Launch of Alison Gadsby's BREATHING IS HOW SOME PEOPLE STAY ALIVE

Doors open at 6:00. Event starts at 6:30.

Conversation with Hollay Ghadery, author of The UnRavelling of Ou (Books also available for sale). Followed by a short reading and acknowledgments.

Book signing and mingling, 7:30pm to 9:00pm. Refreshments.

Supported by Toronto International Festival of Authors, through Toronto Lit Up.

About the book

A woman learns to swim. A girl falls in love with her teacher. A man hires a humanoid nanny. A woman is abducted by her trash collector. A mother recycles time.In loosely connected stories that blur the lines between horror, speculative fiction and psychological realism, characters struggle to stay afloat in the wake of childhoods they barely survived.

About the author

Alison Gadsby writes in Tkaronto, where she lives in a multigenerational home that includes several dogs. Her short fiction appears in The Ex-Puritan, Blank Spaces, The TƐmz Review, Blue Lake Review, and many more. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from York University. She is the founder/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series in Toronto. Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions) is her first collection of stories. Her debut novel, Dreams of the Weary will be published in 2027 (Palimpsest Press). Find out more at www.alisongadsby.ca and www.junctionreads.ca.

About the moderator

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and her poetry, short stories, and personal essays have appeared in literary journals and magazines around the world, including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead. The Antigonish Review, Today’s Parent, and CBC Parents. Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, was released with Radiant Press in April 2023 and in 2022, its title poem won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Prize. Hollay's short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, came out with Gordon Hill Press in 2024. Her debut novel is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in spring 2026 and her children’s book with Guernica Editions in 2027.
Hollay is also a co-host of HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM and a host on The New Books Network.