Sunday September 22, 2013 at Queen's Park Circle, 11am - 6pm
Vibrant Voices of Ontario Tent
Hosts:
Becky Toyne is a books columnist, editor and publicist. She is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio One and Open Book: Toronto, and a freelance publicist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada. One day a week she works at Toronto indie bookstore Type.
Steven W. Beattie, Toronto-based writer and critic, is the Review Editor at Quill & Quire, the magazine of the Canadian publishing trade. He maintains the literary blog That Shakespearean Rag.
Click on a segment below to learn more.
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM :: We ♥ Toronto: Books Inspired by the City
Oranges and Lemons - Liz Bugg
The second book in the Calli Barnow mystery series sees the Toronto PI going undercover on Bay Street. Someone is ripping off a high-end advertising firm, and Calli is hired to find out what's going on. But when a hotshot young executive is found dead, things start to unravel…
Liz Bugg is a writer, teacher and actor. Her first mystery novel, Red Rover, won a Debut Author Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society, and Margaret Cannon of the Globe and Mail called it “a slick debut,” predicting that the Calli Barnow Series would be “a series to watch.”
Insomniac Press - $19.95 -Mystery/Lesbian Fiction
Some Great Idea: Good Neighbourhoods, Crazy Politics and the Invention of Toronto - Edward Keenan
Since 2010, Toronto’s headlines have been consumed by the personal foibles and anti-urbanist policies of Mayor Rob Ford. But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto’s ascendance as a mature global city. It raises questions: What role does a mayor play in a city’s temperament and self-confidence? Can an unpopular mayor make a city better by forcing its citizens to engage?
Edward Keenan serves as senior editor and lead columnist at The Grid magazine in Toronto. An eight-time finalist at the National Magazine Awards, he was the top editor at Eye Weekly, is a contributing editor at Spacing magazine, and writes widely on politics, sports and culture.
Coach House Books - $12.00 - Urban Studies
Hope and Heartbreak in Toronto: Life as a Maple Leafs Fan - Peter Robinson
Why does a team that hasn't won a Stanley Cup since 1967 have such a hold on its fans? Peter Robinson tries to answer that question while detailing what it's like to love one of the most unlovable teams in all of professional sports.
Peter Robinson is the editor of Prospects Hockey, the official magazine of the Canadian Hockey League, and the golf columnist for CBC.ca. Somehow he manages to balance his work, his family, and his obsession with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Dundurn - $19.99 - Sports & Recreation
Seen Reading - Julie Wilson
Seen Reading is the exciting debut collection of more than a hundred stories inspired by sightings of people reading on Toronto transit, each reader re-invented in a poetic piece of short fiction. Tender, poignant, and fun, Seen Reading offers readers an inspired fictional map while charting an urban centre's cultural commitment to books and literature.
Julie Wilson is The Book Madam, a self-professed "professional publishing fan" living and working in Toronto. She's the past Online Marketing Manager for House of Anansi Press and recent Host of the CBC Book Club.
Freehand Books - $21.95 - Short fiction
12:30 - 12:45 PM :: How to Get a Girl Pregnant - Karleen Pendleton Jiménez
Karleen Pendleton Jiménez has known that she was gay since she was three years old and wanted to have a baby for almost as long. But how is a butch Chicana lesbian supposed to get sperm? Picking up men at nightclubs? Asking queer male friends for a donation? This candid and humorous memoir follows Karleen’s challenges, adventures, successes, failures, humiliations, and triumphs while attempting to fulfill her dream of giving birth to a child.
Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is the screenwriter, and the author of the children’s book Are You a Boy or a Girl?, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She is a professor of education at Trent University. How to Get a Girl Pregnant was a finalist for a Lambda Award earlier this year.
Tightrope Books - $19.95 - Non-fiction12:45 - 1:00 PM :: Floating Life- Moez Surani
Composed of spare, elegant poetry that highlights the disconnect between love and travel, Floating Life takes the reader on a dizzying tour of the world, stopping in Cairo, Muju, Madrid and Cape Breton. Interwoven through these evocative glimpses of places and the people that live in them are poems exploring relationships, reflecting on identity and considering the passing of time.
Moez Surani is a poet, reviewer and short fiction author. His writing has been included in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including The Literary Review of Canada and The Walrus.
Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd. - $17.00 - Poetry1:00 - 1:15 PM :: Algoma - Dani Couture
A year after watching Leo go through thin ice, twelve-year-old Ferd is obsessed with the idea that he can persuade his dead brother to come home through a campaign of letters. Plaintive notes appear around the house—folded squares of paper in the rain reservoir, kitchen sink, and washing machine. Ferd’s mother, Algoma, is also unravelling; attempting to hide her son’s letters, reconnect with her increasingly distant husband, and rebuild her life. Algoma is a story of loss, obsession, giving up, and moving on.
Dani Couture is the author of two collections of poetry: Good Meat and Sweet. Sweet was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the ReLit Award. Couture also received an Honour of Distinction from The Writers’ Trust’s Dayne Ogilvie Grant in 2011. She resides in Toronto.
Invisible Publishing - $19.95 - Fiction1:15 - 1:30 PM :: Onion Man - Kathryn Mockler
Onion Man is an intense and masterfully sculpted series of linked poems. The poems are told from the point of view of a girl working for the summer at a corn canning factory, and they follow her relationship with her factory job and a co-worker who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.” A traumatic event at the factory causes the girl to rethink the direction of her life.
Kathryn Mockler teaches poetry and screenwriting at the University of Western Ontario. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and her Honours BA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University. Originally from London, Ontario, she now resides in Toronto.
Tightrope Books - $14.95 - Poetry1:30 - 2:00 PM :: Sweet Jesus - Christine Pountney
Set in Victoria, Toronto, and on the road into the middle states the week before the 2012 presidential election, Connie, in shock over the recent bankruptcy of her husband's business, and Hannah, bereft at her boyfriend's refusal to have a child, meet in Toronto to travel by pickup truck across the border. They are joined by their adopted brother Zeus, a therapeutic clown grieving over the recent death of his boyfriend. Together, the threesome drives toward New Mexico… Sweet Jesus is a deeply affective novel about family connections, about faith, and how it is often found in unexpected ways.
Christine Pountney has two previous novels, Last Chance Texaco (longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2000), and The Best Way You Know How. She has written for the Guardian, theNew York Times Magazine, the Walrus, Brick Magazine, and Nuvo.
Emblem Editions - $29.99 - Fiction
2:00 - 2:45 PM :: Ecopoetry: Requiems and Rallying Cries
For as long as there has been pen and paper, poets have embraced the natural world as a source of inspiration. Today, as we face an increasingly bleak environmental future, the poet’s exploration of the natural world often reflects a new ecological imperative. What, then, is the responsibility of today’s Ecopoet? Is it a celebration of the beauty of nature, designed to inspire the reader? An outcry against the conflict between humankind and the environment? A call to action?
Join poets Roo Borson, David Day, James Deahl and Dennis Lee as they discuss the changing relationship between the natural world and modern poetry.
Rain; road; an open boat, by turns wry and ecstatic, droll and elegiac, quizzical and contemplative, is a major new work by one of our most singular and compelling poets. Roo Borson has published ten previous books of poems, most recently Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida, winner of the Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize.
McClelland & Stewart - $18.99 - PoetryNevermore: A Book of Hours is a modern bestiary and a book of remembrance, a distillation of thirty years of research and meditation by author and poet David Day, an acknowledged authority on the extinction of species.
Quattro Books Inc. - $20.00 - Creative Non-fiction
Rooms the Wind Makes continues Deahl's exploration of the natural world in precise, startling language, tinged with nostalgia but bravely facing reality. The publication of Rooms The Wind Makes completes a cycle of four poetry collections, No Cold Ash, Even This Land Was Born Of Light, and When Rivers Speak.
Guernica Editions - $20.00 - Poetry
Testament is the summation of Dennis Lee's decade-long exploration of the dilemma of contemporary existence. This startling collection reminds us anew of the catastrophic reality we have made of our planet, while simultaneously insisting on a particular kind of hope for our future. Dennis Lee is the author of more than twenty books, including Civil Elegies, which won the Governor General's Literary Award. Among many other honours, he was Toronto's first poet laureate from 2001 to 2004.
House of Anansi Press - $19.95 - Poetry
2:45 - 3:15 PM :: Words To Live By - William Whitehead
Words to Live By is the memoir of William Whitehead who, from the 1950s onwards, has been a participant in the development of Canadian culture. Whitehead’s book does far more than document the events and people of this period — it tells the story of a prairie boy who trained as a scientist but fell in love with the stage, whose adventures and misadventures in the written and spoken word have given new meaning to the phrase “words to live by.”
William Whitehead is a Canadian actor and writer. He worked with the CBC for many years, developing programs such as The Nature of Things for television and the series Ideas for radio. With his partner Timothy Findley, he co-wrote several works including the television documentaries Dieppe 1942 and The National Dream: Building the Impossible Railway.
Cormorant Books - $34.95 - Memoir3:15 - 3:45 PM :: The Western Light - Susan Swan
The Western Light, prequel to The Wives of Bath, is Susan Swan’s return to the life of Mary “Mouse” Bradford, whose world is constrained by her emotionally distant father and her prejudiced housekeeper, Sal. The only life-affirming presences, grandmother Big Louie and aunt Little Louie, live elsewhere.
Former NHL star Gentleman John Pilkie is transferred to the local mental hospital, having murdered his wife and daughter. Wanting the attention she does not receive from her father, Mouse becomes attracted to John...
Susan Swan’s international bestseller The Wives of Bath was a finalist for the UK Guardian Award and Ontario’s Trillium Award in 1993, and was adapted into the film Lost and Delirious. She has worked as a journalist, a humanities professor at York University, and Chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada.
Cormorant Books - $29.95 - Fiction3:45 - 4:00 PM :: Bent at the Spine - Nicole Markotić
Markotić’s poetry, through karma-jarring vocabulary, jolts readers to pay attention not only to every word, but to how lines bleed into each other, how spines bend and plunge, and how readers, still, love the rapturous word.
Nicole Markotić has published two novels (Yellow Pages and Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot) and two books of poetry (Connect the Dots, Minotaurs & Other Alphabets) and the chapbook More Excess which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Formerly from Calgary, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, specializing in Canadian and Children's Literature, Poetry and Disability Studies.
BookThug - $20.00 - Poetry4:00 - 4:30 PM :: Working The Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada - Sandra Martin
Globe and Mail columnist Sandra Martin honours Canada's famous, infamous, and unsung heroes in this unique collection of obituaries of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Here are Canadian icons such as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, social activist June Callwood, and urban theorist Jane Jacobs. Here are our rogues, rascals, and romantics; our service men and women; and here are those private citizens whose lives have had an undeniable public impact. These elegant and eloquent biographies, interwoven with the autobiography of the obit writer, offer an intimate view of life on the dead beat.
Sandra Martin is a journalist at the Globe and Mail. She has won writing prizes from the Society of Professional Obituary Writers, gold and silver National Magazine Awards, the Atkinson and William Southam Journalism Fellowships, and the Harvey Southam Lecturership at the University of Victoria. The co-author of three books, she is the editor of the bestselling and critically acclaimed collection, The First Man in My Life: Daughters Write about Their Fathers.
House of Anansi Press - $29.95 - Biography4:30 - 5:00 PM :: True North: A Life Inside the Music Business - Bernie Finkelstein
Bernie Finkelstein has been a prominent figure in the Canadian music industry for nearly five decades. Now, a couple years after selling his beloved True North label and only recently stepping down from his role at MuchFACT, which has given out more than $63 million in grants to Grammy-winning acts like Sarah McLachlan, Nelly Furtado and Arcade Fire, Bernie is finally ready to talk…
In 1969, Bernie Finkelstein founded True North Recordsand The Finkelstein Management Company. Since its inception, the label has sold more than 40 gold and platinum records and received more than 40 Junos. Bernie is a member of the Order of Canada, and an inductee of the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame.
McClelland & Stewart - $32.99 - Memoir5:00 - 5:30 PM :: The Mastersinger from Minsk- Morley Torgov
In 1868 Munich, composer Richard Wagner is putting the finishing touches on his new opera, Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg. An anonymous note warns Wagner that the premiere will be his ruination. Enter Inspector Hermann Preiss, who discovers a complication. Cornelia Vanderhoute is claiming to have been made pregnant after an adulterous Wagner affair. When several people involved in the show are murdered, it seems Cornelia is exacting her revenge. Will Preiss succeed in discovering the writer of the note and prevent the murder of Wagner?
Morley Torgov is one of Canada’s best-loved authors. His works include A Good Place to Come From and the classic The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick. Murder in A-Major, his first mystery novel, was published in 2008. He lives in Toronto.
Dundurn - $19.99 - Mystery Fiction
