Festival Sunday Pass (Author Readings) 2024

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The Book Club Breakfast Celebrates Alice Munro
Enjoy freshly roasted coffee, pastries and sweetbreads make by Bayfield's best bakers while enjoying a moderated discussion on one of Alice Munro's Short Stories. we'll invite you to read the story or listen to it on a podcast.

Intergenerational conflicts unfold in a context of environmental change and degradation in this eerily original debut short fiction collection.

A moderated Q&A will follow the Reading. The Author will be available to sign her books at the end of this session.

Emily Paskevics takes her characters–mothers, daughters, fathers, sisters–into the wilderness to lose themselves in their primal nature . . . or to find what they’ve always been missing, as they struggle in a borderland between irrevocable environmental change and hope for ecological connection and healing.

A man searches for his wife and son who have mysteriously vanished into the woods while they were exploring a small island in Northern Ontario– are they truly lost, or did the woods rescue them from an inadequate husband and father? A mother takes her daughters into the remote wilderness to tell them about a harrowing encounter with a mountain lion, only to find that her story has already been told and is no longer quite her own. An old woman stands on a frozen river, contemplating her own death, until she locks eyes with a curious fox. A retired professor-turned-beekeeper has an affair with a former student, and ultimately learns that she can live alone on the edge of wilderness.

Subtly subverting traditional nature writing, in Paskevics’ stories the forest is burning, rivers are flooding, and the exploitation of land looms large. At a time when human-animal sharing of territory is more fraught than ever, these enthralling tales challenge us to consider how our own existence intersects with the wild creatures we share the earth with, and to understand our place in a threatened ecosystem.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Emily Paskevics is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Her work has appeared in publications including Vallum Magazine, The Humber Literary Review, and Hart House Review. In 2022 she was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award via the Writers Trust of Canada, for her short story “Wild Girls.” She was also longlisted for the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize for her story “Little Wild Creatures.” She divides her time between Toronto and Montreal

About Bones of Belonging

In a series of deft interlocking stories, this national bestseller shares experiences of searching for, and teaching about, belonging in our

deeply divided world. A critically acclaimed racialized immigrant writer and recognized diversity and inclusion leader, Annahid writes with wisdom, honesty and a wry humour as she considers what it means to belong—to a country, in a marriage, in our own skin—

and what the impact is when belonging is absent. Like the bones of the human body,

these stories and vignettes knit together a remarkable vision of what wholeness looks like as a racial outsider in a culture still dominated by whiteness.

Moderated by Mark Nonkes, Local Immigration Partnership

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Annahid is an author and CEO of international inclusion company Anima Leadership, devoted to using her voice towards a more just future. Alongside writing for various publications and serving on award juries (including the Hilary Weston non-fiction prize), she’s author of the national best-seller Bones of Belonging and memoir Breaking the Ocean which Ms. Magazine prophesied “may change you”. A leading voice on race, trauma and immigration, she also hosts the podcast Soundwaves of Belonging, featuring intimate and irreverent conversations with fellow bridge-builders. Having grown up in three different countries—Iran, England and Canada—on three different continents, Annahid is a citizen of the world, a lover of stories and a truth speaker for a more just future (@Annahid).