Event Info
Mercy Gene
Presented by Kingston WritersFest
2:30pm - 3:30pm
$19.61-$21.69
Event Description
Mercy Gene
JD Derbyshire with Angela Facundo
Reading and Conversation
Bellevue
2:30 – 3:30 pm
Arts Partner: FOLDA Festival of Live Digital Arts
“A dizzying double helix of creative gusto, funhouse humour, hard-won wisdom, and ferocious empathy” – Zsuzsi Gartner. Join writer, playwright, and comedian JD Derbyshire, in conversation with Angela Facundo, with their genre-defying work of auto-fiction Mercy Gene. This dynamic book, based on their award-winning one-person play Certified, is a beautiful, humorous, and sometimes brutal look at queerness, gender confusion, institutionalization, addiction, and abuse.
JD Derbyshire
JD Derbyshire (they/them) is a Vancouver-based comedian, theatre maker, writer, and activist whose work examines mental health, neurodiversity, queerness, and gender exploration. JD has toured Canada as a stand-up comedian and solo performer; has written over twenty plays and co-hosts the mental health podcast Mad Practice. Their play Certified, which served as partial inspiration for their debut novel Mercy Gene, turns the audience into a mental health review board to determine Derbyshire’s sanity by the end of the show. It won two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. Mercy Gene is a genre-smashing work of auto-fiction that navigates queerness, gender confusion, institutionalization, addiction, and abuse through a beautiful, humorous, sometimes erratic series of vignettes, lists, anecdotes and poems. “Mercy Gene is an incredible book that lifted me right up off the ground and away to other places both hard and soft. It’s essential reading for anyone wanting to know what the agony of psychic pain is really like, but it’s also very funny. Thank you, thank you to JD for this ferocious, devastating and illuminating, tender and vulnerable, mountain peak and universal embrace of a book and for being in the world. Exquisite.” — Miriam Toews
Angela Facundo
Angela Facundo is an assistant professor in the Queen’s Department of English. She teaches a range of themes and histories in literary theory, with research exploring the relationship between sexuality, knowledge formation and its institutionalization, and narratives of attachment (to texts, to others, to versions of the self). Her next project addresses questions of “investment” in an exploration of the relationship between literature and empathy. To answer these questions, she focuses on narratives of catastrophe in contemporary fiction (Kazuo Ishiguro, Emily St. John Mandel, Dionne Brand, Alison Bechdel, Ali Smith). Angela is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapy candidate at the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Angela is author of Oscillations of Literary Theory: The Paranoid Imperative and Queer Reparative.
Fri. September 29th 2023
Holiday Inn Kingston-Waterfront, an IHG Hotel Kingston Ontario
