Wednesday, July 12th, 2023—6:30 p.m.

Brockton Writers Series presents readings by:

Hannah Amdemichael

Cleopatria Peterson

Rocco de Giacomo

Margaret Nowacyzk

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Special note: As we adapt with current social distancing regulations, we’re happy to announce our event will be hosted in-person at the Glad Day Bookshop, located at 499 Church St., Toronto. We will also live stream the event on the Brockton Writers Series YouTube channel! The event starts at 6:30 p.m.

The reading is PWYC (suggested $3-$5) and features a Q&A with the writers afterward. Books are available for sale.

 If you’d like to donate, please do so here.

Many thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for their support.

We are also planning to have ASL Interpreters at our May event! 

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GUEST SPEAKER

“Pushing Through to the Authentic You: Reading & Performance Tips” by Jennifer Alicia

Jennifer Alicia (they/she) is a queer Mi’kmaw/Settler (German/Irish/Scottish) multi-disciplinary artist originally from Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk. Her work has been featured in CBC Arts, NOW Magazine, and Canthius Magazine. Jennifer Alicia recently co-edited The Condor and the Eagle Meet, an Indigenous poetry anthology.

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READERS

self portrait. September 3, 2021

Hannah Amdemichael (she/her) resides in Tkaronto living her life one day at a time. With a bit of courage, a bit of wonder at what could be, and tongue tied on what currently is, she offers snapshots of thoughts recorded and words spoken. 

Cleopatria Peterson is a black non-binary trans multidisciplinary artist that writes, printmakes, illustrates and more. They graduated from Toronto Metropolitan University’s Fashion Communication program and are the medal winner for Cross-Disciplinary Arts: Publications at OCAD. Their work focuses on themes of nature, humour, identity, and above all things, love. Their chapbook What We Call Home was shortlisted for the BpNichol chapbook award.

Rocco de Giacomo lives in Toronto with his wife, Lisa Keophila, a fabric artist, and his daughters, Ava and Matilda. He is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in literary journals in Canada, Australia, England, Hong Kong, and the US. The author of numerous poetry chapbooks and full-length collections, his latest, Casting Out (Guernica Editions) — on the reconciliation of the author’s secular lifestyle and his deeply Evangelical upbringing — was published in April of 2023.

Margaret Nowaczyk is a clinical geneticist and a writer. She is a professor of pathology and molecular medicine and pediatrics at McMaster University. Her writing has appeared in numerous Canadian and American literary magazines. Her memoir Chasing Zebras was published by Wolsak&Wynn in 2021 and won the 2022 Sarton Award for Memoir. Her as yet untitled collection of essays is forthcoming in spring 2024. She lives in Hamilton with her husband, a foundling cat, and a rescue greyhound, her two sons having flown the coop. 

Twitter: @Marg_Nowaczyk

IG: Margaret Nowaczyk

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BWS 05.10.23 report: Grant Writing 101 by Dominik Parisien

Dominik Parisien is a disabled, bisexual French Canadian and the author of the poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) and the forthcoming memoir On a Scale of 1 to 500 Miles: A Memoir of Chronic Pain (Penguin Canada). He also co-edited several award-winning anthologies, including Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, The Mythic Dream, and The Starlit Wood. 

Grant Writing 101

One of the challenges of applying for grants is not knowing where to begin. In my presentation I discussed some of the fundamentals of grant application, which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfPWXu5FyN4

The various granting bodies also have guides or resources to assist you in your application. However, support resources can at times be difficult to locate. Here are some useful links to help you in your application process.

Toronto Arts Council: https://torontoartscouncil.org/grant-programs/discover-tac-grants/online-application 

• Includes several video tutorials.
• Their Tips and Resources section is particularly valuable: https://torontoartscouncil.org/grant-programs/tips-and-resources

Ontario Arts Council: https://www.arts.on.ca/grants

• This page is particularly useful, especially the Nova User Guide section https://www.arts.on.ca/grants/general-granting-information
• Pay special attention to the Deadlines and Important Dates section as well

Canada Council for the Arts: https://canadacouncil.ca/funding/grants/guide

• This page includes links to several parts of the application process.
• The profile creation process for the CCA can take a bit of time, and their system also needs several weeks to activate a profile. Create your account well before deadlines.

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Application support is available for deaf and disabled creators, or artists living with mental health. Through these programs an applicant may request an assistant to help throughout their application process, including completing the report after a successful application.

Applicants should contact the officers or administrators several weeks before the deadline in order to give enough time to process a support request.

Toronto Arts Council: https://torontoartscouncil.org/grant-programs/application-accessibility-support  

• Applicants can request up to $500 for support.
• The page provides a link to the contact information for the managers responsible for each program.

Ontario Arts Council: https://www.arts.on.ca/grants/priority-group/deaf-artists-and-artists-with-disabilities

• The relevant section here is the Accessibility Fund: Application Support.
• In order to apply for this program the applicant can contact the program administrator, Naomi Chorney: nchorney@arts.on.ca
• Applicants can request up to $500 for support.

Canada Council for the Arts: https://canadacouncil.ca/funding/application-assistance

• This program also supports First Nations, Inuit, or Métis creators facing language, geographic, or cultural barriers.
• Support can be request for both the creation of a profile and applying to the grant itself.
• The website details the amounts you can request and provides contact information.
• Amounts vary depending on the support requested.

Some of the granting bodies have grants dedicated to specific demographics across disciplines. These can be easily missed when applying. Some of these include:

• Toronto Arts Council — Black Arts: https://torontoartscouncil.org/grant-programs/discover-tac-grants/tac-grants/art-discipline-funding/black-arts
• Ontario Arts Council’s Deaf and Disability — Arts Projects: https://www.arts.on.ca/grants/deaf-and-disability-arts-projects
• Canada Council for the Arts — Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples: https://canadacouncil.ca/funding/grants/creating-knowing-sharing
• Canada Council for the Arts — Deaf and Disability Arts: https://canadacouncil.ca/funding/funding-decisions/decision-making-process/application-assessment/context-briefs/deaf-and-disability-arts-practices

For research-based work — Access Copyright Foundation: https://www.acfoundation.ca/eligibility/

• Although the application portal gives the impression their focus is exclusively on the arts in Saskatchewan, SK Arts administers grants for the Access Copyright Foundations and writers across Canada can apply for grants. 

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These should help in you application process. As I mention in the presentation, grant officers and administrators can answer general questions and provide additional support in your application process, as well as provide some feedback in certain cases. Don’t hesitate to contact them for help.

BWS 05.10.23: In Case You Missed It!

We had an amazing group of writers talk about their work and share their writing with us this past Wednesday. It was a wonderful evening with topics of queerness, identity, personal relationship, and societal issues. It was lovely having all our participants in person as well!

Click here to see the recorded live stream of our May 10th event featuring Douglas Davey, Sahar Golshan, Dwayne Morgan, and Andrew F. Sullivan, with guest speaker Dominik Parisien who spoke to us about grant writing.

We are so thrilled to still be offering our events in a hybrid format. Please stay tuned for more updates about our next events and readers.

Brockton Writers Series 10.05.23: Sahar Golshan

(photo credit Soko Negash)

Sahar Golshan is a writer, language learner, and the director of the short documentary KAR. She is the 2022 winner of the Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing in Non-Fiction. Her picture book TOO LOUD! will be published in spring 2024 by Annick Press and is illustrated by Shiva Delsooz.

Twitter: @SaharGolshan

Instagram: @sahargolshanwriting

Website: https://www.sahargolshan.com/

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KAR (2019) directed by Sahar Golshan

Mohammad has worked as a pizza delivery man, a driving instructor, and a taxi driver. With the rise of ride-sharing apps like Uber, he is now unemployed. A weekend drive with his daughter prompts reflection on cars, labour, and family.

The short documentary KAR had its world premiere at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival in November 2019. The film was selected by the festival’s shorts jury for the Air Canada Short Film Award. Upon selection, KAR was presented in a curated programme on Air Canada’s in-flight entertainment in 2020.

In September 2021, KAR had its international premiere at the Minikino International Short Film Festival in Bali, Indonesia.

Additional Awards:

• 2019 Canada Shorts Canadian and International Short Film Festival Award of Commendation

• 2020 University of Guelph-Humber Film Festival People’s Choice Award

Additional Screenings:

• 2020 University of Guelph – Humber Annual Film Festival

• 2021 Canadian Labour International Film Festival

• 2021 Toronto Youth Shorts Film Festival

Brockton Writers Series 10.05.23: Andrew F. Sullivan

Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of The Marigold (ECW Press), a novel about a city eating itself. The Handyman Method, a novel co-written with Nick Cutter about home improvement gone wrong, is forthcoming from Gallery Books / Saga Press in August 2023. Sullivan is also the author of the novel WASTE (Dzanc Books) and the short story collection All We Want is Everything (ARP Books), both named Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

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THE ART OF THE MARIGOLD

Andrew F. Sullivan

My book The Marigold is a polyphonic, fungal horror novel about a city slowly being eaten from within, feeding off the past. I’ve been really lucky to work with many great artists over the last year to bring this work to life. A novel’s prose stands on its own, but a book faces the world as an art object. How it feels in the hand, how it looks on a shelf, how the fonts leap off the page—all these things matter. Artists in all formats need to support one another and reaffirm our solidarity. It’s been extremely humbling to work with so many great artists to support The Marigold.

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Book Cover by Jo Walker

My book cover itself was created by Jo Walker under the direction of Jess Albert at ECW Press. Jo has created some amazing covers for writers like Jeff Vandermeer, Jia Tolentino, and Jenny Offill. A stark, deceptively simple image, The Marigold cover conveys so much about what hides within, a battle between different systems—corporate, organic, civic, and occult—all vying for control over a city already damned and drowning. It explains this book to anyone at a glance.

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The Wet Comes Home Illustration by Bhanu Pratap

Bhanu Pratap is one of my favourite comics artists working today. Bhanu created some early sketches for The Marigold, and I was really excited to follow through with him on his illustration for the tower. Bhanu’s use of colour and the fluid, fleshy way he depicts bodies has always drawn me to the painful contemporary fables he tells. We ended up turning this illustration into a small poster for the book, sending it out into the world. I feel like Bhanu’s worlds resemble my own—stark, beautiful, and dripping.

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Dreaming Cities Poster by Sid Sharp

Sid Sharp is a brilliant artist, someone whose work has the power to unsettle and compel. Sid’s children’s book The Wolf Suit flips an idiom on its head while haunting every page with forms bent and twisted in the forest. After reading an early version of the book as a PDF, Sid captured it so clearly in this piece, a world that lingers long after you close your eyes. This is an imagined Toronto, but one that feels real, tactile, and scabbed over. We used this painting for my Toronto launch, and I could not have been happier.

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Cabeza Ink Drawing by Franz Stefanik

I’ve been getting tattooed by Franz Stefanik for about seven years now, shedding a fair amount of blood and sweat in the process. Franz has a bold, distinct style that’s quickly recognized on streets across southern Ontario. After he read an early version, Franz created an incredible ink drawing of Cabeza, a rebellious portion of the Wet, my fungal force creeping through the city. With this ink drawing that we converted into a print, Franz captured the unsettling ability of the Wet to mimic humanity, and its desire to take on our collective face.

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Tower Block Illustration by Jeff Martin

My friend Jeff Martin is a comics artist based in Edmonton who’s lately been creating some amazing TTRPG’s with his partner, Caitlin Fortier, including Fail Marines, Hell, Inc: The RPG and BURGERPunk. I asked Jeff to take on The Marigold in the vein of Judge Dredd and 2000 A.D. comics and he brought it with all these wonderful colours. The natural world seizing power as the city falls into chaos is a major subplot in the novel, humming beneath the primary narrative, and I love this take on that relationship in this piece. The raccoons of Toronto are crafty, burly creatures—kaiju in their smallest form.

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Little Ghosts Books Poster by Veronika Dawydow

I met Veronika through the world of zines. I love her style and her sketches. She’s created multiple versions of my dog Iggy, including the cover for his infamous Bread Zine. For the Little Ghosts Books launch, I wanted something to express a lighter side of the novel. Raccoons are inherent to the very idea of Toronto and since this was a Q&A, I wanted to play around with the scene. In Toronto, the raccoons are getting closer to becoming human every day. Veronika captured that carefree, reckless capacity for joy with this piece.

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Hamilton Launch Poster by J.R. Bolt

Walking along the shore of Lake Ontario last winter, I found a stuffed panda bear tied to an electrical tower. This was my introduction to Hamilton, the city I’ve called home for the past 4 years. For my hometown launch, I wanted to capture a sense of industrial unease. My good friend J.R. used my silly photo to whip up a poster that immediately establishes a sense of dread, a warning about something left behind to fester. The Marigold, like almost all my fiction, is about what happens when we try to bury the past. It always comes back. It was always here.

Brockton Writers Series 10.05.23: Douglas Davey

Douglas Davey is author of the YA novels M in the Abstract and Switch, published by Red Deer Press. Douglas lives in Guelph with his family where he spends his time in various nerdy endeavours such as reading, playing games, and showing B-movies in his garage. You can find him on Instagram @solongsuccour and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglaspauldavey.

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Detouring Around the “Block”

Writer’s block seems to come to every writer eventually. My particular strain came at the end of (and partly in response to) an incredibly prolific period in my writing life. My first two novels had done well, the second in particular, and overall I was pleased with the reviews and the feedback. At the same time, they were intensely personal, and the process of writing and publishing them took a heavy emotional toll. Still, before the second book had even hit the shelves I was hard at work on a third, (equally-personal) manuscript, as well as amassing enough short stories for a collection. 

Then, life hit me. Personal and professional challenges accumulated until they felt insurmountable, and I found myself unable to write more fiction.

Looking back at this tough time in my life, I realize that my experience with writer’s block followed the classic stages of grief. First, denial. Writer’s block was a disaster that only befell other people, not me, like being in a plane crash or hit by lightning. Then came anger, as I mercilessly berated myself for my own ineptitude. Bargaining came next: if I could just complete this task or get that room renovated THEN I’d be better set up to write, (ignoring the fact that I wrote my first manuscript in surroundings that verged on the Dickensian). Depression, the fourth stage, was an unwanted and lifelong companion, and was never far away to begin with. Finally, acceptance. Which isn’t to say that I was writing fiction again, just that I was able to face the situation realistically.

I was still compelled to write, but with fiction off the table, what was I to do? I wanted something easy breezy, and less emotionally burdensome than my fiction writing had been. So what were my interests? I was a librarian, a film buff, a lover of word puzzles, and the B in LGBTQ+. With this in mind, I wrote and published a library journal article on the now-very-timely subject of drag queen storytimes. After that, I started up a column in another journal, this time assembling back-catalogue movie recommendations based on esoteric themes of my own invention. I paired that column up with another featuring my own cryptic crosswords and other word puzzles. I hadn’t overcome my writer’s, but I was definitely detouring around it.

Slowly, ideas began to seep back into the part of my brain reserved for fiction writing.

Now, with quite a lot of time having passed, I’ve put all of my unfinished projects aside and am proceeding with new work, something very different for me, and a story that feels more like a fun challenge and less like a self-directed exorcism. 

I guess the lesson is: when it hits you—and chances are it will—be kind to yourself. One way or another, and given enough time, you can drive past the block.

Brockton Writers Series 10.05.23: Dwayne Morgan

Dwayne Morgan is a two-time Canadian National Poetry Slam Champion. Morgan made the 2022 Shifter Magazine list of outstanding Black men in Canada, and won the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Celebration of Cultural Life award, and the 2018 the Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award for Career Achievement in the Spoken Word. Morgan has received both the African Canadian Achievement Award, and the Harry Jerome Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Morgan has published fourteen collections, including two children’s books and a memoir. In 2009, Morgan’s work was translated into French, culminating in the book, Le Making of d’un Homme.

Dwayne’s work ethic has taken him across North America and internationally. His emphasis on quality has driven his success and has made him a well-respected component of Toronto’s urban music community, as well as the North American and global spoken word scenes.

@dwayne_morgan and www.dwaynemorgan.ca

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26 Years and Counting

A promotional spoken word video for Dwayne Morgan, looking at the past 27 years through poetry. Timed and edited by Timothy Ashley, Not That Famous Films.

Wednesday, May 10th, 2023—6:30 p.m.

Brockton Writers Series presents readings by:

Douglas Davey

Sahar Golshan

Dwayne Morgan

Andrew F Sullivan

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Special note: As we adapt with current social distancing regulations, we’re happy to announce our event will be hosted in-person at the Glad Day Bookshop, located at 499 Church St., Toronto. We will also live stream the event on the Brockton Writers Series YouTube channel! The event starts at 6:30 p.m.

The reading is PWYC (suggested $3-$5) and features a Q&A with the writers afterward. Books are available for sale.

 If you’d like to donate, please do so here.

Many thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for their support.

We are also planning to have ASL Interpreters at our May event! 

—

GUEST SPEAKER

“Grant Writing 101” by Dominik Parisien

Dominik Parisien is a disabled, bisexual French Canadian and the author of the poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) and the forthcoming memoir On a Scale of 1 to 500 Miles: A Memoir of Chronic Pain (Penguin Canada). He also co-edited several award-winning anthologies, including Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, The Mythic Dream, and The Starlit Wood. 

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READERS

Douglas Davey is author of the YA novels M in the Abstract and Switch, published by Red Deer Press. Douglas lives in Guelph with his family where he spends his time in various nerdy endeavours such as reading, playing games, and showing B-movies in his garage. You can find him on Instagram @solongsuccour and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglaspauldavey.

(photo credit Soko Negash)

Sahar Golshan is a writer, language learner, and the director of the short documentary KAR. She is the 2022 winner of the Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing in Non-Fiction. Her picture book TOO LOUD! will be published in spring 2024 by Annick Press and is illustrated by Shiva Delsooz.

Twitter: @SaharGolshan 

Instagram: @sahargolshanwriting

Dwayne Morgan is a two-time Canadian National Poetry Slam Champion. Morgan made the 2022 Shifter Magazine list of outstanding Black men in Canada, and won the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Celebration of Cultural Life award, and the 2018 the Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award for Career Achievement in the Spoken Word. Morgan has received both the African Canadian Achievement Award, and the Harry Jerome Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Morgan has published fourteen collections, including two children’s books and a memoir. In 2009, Morgan’s work was translated into French, culminating in the book, Le Making of d’un Homme.

Dwayne’s work ethic has taken him across North America and internationally. His emphasis on quality has driven his success and has made him a well-respected component of Toronto’s urban music community, as well as the North American and global spoken word scenes.

@dwayne_morgan and www.dwaynemorgan.ca

Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of The Marigold (ECW Press), a novel about a city eating itself. The Handyman Method, a novel co-written with Nick Cutter about home improvement gone wrong, is forthcoming from Gallery Books / Saga Press in August 2023. Sullivan is also the author of the novel WASTE (Dzanc Books) and the short story collection All We Want is Everything (ARP Books), both named Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

BWS 03.08.23 report: Meditation on Heartbreak—A Writer’s Story by Laura Pratt

Laura Pratt is a journalist, writer, and book editor whose second book, Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, was published in January 2023 by Penguin Random House Canada. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction. She lives in Toronto with her kids and dog.

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Everybody said writing the book was the best part, that the stretch that followed was a lot less fun. I went through the exercise feeling that, waiting for the good stuff to get cinched up into a tight, little fist of drudgery and duty. That happened, to a certain extent, and there’s no question that the writing was the greatest pleasure of my four-plus-year exploit. Still, the after-writing hasn’t been as bad as the doomsayers predicted. It’s been taxing in a new kind of way, calling upon faculties like self-promotion and public speaking. But it’s not been as unpleasant as I feared. Save a notable exception about which nobody warned me.

Here’s what it is: I did not know that writing a book would cause my friends to turn on me, enraged over choices I made about how to live my life.

As I describe in my memoir, Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, heartbreak is not a state that attracts boundless sympathy. There is an end date for people’s indulgence of your devastation, and when you skid beyond it, you know. The consolation is turned off, the censure starts to fly. Your heartbreak is up for grabs, the subject, now, of disgust and derision.

First, my friend John took his leave of our long connection in the wake of my enduring sorrow, simmering with resentment for the way he perceived me to be presuming with my thesis that my heartbreak outranked his.

For Deidre and Ed, the relationship severing was my doing, undertaken in response to the criticisms they made of me that I thought were unfair and none of their business. But maybe that’s my naïveté talking. Maybe when you write a memoir, you renounce your right to your business.

Anyway, it came as a shock, these rejections of my way of doing things. It felt invasive and it made me consider the wisdom, after all, of having exposed so much of my life. I don’t regret it and I’m not so naïve that I thought I’d get through the experience of inviting people into my story unscathed. I just didn’t anticipate the privilege they’d assume that bought them.

As my story goes, my erstwhile love left me with nary an explanation, and then failed to respond to my subsequent efforts to understand his decision. After, in the throes of twitchy dissatisfaction and desperate for relief, I kept those efforts up, very occasionally texting or emailing him to ask what the hell happened and remind him of my continued existence. For his part, he kept up efforts too—those of failing to respond or recognize my existence.

So Deidre and Ed called my behaviour “harassment” and said I wasn’t respecting my heartbreaker’s situation with my overtures. They didn’t mention that he’d denied me a voice and the grace of acknowledgement. Neither did they note the idea that my harmless gestures (he can block me and likely has) might be my entitlement, given the callousness of his dismissal of our long relationship.

Anyway, I spent some time trying to make my case with each of these folks, but abandoned the effort when I realized I was defending the choice I’d made in order to survive heartbreak—just as other people make their own choices in order to survive their own heartbreaks every day. And they’re not required to defend them, at least not publicly, in the glare of a memoir’s advent on the scene. Not like I was.

I won’t talk to these friends anymore. They overstepped their access to me with these outbursts and demonstrated their ignorance of the inferred contract memoirists make with their readers.

Here’s what it is: memoirists will uncover secrets of life on earth in exchange for some mercy and forbearance for the sacrifices the exercise asks of them. The memoir community needs to evolve, I think, to include a more nuanced appreciation for what seeing this contract through involves. In its evolved iteration, it needs to pay attention to both the memoirists’ role in making an oblation to a strain of universal human suffering and of the rights the witnesses thereto enjoy to question it. So long as folks don’t realize that people who write about their lives are conducting an act of service to everyone else (i.e., those individuals who can learn about the human condition without having to bare their own souls or plumb their own suffering), they’re going to feel entitled to pass judgement on particulars.

It’s a tricky argument to take on, the one that defends memoirists’ rights to their own discretion while simultaneously celebrating them for abandoning just that. But trashing writers for choices they made in pursuit of truth is never acceptable.

BWS 03.08.23: In Case You Missed It!

We had an amazing group of writers talk about their work and read their poetry to us this past Wednesday. With the full moon making us all feel a little funky, it was a great evening with topics of romance, intimacy, and heartbreak.

Click here to see the recorded live stream of our March 8th event featuring Yolande House, Anto Chan, Seán Carson Kinsella, and Daniel Sarah Karasik, with guest speaker Laura Pratt who spoke to us about writing on heartbreak.

We are so thrilled to still be offering our events in a hybrid format. Please stay tuned for more updates about our next events and readers.