Author Reading with Paola Ferrante
Her Body Among Animals
Scroll down for details on Paola's Masterclass
Saturday, June 8, 2024
10:00 - 11:00am at the Bayfield Community Centre, 4 Jane Street, Bayfield
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The Reading is followed by a Q&A. The author will be available to sign books following the Reading.
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In this genre-bending collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.
A sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.
Magical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.
Through these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman’s body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility
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Masterclass with Paola Ferrante
Tell the Truth, but Tell it Spec: ...Using the Genre Conventions of Horror and Science Fiction to Tell Stories that Matter
Saturday, June 8, 2024 - 3:00 - 5:00pm
at the Bayfield Branch of Huron County Library, 12 Main St. N., Bayfield
Tell the Truth but Tell it Spec: Using the Genre Conventions of Horror and Science Fiction to Tell Stories that Matter
Sometimes our most important stories are our most painful ones; stories like these can be particularly difficult to tell about not only because of the subject matter, which readers may want to distance themselves from, but because the language around these stories becomes clichéd. In this workshop, participants will explore how certain conventions of genre fiction, particularly those of both horror and science fiction, can lend themselves to new, innovative ways to tell hard stories in ways readers want to engage with. This workshop will discuss how to use genre fiction conventions as metaphor, the importance of asking “what if” when writing speculative fiction, and how these borrowed genre fiction conventions can give us outlines for our own most important short stories. After discussing example stories, participants will write their own opening for a speculative short story.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Paola Ferrante is a woman writer living with depression. Her short fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals (Book*hug 2023), was a 2023 Foreword INDIES finalist and made the 2023 CBC Books fall reading list. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack (Mansfield Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She has won The New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliffe Prize for Fiction, Room Magazine’s Fiction Prize, Grain’s Short Grain Award for Poetry, and been longlisted for The Journey Prize. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her spouse, Mat, and their son.