to Me
A poet’s clear-eyed witnessing of familial history, this is the most personal collection yet from two-time Trillium Book Award finalist Laurie D. Graham.
In these searching, spare, and resonant poems, Laurie D. Graham traces the story of her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This collection’s fractured lines, time-weathered yet alive with detail, reflect a family’s knowledge broken by global immigration and memory loss, both individual and collective. The result is a courageous reckoning with the legacy of leaving home.
With tender curiosity and a determination to bear unflinching witness, Calling It Back to Me asks: When language and memory are so tenuous, what is it that gets passed down between generations?
AuthorLaurie D. Graham
PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
My Mother Joins the Resistance
All there is, is light and darkness and wonder.
And in that moment, there is no difference, either,
between love and the memory of love. – “Up Above the World”
In this latest collection Richard Harrison has created a companion to his Governor General Award–winning collection On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. In My Mother Joins the Resistance, Harrison considers his mother’s life – from her time as a child during WWII’s Operation Pied Piper, up until its end, in 2017, when terminally ill with cancer, she chose MAiD – with elegant, deeply felt poetry. These are beautiful poems, ones that piece together a person, a life and a family over generations. These are poems that examine the wounds passed down through a family, alongside the love, and see the echoes of both – the wounds and the love – in the world around us.
“I was taken by a riptide, allowed my body to be still, held my breath so I wouldn’t drown. Then a tsunami slammed me against the shore and I gulped with pain. A sudden awareness, a philosophical, spiritual awakening. This is Richard’s story, sorrow, grief, the openness to truth. I love when poetry touches me to the core. This is what makes an entry to the soul. Read it until the pain subsides. And cry as the water heals you.” – Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer, Canada’s Ninth Parliamentary Poet Laureate
AuthorRichard Harrison
PublisherWolsak and Wynn
Opioids & Organs
A heartwrenching memoir of a daughter losing her father and a scathing indictment of the medical industry
Arizona grieves at the hospital bed of her father, a man she hardly knew, brain dead after a fentanyl overdose. Doctors encourage her to act quickly to recast him as a hero by way of organ donations. Distraught, Arizona makes a decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life. As she struggles to come to terms with her father’s death and her role as next of kin in making his life’s last decision, she uncovers inconvenient truths about the organ industry’s own codependence on the opioid crisis.
Her parents were bohemian wild kids of 90s Montreal. He was a talented skateboarder, charming guitarist, and visual artist. She was an aspiring writer and outcast. They lived with other teenagers in the Plateau in a messy apartment filled with drugs, alcohol, and black-market animals. The city’s macabre history—McGill Medical School, the Mount Royal Cemetery, ancient cadavers at the Maude Abbott Medical Museum—takes center stage as Arizona sorts out fact from fiction.
Opioids and Organs is a damning critique of an industry that takes advantage of society’s outcasts. It is also the graphic novel debut of O’Neill herself, who weaves together a dramatic personal history with that of how humanity made its scientific advances. A muted yet striking pastel palette and a dolllike fantastical elegance belie both the gruesomeness of the book’s topic and the rage of its author.
AuthorArizona O’Neill
PublisherDrawn & Quarterly
Skin
Conceived in the same world as Pennock’s first two books of poetry, Bones and Blood, Skin is the final book in a trilogy that centres a two-spirit Indigenous person’s experiences.
Skin is a haunting, genre-blurring collection rooted in Treaty 8 territory, where memory, place, and loss intertwine. When a Two-Spirit Indigenous person returns home, they begin to understand the world through their relationships to others. Meditating on the difficulty of belonging, especially when shaped by both colonial and communal wounds, Pennock lets spectral inheritances speak.
Through lyrical, found, and experimental forms, Pennock excavates what―and who―is remembered, grieved, and built upon in the violent memoryscapes of the prairies. Here, haunting is methodology: ghosts are kin, time loops, and memory scratches at the walls. For readers of Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jeanette Armstrong, Skin conjures. It listens. It offers poetry as a kind of skin―porous, protective, remembering―for those still finding their way home.
AuthorTyler Pennock
PublisherBrick Books
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