Featured Events in Roncesvalles in May, 2025 (August Updated)

Join us for the launch of Prairie Fire's Spring 2025 issue, 50 OVER 50: HONOURING WOMEN WRITERS IN CANADA! Hosted by Rose Cullis, with readings by Rose Cullis, Terri Favro, Evena Gottschalk, Terrie Hamazaki, Maureen Hynes, Jeanette Lynes, Kate Marshall Flaherty. Denisha Naidoo, Dorothy Ellen Palmer, Julie Salverson, Nikki Vogel, and Marcia Walker. ABOUT PRAIRIE FIRE Prairie Fire is an award-winning Canadian journal of innovative writing that is published quarterly by Prairie Fire Press, Inc. Each issue is a fresh, vibrant mix of fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction by our most celebrated writers and the hottest new voices of our emerging writers. It consistently features solid writing that will engage your mind and delight your spirit. In a typical issue you will find a wide range of writing, including excerpts from a work-in-progress, a thoughtful essay or memoir, literary humour, lots of poetry and fiction, and sometimes something more experimental. Prairie Fire has been publishing imaginative, provocative, exceptional, worthwhile writing for over 45 years, making it one of Canada’s oldest literary magazines. Prairie Fire Press, Inc. is located in Treaty One Territory, the home and traditional lands of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Ininew (Cree), and Dakota peoples, and in the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. Our drinking water comes from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, in Treaty Three Territory. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the launch of Prairie Fire's Spring 2025 issue, 50 OVER 50: HONOURING WOMEN WRITERS IN CANADA! Hosted by Rose Cullis, with readings by Rose Cullis, Terri Favro, Evena Gottschalk, Terrie Hamazaki, Maureen Hynes, Jeanette Lynes, Kate Marshall Flaherty. Denisha Naidoo, Dorothy Ellen Palmer, Julie Salverson, and Marcia Walker. ABOUT PRAIRIE FIRE Prairie Fire is an award-winning Canadian journal of innovative writing that is published quarterly by Prairie Fire Press, Inc. Each issue is a fresh, vibrant mix of fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction by our most celebrated writers and the hottest new voices of our emerging writers. It consistently features solid writing that will engage your mind and delight your spirit. In a typical issue you will find a wide range of writing, including excerpts from a work-in-progress, a thoughtful essay or memoir, literary humour, lots of poetry and fiction, and sometimes something more experimental. Prairie Fire has been publishing imaginative, provocative, exceptional, worthwhile writing for over 45 years, making it one of Canada’s oldest literary magazines. Prairie Fire Press, Inc. is located in Treaty One Territory, the home and traditional lands of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Ininew (Cree), and Dakota peoples, and in the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. Our drinking water comes from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, in Treaty Three Territory. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Please join Another Story Bookshop and Knopf Canada to celebrate Madeleine Thien's new novel The Book of Records With special guests Canisia Lubrin, Kyo Maclear and Thea Lim The sublime, long-awaited, major new novel from the beloved author of the GG Award-winning, Booker Prize-shortlisted bestseller Do Not Say We Have Nothing. In The Sea, a sprawling, mysterious building-complex that endlessly receives migrants from everywhere and seems to exist somewhere outside of normal space and time, adolescent Lina cares for her ailing father. Having landed at The Sea with only what could be carried by hand, Lina grows up with nothing but a trio of books to read—three volumes in a series about the lives of famous voyagers of the past. Soon, however, she discovers three eccentric neighbours in the building who have stories of their own to share. These neighbours are Bento (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Baruch Spinoza), a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam who was excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher (whose life mirrors Hannah Arendt), a philosopher whose academic promise in 1930s Germany became a quest to survive Nazi persecution; and Jupiter (or shades of Du Fu), a poet of Tang Dynasty China whose brilliance went unrecognised by the state, and whose dependence on fickle patrons barely sustained him while lesser artists thrived. As she grows up in the building, Lina spends many hours listening to the fascinating tales of these friends. But it is only when she is finally told her father’s account of how the two of them came to reside in The Sea that she truly understands the unbearable cost of betrayal in her own life. And the combined force of these stories soon sets her on her own path into the unknown future. An adventurous, voyaging novel in which time occupies space uniquely, The Book of Records holds a mirror to the idea of fate in history, interrogates questions of legacy, explores how the political factors of a collective moment may determine an individual's future, and beautifully shows the infinite joys of art and intellectual endeavour. This is the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most remarkable, exciting, engrossing, and enriching. MADELEINE THIEN is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and four novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) and The Book of Records (2025). Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. As a librettist, she created Chinatown, a full-length opera by Alice Ping Yee Ho and Paul Yee, and collaborates on a range of chamber works. In 2024, she received the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, honouring a writer in mid-career. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the launch of The Snag by Tessa McWatt! In conversation with Allisa Trotz. ABOUT THE BOOK In her memoir The Snag, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Shame on Me, Tessa McWatt, takes on personal and collective grief, and the solace and inspiration to be found in connecting with nature—and each other. Every day, we hear about and experience griefs, large and small, in our families, friendships, communities, and worldwide. The grief of a loved one passing. The grief of a way of life ceasing to exist. The grief of global pandemic, war, climate collapse. As her mother’s dementia advances and she can no longer live independently, Tessa McWatt confronts personal and political losses, and finds herself wandering in a forest asking, how do we grieve? And what can we learn from nature and those whose communities are rooted in nature about not only how to grieve but also how to live? From the newest seedling to the oldest snag in the forest, there is meaning to be found in every stage of a tree’s life, all of which contribute to a thriving forest community. In this forest thinking, Tessa begins to find answers to her questions about how to live (for each other), how to grieve (radically), and how to die (with love and connection). The Snag is an essential book about living and dancing and singing and praying, even in the face of unimaginable sadness, and in this way, growing together and supporting one another, like the trees in the forest. ABOUT THE AUTHOR TESSA McWATT is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, the OCM Bocas Prize and the Society of Authors’ Volcano Prize. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018, for her memoir, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which won the Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2020 and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor General's Award. She has been a resident at the Sacatar Institute in Brazil and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. Professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, she is also a librettist, and works on interdisciplinary projects and community-based life writing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Guyana, she grew up in Canada, and now makes her home in London, England. ABOUT THE MODERATOR Alissa Trotz is a Professor of Caribbean Studies at New College and the Director of Women and Gender Studies. She is also affiliate faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; and a member of the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health. She is a resource person with Red Thread Women’s Organization in Guyana (also see Red Thread’s Youtube Channel) and editor of “In the Diaspora,” a weekly newspaper column in the Guyanese daily, Stabroek News. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the launch of The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman by Niko Stratis! In conversation with Elamin Abdelmahmoud. ABOUT THE BOOK A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us. When Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as “dad rock,” Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad’s glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock’s emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward. In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe’s allusions to queer longing, Radiohead’s embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen’s very trans desire to “change my clothes my hair my face”—and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis’s own who embody the tenderness at the genre’s heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Niko Stratis is a culture writer based in Toronto, Ontario by way of the Yukon where she spent close to two decades working as a journeyman glazier before coming out as a trans woman in her late 30s and being forced to abandon her previous line of work. Now in her 40s, Niko provides a unique voice in cultural spaces seeking to work through lifelong traumas and emotional highs and lows through her work. She has won a Digital Publishing Award for Best Personal Essay, and her work regularly appears in outlets like Spin magazine, Xtra, Paste Magazine and more. Her column in Catapult, Everyone Is Gay, was a widely read series that explored gender and sexuality in 90s music and music criticism, and its impact on her as a closeted queer and trans woman in her teen years. Her newsletter, Anxiety Shark, is a self-published weekly essay collection using music to explore her relationship to themes like gender and sobriety. She lives in Toronto with her fiancé, their dog Bowie and two cats Winona and Ramona. She is a former smoker and a cancer. ABOUT THE MODERATOR Elamin Abdelmahmoud is the host of CBC Radio’s daily arts, pop culture and entertainment show Commotion and a former writer for BuzzFeed News. His work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, Rolling Stone and others. Elamin is the author of Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the Toronto launch of A Continuous Struggle by Garrett Felber! In conversation with Robyn Maynard. ABOUT THE BOOK The first biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism. A Continuous Struggle is a political biography of one of the most important revolutionary figures of the twentieth century in the United States. Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty-one to forty-one years. Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. During that time, he engaged in principled resistance to strip frisks for which he was beaten eleven times, raising awareness about the routinized sexual assault of imprisoned people. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are a co-founder of the abolitionist organization, Study and Struggle, and are currently building a mobile radical library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon. ABOUT THE MODERATOR Robyn Maynard is an author and scholar based in Toronto, where she holds the position of Assistant Professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at the University of Toronto-Scarborough in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies. Her writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe. Maynard is the author of two books. Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present (Fernwood 2017)is a national bestseller, designated as one of the best 100 books of 2017 by the Hill Times, listed in The Walrus's best books of 2018, shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award, the Concordia University First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, and the winner of the 2017 Errol Sharpe Book Prize. In 2018 the book was published in French with Mémoire d'encrier, titled NoirEs sous surveillance. Esclavage, répression et violence d’État au Canada and won the 2019 Prix de libraires in the category of essais. Rehearsals for Living (Knopt/Haymarket, 2022) co-authored with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is a Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and CBC National Bestseller and was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award for literary non-fiction. Other awards include 2018 Author of the Year from Montreal's Black History Month and the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQO* Emerging Writers. Additional writing appears in Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal and numerous book anthologies. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the Toronto launch of Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution! With editors Bänoo Zan, Cy Strom, and contributors Elana Wolff, Hollay Ghadery, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Mahdi Ganjavi, Fereshteh Molavi, Nilou Doust, Katerina Fretwell, and Kate Marshall Flaherty. ABOUT THE BOOK This international anthology marks a world-historical moment: the first ever feminist revolution. The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran is Woman, Life, Freedom, and it encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. This anthology echoes that cry. The poems here might be reflections on the present moment, denunciations of injustice, examinations of the poet’s own conscience, laments for the fallen, bitter curses, prayers, celebrations of life, and visions of a better future. Bänoo and Cy aim to raise awareness of the women’s revolution in Iran and show the world that this cause is alive and will not be put down. ABOUT THE EDITORS Bänoo Zan is a self-exiled poet, librettist, translator, teacher, editor and poetry curator, with numerous published pieces and three books. Songs of Exile was shortlisted for Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Letters to My Father was published in 2017. She uses symbolism, oxymoron and allusions to myth, religion, and culture and has been called a political, metaphysical, and spiritual poet. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Toronto’s most diverse poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012). A contract faculty member at Centennial College, she teaches ESL and English to international and domestic students. Bänoo, along with Cy Strom, is the co-editor of the poetry anthology: Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution. Cy Strom works as an editor. He holds MA and MPhil degrees from Columbia University in early modern European history and has published in academic and other areas. He edits in different genres and sometimes languages, and has had a role in developing professional editorial standards and educational materials. Cy and Iranian-born poet Bänoo Zan are co-editors of the forthcoming poetry anthology Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution (Guernica Editions, 2025). Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the Toronto launch of My Thievery of the People by Leila Marshy! Featuring a conversation with Trish Salah. ABOUT THE BOOK From the highways of Cairo to the outports of Newfoundland, the soul-crushing cubicles of city work and the deceptive perils of the Quebec countryside, these brilliant short stories lay bare the workings of power and the small acts of both courage and compromise by which those on the margins defy them. Beautifully cohesive across the stunning depth and range of setting and subject, there is nothing predictable about My Thievery of the People. ABOUT LEILA MARSHY LeilaMarshy is of Palestinian-Newfoundland parentage, which explains a lot. She has worked for the Palestine Hospital in Cairo, the Palestinian Mental Health Association in Gaza, and Medical Aid for Palestine in Montreal. Also in Montreal, she founded a ground-breaking community group bringing Hasidim and their neighbours together for dialogue. She’s been a baker, a chicken farmer, a mobile app designer, a film editor and a political campaigner. Her stories, poetry and articles have appeared in journals, newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, The Philistine, was published in 2018. She lives in Montreal. ABOUT TRISH SALAH TrishSalah lives and writes in T’karonto and is associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, in traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory.She is the author of Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. Recent writing can be found in the collections, El-Ghouraba, Other Influences, and Rumi Roaming, in the journals, Carte blanche, C Magazine, The New York War Crimes, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, as well as online at the Poetry Foundation website, the American Academy of Poets’ Poem-A-Day, and through Giorno Poetry System’s Dial-A-Poem. She is currently working on the second volume of Lyric Sexology, a collection of essays on the histories, practices, and pedagogies of trans poetics, and a novella. She edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, and is co-editor of special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on cultural production, and of Arc Poetry Magazine, showcasing trans, Two-Spirit and non-binary writers. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the Toronto launch of No One Knows Us There by Jessica Bebenek and familial hungers by Christine Wu! With Terese Mason Pierre. ABOUT THE BOOKS Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky,Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs - the reader's appetite is satiated with these poems' complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow. In this stunning debut collection, Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two distinct and moving portraits of early womanhood. The first is that of the devoted, caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realities of palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older, compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenek rewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing. At once sensual, visceral, and dreamlike, No One Knows Us Theretakes us from the sterility of the hospital into the sumptuous natural world. We face horror in a manicured garden and discover beauty in a suncapped lake. A theoretical mathematician leads us to an elk encounter, the crooked bodies of birds are found in the spring thaw, and we become our own pet snail in a mason jar. Ultimately, grief is radically transformed through plainspoken yet lyrical language, and this keen examination of trauma evolves into a striking celebration of the inevitability of change. Myth, the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds ('real' and 'imaginary') unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in Myth move symphonically from tropical islands to barren cities, from lucid dreams to the mysteries of reality, from the sea to the cosmos. A dynamic mix of speculative poetry and ecstatic lyricism, the otherworldly and the sublime, Pierre's poems never stray too long or too far from the spell of unspoiled nature: The palm trees nod / at the ocean / the ocean does / what it always does / trusts the moon completely. ABOUT THE AUTHORS CHRISTINE WU is a Chinese-Canadian poet who was born and raised on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh (Vancouver, BC). She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, a MLIS from Dalhousie University, and a MA in English from the University of New Brunswick. In 2023, she was the winner of the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award and in 2022, she was shortlisted for the RBC Writers' Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She now lives and writes in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS) in Mi'kma'ki. JESSICA BEBENEK is a queer interdisciplinary poet and educator from Tkaronto (Toronto) who now splits her time between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. She works as a risograph printer and bookmaker at Concordia University's Centre for Expanded Poetics, where she organized the international Occult Poetics Symposium. In 2021, Bebenek was a finalist for the Writers' Trust of Canada's Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize and Pushcart Prize, and she is the author of seven poetry chapbooks, including I Remember the Exorcism. No One Knows Us There is her first book of poetry. TERESE MASON PIERRE (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Year's Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers' Trust Journey Prize and was named a Writers' Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon, Augur's biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the launch of Jacob McArthur Mooney’s The Northern! With Alexis von Konigslow and Andrew Forbes. About The Northern It is the summer of 1952 and three men — well, one man and two boys — are on a spiritual and commercial mission. Dispatched from Minnesota to Western Ontario, they have been hired by an upstart Mormon baseball card company to find licensees for their products among the young men filing out Korean War–era rosters in the Northern League, at the bottom-most rung of professional baseball. What the Northern has for them, and the secrets and deceptions they have for each other, will drive their two weeks in Canada into ever-growing chaos. In a vision of early 1950s Ontario that emphasizes accuracy but remains robustly anti-nostalgic and contemporary, the three businessmen have themselves an adventure of personal discovery, interpersonal hardship, and more than a little danger. With a world shaped by the trauma of World War II and the generations of deflated adults and orphaned children left behind by it, the story sets out on a clear-eyed and psychologically precise character study taking on grief, fantasy, adolescence, and family. As the narrator for this story of salesmen and ambitious athletes, 12-year-old Chris is a budding acerbic, able to be carried away by the — often empty — hopes of others and put his feet in the ground to stop them. A novel concerned with sports, labor, growing up, and God, The Northern is a funny and heartbreaking book about the series of disappointments that characterize the progress of growing up. About The Author Jacob McArthur Mooney’s work has been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Trillium Award in Poetry. An MFA graduate from the University of Guelph, he lives in Toronto with his partner, the novelist Alexis von Konigslow, and their son. The Northern is his fifth book and first novel. About The Guests Alexis von Konigslow is the author of The Capacity for Infinite Happiness. She has degrees in mathematical physics from Queen’s University and creative writing from the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto with her family. Andrew Forbes is the author of the the novel The Diapause (Invisible, October 1, 2024), the novella McCurdle’s Arm: A Fiction (Invisible Publishing, July 16, 2024), and the forthcoming essay collection Field Work: On Baseball and Making a Living(Assembly Press, April 15, 2025). He is also the author of two books of short fiction and two earlier collections of baseball writing. His work has appeared in publications such as the Toronto Star, Canadian Notes and Queries, and Maisonneuve Magazine. He was the 2019 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University, and served on the jury of the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Forbes lives in Peterborough, Ontario. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us in store for our May book club! Read and discuss Corinna Chong's The Queen's Spade with Macklin! Limited tickets available. 10% discount on The Queen's Spade in store and online with code ASBOOKCLUB. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the launch of Ehime Ora's Spirits Come From Water, an interactive book reading followed by a Q&A and signing! ABOUT THE BOOK For those who wish to decolonize their minds, particularly Black women, comes a thoughtful guide to ancestral veneration, with a focus on the importance of reclaiming African Spiritual practices as an act of liberation. In today's world, there's a notable resurgence in spiritual exploration that diverges from the mainstream New Age culture. People are seeking clarity that aligns with their own ancestral lineage, and ancestral veneration has emerged as a powerful avenue to navigate life's complexities. For Black communities, this resurgence represents a reclamation of hope for the diaspora. In this book, Ifa and Orisa priestess Ehime Ora shares the importance of connection to the ancestors, and to one’s spiritual roots. There’s a certain type of radical healing that takes place when we reconnect to our ancestral veneration and follow through with their wisdom. Providing healing through the written word, Ehime walks you though the reclamation of African Spiritual practices, discussing the spiritual renaissance occurring in the African community, and includes interviews with elders of the rich traditions. She also provides tangible spiritual tools so that you can incorporate ancestral veneration in your life: how to properly set up and work with an ancestral altar, the importance of spiritual hygiene, and bringing forth the concept of the ori, or the higher self. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ehime Ora is an Edo-Urhobo Nigerian scholar, writer, artist, and priestess of the Ifá and Òrìsà tradition. As a traditional healer, her work serves as a bridge for those searching for ancestral connection, generational healing, and empowerment. The author of Ancestors Said: 365 Introspections for Emotional Healing (Hay House / Penguin Random House), Spirits Come from Wateris her second book. ABOUT THE PRESENTERS This event is presented by the Ancestral Arts Collective, in association with Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre and OnePeopleTO. The Ancestral Arts Collective is a Toronto / Tkaronto collective of Black healing arts practitioners, artists, scholars, and storytellers who are dedicated to the reclamation of grief, death, and ancestral cultural practices — while providing spaces for joy. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite

Join us for the Toronto launch of A DROP IN THE OCEAN by Léa Taranto! In conversation with Drew McEwan. ABOUT THE BOOK Sixteen-year-old Mira Durand has just been checked into the secure unit of the Residency Adolescent Treatment Centre for obsessive compulsive and comorbid disorders. Four years of being passed around different psych wards like a hot potato have only worsened her OCD and anorexia. Her brutal, religious compulsions, which she believes keep her mom safe, make her less of a clean freak and more of a freak freak. No wonder her only friend is her journal. At the Residency's Ward 2, Mira discovers that her shrink is a fellow fantasy nerd and that her wardmates have enough of their own high-risk behaviours to tolerate hers. The complex friendships she forms with them (including a first love), the slow trust she builds with her treatment team, and the outside and family visits she earns give her things to look forward to beyond the drudgery of her compulsions. But it takes visiting Gung Gung, her dying maternal grandfather, for her to realize that to truly live, she must fight the cognitive distortions at the heart of her compulsions. Based on the author's personal experience, A Drop in the Ocean is a gritty, humanizing portrait of living with mental illness. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lea Taranto is a disabled Chinese Jewish Canadian writer who lives with OCD and comorbid disorders. An MFA graduate of the University of British Columbia, alumnus of Simon Fraser University Writer's Studio, and member of PRISM International's poetry board, she resides on traditional, unceded Halkomelem and Squamish territories in BC. ABOUT THE MODERATOR Drew McEwan is the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming, 2025). She is a postdoctoral researcher who writes on rhetorical and cultural representations of madness, disability, queerness, and transness from a position of lived experience. Her academic work has appeared in The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and the anthology Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health. Information Source: Another Story Bookshop | eventbrite