Adults
Join us for a conversation with authors Ariel Gordon, Yvonne Blomer, and Sue Sorenson as they discuss their newest books, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Gordon), Death of Persephone: A Murder (Blomer) and Acutely Life (Sorensen). The event will be moderated by author Mark Morton.
This program is presented in partnership with Words Worth Books.
Ariel Gordon
Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 Territory–based writer, editor and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Her previous work of nonfiction, Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests, was shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award. Gordon’s essay “Red River Mudlark” was second-place winner of the 2022 Kloppenburg Hybrid Grain Contest in Grain magazine and other work appeared recently in FreeFall, Columba Poetry, Canthius and Canadian Notes & Queries. Gordon’s fourth collection of poetry, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate across the prairies, was written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and appeared in fall 2023.
Ariel's latest collection, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Wolsak & Wynn, June 2024) explores her fascination with all mushrooms, not just those you can eat. In these engaging essays she takes the reader through ditches and puddles in search of morels, through the hallways of a mushroom factory, down city sidewalks and beside riverbanks as she considers things found and fungal. Along the way there are entertaining stories of the perils of mushroom identification, including mailed mushrooms that have liquefied, or terrifying thoughts of Canadian geese being fed hallucinogenic mushrooms as well as thoughtful analysis of the ways mushrooms knit our ecosystems together and the ways we knit our lives and communities together. Smart, funny and poetic, Gordon moves seamlessly from the natural world to the personal in these essays, examining the interconnectedness of all things and delighting in the rich variety of the world around her.
Yvonne Blomer
Yvonne Blomer is an award-winning poet and nonfiction writer who has edited five anthologies, most recently: Hologram: Homage to PK Page. Yvonne holds an MA with Distinction from the University of East Anglia and is the past poet laureate of Victoria, BC. She lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking people.
Yvonne's sixth book of poems is Death of Persephone: A Murder, a mystery based on the Persephone myth, the noir mystery genre and the ongoing violence to girls and women. In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him. In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule. Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core?
Her previous books include The Last Show on Earth, 2022, which explores grief, love and climate change.
Sue Sorensen
Sue Sorensen was born in Saskatchewan and now lives in Winnipeg. The author of the novel A Large Harmonium and the non-fiction study The Collar, she is Professor of English at Canadian Mennonite University and the director of CMU Press. Acutely Life is her first collection of poetry.
In her poems, Sue Sorensen makes visits to the Village Vanguard jazz club in June 1961, to Freud’s study in London, to the novelist Henry James. Working her allusive and spirited way inside books and paintings, she has acute meetings with musicians, photographers, fictional characters—and most of all herself.
Programmer: Ikhlas
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Located on the west side of Waterloo, the John M. Harper Branch shares a building with the Stork Family YMCA. It features soaring ceilings, dedicated study space (including 3 bookable study rooms), a large Community Room and an outdoor courtyard.
