The Literary Committee of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council is bringing three exciting Canadian authors to the Coast this spring in its annual reading series.
Madeline Sonik and Marlyn Horsdal are both from Vancouver Island, while Alissa York is from Toronto.
Sonik will be reading at the Arts Centre on Trail and Medusa in Sechelt on Saturday, April 13 at 8 p.m.
Sonik is a relatively new voice in Canadian writing, but one which is receiving increasing recognition. She writes in a variety of genres, fiction, poetry and literary non-fiction, and her books include a novel, Arms, a book of short fiction, Drying the Bone, two volumes of poetry, and a work of literary non-fiction, Afflictions and Departures (2011). This last work was short-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, Canada's most prestigious non-fiction award, and also received the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.
Sonik's work stems from her own life experience. Afflictions and Departures is auto-biographical; the story is not continuous but broken into snapshots of significant moments and experiences, a style that she calls "fracturing". Interspersed into the personal narrative are constant references to what is happening in the wider world, and the effect is to add both a lightness and a perspective that prevents over-involvement in the trials and tribulations of childhood and youth on the part of both author and reader. The poems in The Book of Changes are also a collection of Sonik's experiences from bitter to joyful, from tender to downright lusty. But throughout there is a search for meaning in this world which "was created / in a fumble for firm footing", a search for a link "a spine to fuse the cosmic centre / of her many / liquid selves".
Thanks to the sponsorship of the Canada Council for the Arts, admission is free for this reading.
- Submitted
