Festival Sunday Pass for Readers 2024

Details Coming Soon:

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.

Author Reading: Half=Wild and Other Stories of Encounter

Sunday, June 9, 2024
10:30 - 11:30 am at the Bayfield Community Centre, 4 Jane Street, Bayfield

In Half-Wild and Other Stories of Encounter, a startling debut short story collection by a new Ontario writer, intergenerational relationships unfold in a context of environmental change and degradation.

The Reading is followed by a Q&A.
The author will be available to sign books following the Reading.

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.

In her stories, Emily Paskevics subtly subverts traditional nature writing: 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.

Bones of Belonging by Annahid Dashtgard

Sunday, June 9, 2024
12 Noon at the Bayfield Community Centre, 4 Jane Street, Bayfield

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, Manager, Local Immigration Partnership