Ask any writer: committing to this artform is hard. You take jobs you don’t want, spend too much time alone, fret and sweat at the keyboard, make do with little, and then do it all over again. More than this, writing with honesty takes spine and guts. The creation of art inevitably encroaches on life—whether through family schisms, professional divides, or controversy. These writers at the top of their game discuss what it means to write honestly—and what they have sacrificed in order to do so. Join Guest Curator Kim Thúy alongside Heather O’Neill (The Capital of Dreams), Brandon Taylor (The Late Americans), and Jenny Heijun Wills (Everything and Nothing at All) for a riveting discussion about the real cost of art. Moderated by Kim Thúy.
This event will include ASL interpretation.
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Event Participants:
HEATHER O'NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her last novel, When We Lost Our Heads, was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives there today.
BRANDON TAYLOR is an American writer. He is the author of The Late Americans, Real Life, and Filthy Animals.
KIM THÚY was born in Vietnam in 1968. At the age of 10 she left Vietnam along with a wave of refugees commonly referred to in the media as “the boat people” and settled with her family in Quebec, Canada. A graduate in translation and law, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer, and restaurant owner. The author has received many awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2010, and was one of the top 4 finalists of the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018. Her books have sold more than 850,000 copies around the world and have been translated into 31 languages and distributed across 43 countries and territories. Kim Thúy lives in Montreal where she devotes her time to writing.
JENNY HEIJUN WILLS is a transnationally and transracially adopted Korean Canadian writer who currently lives in Winnipeg (Treaty 1). She is the author of Everything and Nothing at all: Essays and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction prize winning Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. A memoir. She is professor of English at the University of Winnipeg.
