Event Info
Folklore, Fable, and Fantastical Females
Presented by Kingston WritersFest
9:30pm - 11:00pm
$0-$26.89
Event Description
Folklore, Fable, and Fantastical Females
Paola Ferrante, Emily Urquhart, Anuja Varghese
Reading and Conversation
Islandview
9:30 – 11:00 am
A trio of authors explore complex issues through genre-bending stories that blur the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Join Paola (Her Body Among Animals), Emily (Ordinary Wonder Tales), and Anuja (Chrysalis) for an open discussion of the intersectionalities of being a woman, mother, artist, queer, POC, and how fairy tales, wonder, ghosts, pregnancy, chimeras, plagues, and magic help us tell our stories.
Paola Ferrante
Paola Ferrante is an award-winning poet and writer living with depression.
Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her latest poetry chapbook is The Dark Unwind. Her short story, “When Foxes Die Electric,” was longlisted for the Journey Prize, and judges Amy Jones, Doretta Lau and Téa Mutonji described as “surprising, wielding sci-fi conventions with ease while upending our expectations of the genre,” and having “prose [that] carries a charge.” Other awards include Room’s prize for Fiction, and Grain’s Short Grain Prize for Poetry. She also won The New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award for “The Underside of a Wing,” which the judges described as “demonstrat[ing] the kind of fluorescent immanence short fiction can achieve…. This story feasts on the ruins of formulaic narrative and lingers darkly in the mind.” Her work has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories, Best Canadian Poetry, The Master’s Review Anthology, North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere.
Her first short fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals, released this fall. The book is a genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, where women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it a “decadent and haunting fiction debut”, adding “there is no filler here; each story is devastating, brilliantly imaginative, and almost impossible to summarize neatly. Ferrante is a vital new voice in short fiction.”
Paola is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and lives in Toronto, Canada with her spouse Mat, and their son.
Emily Urquhart
Emily Urquhart knows how to keep busy. She has worked as a freelance writer for two decades and her narrative nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in Guernica, Longreads, The Walrus, The Rumpus, The Literary Review of Canada and The Toronto Star among other publications. She is a five-time National Magazine Award nominee, a Digital Magazine Award nominee, and won an Alberta Magazine Award. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and has taught courses on creative writing, literary nonfiction, research practices, and various genres of folklore, mentored student, staff and faculty writers.
She has a doctorate in folklore, and has drawn on that background in her writing, including Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes, which was nominated for the Kobo First Book Award, a British Columbia Book Prize, and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Emily’s next book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, about creativity and aging, was listed as a top book of by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. This love of art lead her to the role of writer-on-site for a serial collaboration of twelve artists called A Hole in the Ground
Her third and most recent book, a collection of essays is Ordinary Wonder Tales, was again listed as a top book by the Globe and Mail and The Telegram. The Toronto Star calls it “a book of both deep thought and intense feeling, Ordinary Wonder Tales is, literally, a collection of wonders, and a truly beautiful account of a life lived in the nexus of the temporal and the eternal. It’s a treasure.” Emily lives in Kitchener with her husband, an ecology professor at the University of Waterloo, and two amazing kids.
Anuja Varghese
Anuja Varghese is a writer, reviewer, editor, and fiction editor with The Ex-Puritan Magazine. Her work has appeared in Hobart, the Malahat Review, the Fiddlehead, Plenitude Magazine, and others. Her stories have been recognized in the PRISM International Short Fiction Contest and the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She writes literary fiction, speculative fiction, and erotica/romance – and combinations of all three – where women of colour get leading roles. Anuja has work included in When Other People Saw Us, They Saw the Dead, an anthology of BIPOC gothic horror from, and Queer Little Nightmares, an anthology of queer monster stories. Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, delves into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it. Reviews have called the collection powerful and punchy, with Quill & Quire saying “Varghese’s women are like her words: brutal, elegant, and resonant. Xtra describes the stories as “thoughtful, surprising, horrifying, tender portrayals of urgent transformation. Varghese’s dedication to upending expected queer and immigrant narratives, and to spotlighting complexity in relationships is welcome and invigorating.” Anuja lives in Hamilton with her partner, cats, and kids.
Venue
2 Princess Street
Open / Operational
In-Person Event
Sat. September 30th 2023 + Add to Calendar
Holiday Inn Kingston-Waterfront, an IHG Hotel
