Personal Upheaval
Event Details
Short fiction poses questions of identity and belonging allowing us to live other lives, as though remembering a dream. Moderated by Fawn Parker.
Equipoise
Katie Zdybel
A young woman forms her own idea of feminine sexuality while skinny-dipping with her best friend’s mother during a thunderstorm. A naive bride returns to her beloved Ontario farm country and, after an encounter with a young female beekeeper, suddenly sees her husband in a sobering new light. Under pretences, a rural doctor returns for her childhood friend, but finds the women in her new life have only a very specific use for her. A middle-aged woman facing the devastating end of a friendship as well as her last chance at childbirth, flees North only to be confronted with the complexities of life in the Yukon. The women of Equipoise struggle to find their positionality in life in relation to the women around them. They are also contoured by their geographies, caught between North and South, East and West, childhood home and adulthood home. They struggle to maintain a balance within the tension of their opposing female roles, landscapes, friendships, rivalries, victories, and catastrophes, always vigourously seeking equipoise.
Shimmer
Alex Pugsley
Outside a 7-Eleven, teen boys Veeper and Wendell try to decide what to do with their night, though the thought of the rest of their lives doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. In Laurel Canyon, two movie stars try to decide if the affair they’re having might mean they like each other. When Byron, trying to figure out the chords of a song he likes, posts a question on a guitar website, he ends up meeting Jessica as well, a woman with her own difficult music. And when the snide and sharp-tongued Twyla agrees to try therapy, not even she would have imagined the results.
