Taking place in the liminal spaces between reality, fantasy, and dreams, these mesmerizing novels will root themselves in your psyche, and linger for a long time to come. An unraveling couple are sucked into a maze of duplicate selves when they stumble on a porn film based on the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne, in Angélique Lalonde’s eclectic Variations on a Dream. Michelle Porter spins a modern tale of identity and belonging in A Glacier’s Guide to Dying, wherein a young Métis man searching for his missing father finds himself arguing with a dying glacier. And multiple narratives come together across time and space in Portia Elan’s Homebound, united by the very things that make us human, and one unfinished video game saved to a floppy disk. Take a trip to the thresholds of reality. Moderated by Michelle Cyca.
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MICHELLE CYCA is bureau chief for The Narwhal and a contributing writer to The Walrus. Her literary criticism and books coverage appears in Quill & Quire, The Globe & Mail, The Tyee and the Vancouver Sun. Michelle is a board member for Upstart & Crow, a non-profit society and literary incubator based on Granville Island, and the chair of tâpwêwin media, an independent, Indigenous-led publishing non-profit. She is a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 6, and she lives and works in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam territory.
PORTIA ELAN studied history at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, before returning to California, where she has worked as a teacher and public librarian. A former Lambda Literary Fellow, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and an abundance of cats. Homebound is her first novel.
ANGÉLIQUE LALONDE’s work has been featured in PRISM International, The Journey Prize Stories, Room, and The Malahat Review, among other publications. She received the 2019 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She lives on Gitxsan Territory in Northern B.C. Her short story collection Glorious Frazzled Beings was shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
MICHELLE PORTER's debut novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story, won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Her previous books include Approaching Fire, which was shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award. Michelle lives in St. John's where she teaches creative writing and Métis Literature at Memorial University.
