Sharon Butala, Larissa Lai, Michelle Good and JoAnn McCaig in conversation about reading, writing and aging during this pandemic.

“Inspired by canonical stories such as James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ Sharon Butala reinvigorates aging myths and the writing craft itself. Season of Fury and Wonder is poetic, flawless, and unflinching.” —Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury

Larissa Lai’s Tiger Flu is visionary, bold, beautiful, and wildly imaginative. It is at once a saga of two women heroes, a cyberpunk thriller, and a convention-breaking cautionary tale -- a striking metaphor for our complicated times.

With compassion and insight, Michelle Good’s stunning, debut novel Five Little Indians chronicles the desperate quest of residential school survivors to come to terms with their past and, ultimately, find a way forward.

JoAnn McCaig’s An Honest Woman is immensely gutsy and beautifully written. Stories nest inside stories in this very bookish novel about the writerly process and about the places where literary ambition collides with erotic desire.

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHORS

SHARON BUTALA turned 80 in 2020 and her latest book, Season of Fury and Wonder is about old age: the joy of success and the sting of shortcomings. Each story is a riff on a classic work of literature by the likes of Raymond Carver, Willa Cather and Flannery O’Connor. Season of Fury and Wonder won The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. The highly-acclaimed Butala is the author of 20 books of fiction and non-fiction. She has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award three times.

Of Hong Kong Chinese descent, poet, critic and novelist LARISSA LAI has written eight books, including The Tiger Flu, a speculative fiction novel in which a woman over 50 is responsible for the reproductive continuity of her community. Involved in cultural organizing, experimental poetry and speculative fiction communities since the late 1980s, Larissa has received the Duggins Prize, the Lambda Award, and the Astraea Award, and been shortlisted twice for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award. She holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary, where she directs The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing.

MICHELLE GOOD is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years and advocating for residential school survivors, she obtained a law degree. She earned her MFA in creative writing at UBC while still practicing law. Her novel Five Little Indians was nominated for the Giller Prize and a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Prize. Her poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. Michelle Good now lives in the southern Okanagan in BC.

JOANN MCCAIG taught English at the University of Calgary for twenty years. Her scholarly book Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives was based on her doctoral research. Her first novel, The Textbook of the Rose, was shortlisted for the Georges Bugnet Award and won the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. She published her second novel in 2019; An Honest Woman is a very bookish novel about the places where writerly ambition collides with erotic desire. JoAnn’s bookishness finds further expression in her involvement with Broadview Press, Freehand Books, Thistledown Press, and the independent bookstore Shelf Life Books.

You will be provided a link to the Zoom closer to the event, hosted by Shelf Life Books. Ask your local bookseller for the books.

Sponsored by Freehand Books and Shelf Life Books