For Adults
Join authors Teri Vlassopoulos and Lindsay Zier-Vogel as they discuss their complementary new novels—Living Expenses and The Fun Times Brigade—touching on themes of motherhood, early adulthood, and complex close relationships.
Presented in partnership with Words Worth Books.
As the children of a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. That is, until Claire moves to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Enter the slow, hopeful, devastating process of fertility treatments. While Laura prepares for IVF, Claire has her own encounter with the fertility industry. Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters’ lives, from communication to reproduction.
Teri Vlassopoulos is the author of Living Expenses (Invisible Publishing, 2025), Escape Plans (Invisible Publishing, 2015) and Bats or Swallows (Invisible Publishing, 2010). Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in Room Magazine, Today’s Parent, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Toast, Open Book and more. She has been nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. In addition to writing, Teri sits on the Board of Directors of the FOLD (the Festival of Literary Diversity). She lives in Toronto.
From acclaimed author Lindsay Zier-Vogel comes an insightful and heart-rending exploration of motherhood, grief, and the search for identity. Amy is a new mother, navigating the fog of those bewildering early days and struggling with a role she feels ill-prepared for. It’s the first time in a decade that she hasn’t been living the busy life of a successful children’s musician, and her sense of self is unravelling. To make matters worse, her former bandmates have seemingly abandoned her. In flashbacks, we see Amy’s journey to artistic success—her stumblings as a solo singer-songwriter and her eventual evolution into acclaim as a children’s entertainer. But as the novel progresses—and Amy grapples with a devastating loss—we come to understand how precarious definitions of artistic success can be and how hard it is to truly find our place in the world. The Fun Times Brigade examines the enduring challenges of reconciling being an artist with being a mother, and how we ultimately fail and find the need to forgive those we love. It is also a timely reflection on what it really means to have a good life in a world that demands we have—and be—it all, and asserts that amidst the chaos, we can find our way back to our genuine selves.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel is a Toronto-based author and the creator of the internationally beloved Love Lettering Project. After studying contemporary dance, Zier-Vogel received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. She is the author of the acclaimed novel Letters to Amelia, and her first picturebook, Dear Street was a Junior Library Guild pick, a Canadian Children’s Book Centre book of the year, and was nominated for a Forest of Reading Blue Spruce Award in 2024. The Fun Times Brigade is her second novel.
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Programmer: Nancy
Located at the RIM Park Manulife Sportsplex, the Eastside Branch boasts specialized creative spaces, quiet study areas, a nature education space and lots of natural light.
