Event Details
Three literary voices reimagine motherhood through the strange, the surreal, and the beautifully unexpected.
Event Details
Three literary voices reimagine motherhood through the strange, the surreal, and the beautifully unexpected.
Speakers for this event
-
Arpita Ghosal
Arpita Ghosal
As a child, Arpita Ghosal pestered her storyteller grandmother for “just one more story” so incessantly that her mother taught her to read out of desperation. Her love of stories led her to a PhD in English literature, a career in public and post-secondary education, and a passion for arts journalism. Arpita writes constantly at Sesaya Arts Magazine (sesayarts.com), regularly interviewing artists and authors to help them share their stories. She works at the TDSB, where she has held various teaching and leadership roles. Her life as a mother to three remarkable children and a one-of-a-kind rescue dog yields wondrous stories and experiences. And she remains an avid reader with far too many books teetering on multiple surfaces.
-
Harriet Alida Lye
Harriet Alida Lye
Harriet Alida Lye is the award-winning author of The Honey Farm, Natural Killer, Let It Destroy You, and the novel Motherclown. She is also the co-author of a children’s picture book called Serge the Snail Without a Shell. Her essays and reporting have been published in The Globe & Mail, The New York Times, and more. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, and she works with authors as a mentor and editor at Flying Books and Humber College. She has lived in Halifax, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, and now lives in Toronto with her partner, their two children, and two dogs.
URL https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/5hHuC680yYho4Y65LCmiGf5bWCV?domain=harrietalida.com
-
Hollay Ghadery
Hollay Ghadery
Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has written four books, including most recently her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, (Palimpsest Press, 2026). Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township.
-
Jaclyn Desforges
Jaclyn Desforges
Jaclyn Desforges is the queer and neurodivergent author of a short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2026), which Quill & Quire called “refreshing, unpredictable, and utterly distinctive.” She’s also written a poetry collection, Danger Flower (Anstruther Books, 2021), and a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020). She teaches creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University and lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Jaclyn is working on her first novel, Eyelash Person, with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Books
Motherclown
In the wake of her father’s death, twenty-one-year-old Elise leaves her boyfriend, mother, and hometown of Niagara Falls to move to Paris. She’s earned a place at Chevalier, an elite physical theatre school with a focus on clown. Not “clown-clown,” but the pursuit of an inner child. At Chevalier, they don’t follow scripts—they follow their souls. The school is merciless, and it is the best.
Left behind, Elise’s mother, Catherine, is unravelling. At first she feels irritated, as if she’s just been demoted: from wife to widow, mother to empty-nester. She longs for the creative life she lost when she became pregnant, and in the quiet of the empty house, she becomes haunted by regret, and a secret she never told her daughter. When Elise disappears into Paris, Catherine follows.
But Elise, awakening to her own creative power, feels ambushed by her mother’s arrival. As Paris works its spell on them both, old wounds surface and resentments ignite. Can Elise hear her mother without losing herself? Can Catherine face the real reason she followed her daughter to Paris, or is she there—as Elise believes—to swallow her daughter whole?
Motherclown is an electric novel about art and inheritance, desire and devotion, and the ferocious, vulnerable love between mothers and daughters.
AuthorHarriet Alida Lye
PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
The Unravelling of Ou
Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and untangle herself from her dependence on it, and reconnect with the people she loves.
AuthorHollay Ghadery
PublisherPalimpsest Press
Weird Babies
Weird Babies is a short story collection about weird babies: a miraculous set of reincarnated quadruplets, babies born from the bellies of trout, babies who are destined to molt like tarantulas, babies who hatch from piles of warm clothes. It’s also about the weird baby living in each of us—the tenderest part of ourselves that longs, at whatever the cost, to be loved.
Stories from Weird Babies have appeared in The Ex-Puritan, The Temz Review, Minola Review, and CRAFT Literary. They were also nominated for the Best Of The Net Award (2025), Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy (2024), and Best American Short Stories (2024); were finalists for the Room Magazine Fiction Contest (2024), the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize (2023), and the 2024 CRAFT Novelette Print Prize; and were winners of the Short Works Prize (2019), and the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award (2018).
AuthorJaclyn Desforges
PublisherThe Porcupine's Quill