Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
Join us at the Toronto Launch of
Desperately Seeking Susans
Friday, December 7th 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Supermarket Restaurant and Bar 268 Augusta Ave. Toronto
Featuring

• Suzanne Bowness
• Sue Chenette
• Susan Glickman
• Susan Ioannou
• Sue Kanhai
• Sue MacLeod
• Suzanne Robertson
• Suzannah Showler
• Susan Siddeley
• Susan Olding
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
Wednesday, September 26
2 pm
Kingston Seniors’ Centre, 56 Francis Street, Kingston
613.548.7810
Reading and discussion
Refreshments provided
Saturday, September 29
5:30 - 6:30 pm
Kingston WritersFest
“Desperately Seeking Susans”
Reading and Discussion with Susan Gillis, Susan McMaster, and moderator Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang
Sunday, September 30
2-3 pm
Kingston WritersFest
“The Beautiful and the Damned”
Moderating a discussion with novelists Melanie Dugan and Emily Schultz
Thursday, August 9th, 2012
I’ll be reading this Sunday, August 12 from 2-5 pm at the Grist Mill Artists’ Retreat in Westport, Ontario, with Eric Folsom, Elizabeth Greene, Jason Heroux, Tara Kainer, Jeannette Lynes, and more! It promises to be a lovely event. Join us if you can!
Sponsored by Artemisia Gallery in Westport!
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
Once again it’s time for Kingston WritersFest, and a brilliant festival it will be! As web content editor I got to write profiles of many of the artists who will be visiting us, and what a wonderful way to get a sense of the variety and excitement the festival will offer. I’m looking forward to so many of these events.
Several, in particular, should appeal to lovers of nonfiction, including In Praise of Older Women, with Lorna Crozier, Molly Peacock, and Merrily Weisbord; and Great Scots, with Richard Gwyn, Vincent Lam, and Ken McGoogan. There are still tickets to these events available, but several others are sold out, and it would be wise to order in advance rather than hoping to get seats at the door.
On Thursday, I’m delighted to be moderating a discussion between young adult writers Adwoa Badoe and Y.S. Lee. Adwoa’s Between Sisters is a gripping realistic account of a young girl caught by temptations that her background has ill prepared her for, while Ying Lee’s The Agency series is a gender bending mystery-romance set in Victorian London. But if you think these books have nothing in common, you are wrong. Join us at 10:45 a.m., Thursday, September 25, at Kingston’s Holiday Inn Waterfront, to find out what I mean.
I will also be hosting several other events during the festival and will be onsite most of the time. Really looking forward to it.
Saturday, July 9th, 2011
But You Have No Idea.
A Reading and Discussion with Sarah Leavitt at Novel Idea Books, Kingston
Wednesday, July 20, 6 pm
FREE.
Most readers will confess to mining the details of their favourite novels for evidence of the writer’s life. Switch out one gender for another, add ten years and relocate a character to another province or territory and we’re all but certain that the writer is talking about his or her first love, a parent, an old boss, maybe a child.
What, though, of the non-fiction writer and the memoirist? What of the people we’ve come to know only through a very focused view of their world? Do we take for granted that we know something about them? Do we as readers in a sense fictionalize non-fiction writers, creating heroes and, in some cases, villains? What do we really know of the non-fiction writer?
Please join Sarah and me as we read from our respective works and chat candidly about the figure of the nonfiction writer.
