Event Info
Late Nights with KWF: Hives of Activity
Presented by Kingston WritersFest
9:00pm - 10:30pm
$0-$21.69
Event Description
Late Nights with KWF: Hives of Activity
Patrick Errington, Jason Heroux, Stuart Ross, Carolyn Smart, Vivian Sun, Paul Vermeersch
Reading and Conversation
Curate.Social
9:00 – 10:30 pm
Enjoy a nightcap and savour our Strange Salon - a selection of weird and wonderful readings from a singular group of Canadian authors who are not afraid to push the literary envelope to tickle your aural fancies. Get ready for alternate futures, the dawn of civilizations, all-knowing potatoes, loss, grief, and centipedes.
Including special readings from Poetry In Voice performer Vivian Sun!
Patrick Errington
“Like figures walking through the smoke from a burning field, Errington’s poems emerge with remarkable definition, clarity, and surprise.” Bronwen Wallace Prize jury citation
Patrick James Errington is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and academic from Alberta. He is the author of two chapbooks, Glean and Field Studies, and his poems appear in magazines, journals, and anthologies including Poetry Review, Poetry International, Best New Poets, Oxford Poetry, CV2, and more. His numerous prizes include The National Poetry Competition, The London Magazine Poetry Competition, the Flambard International Prize, the McLellan Poetry Prize, the Plough Prize, the Callan Gordon/Scottish New Writers Award, the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writer’s Trust of Canada and others.
A graduate of the University of Alberta, where he studied under the late Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Patrick holds an MFA in writing and literary translation and a PhD for research in poetic theory and enactive hermeneutics. Patrick is a Lecturer in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches literature and creative writing.
His new poetry collection, the swailing, traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness. “Radiant in its ache and teeming with beauty, the swailing absorbs the haunted geographies of home, forest, field, fire, and snow while delivering a stunning introspection… So many of the last lines blew me away, and I found myself continually returning to savour their longing.” Mai Der Vang
Jason Heroux
“I don’t know anyone in this country who is doing this kind of work, writing this very quietly explosive surrealism.” – Stuart Ross
Jason Heroux has written four books of poetry, including Natural Capital, which was shortlisted for the RELIT Poetry award, and Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines. His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, and three editions of Best Canadian Poetry in English. He has also appeared in magazines and journals in Canada, the U.S, Belgium, France and Italy. His novels include Good Evening, Central Laundromat which was shortlisted for the RELIT Novel award, We Wish You a Happy Killday, and Amusement Park of Constant Sorrow. In their review, The Varsity likened the novel to Kafka’s The Metamorphoses, calling it “a puzzle perfectly jigsawed together to capture both the mundane nature and the complexities of everyday life.”
This year, Jason released his first collection of short stories, Survivors of the Hive, which explores survival, attack and the difficulty individuals have letting go of what's gone in order to live with what's left. In her review, Jeanette Lynes says “the stories in Survivors of the Hive crackle and pop with Jason Heroux's signature surrealism, inquisitive edge, and dark humour... Heroux possesses an uncanny knack for bending the everyday and before we know it, we're in strange worlds rich with linguistic play and dissolving boundaries between past and future, memory and dream.”
Jason Heroux was Kingston’s third Poet Laureate. Originally from Montreal, Jason lives in Kingston with his wife Soheir, and their three cats, Akira, Pablo, and Neruda.
Stuart Ross
“I am drawn to the weird, to the dreamlike, to the absurd,” says Stuart Ross. “I don’t think we should be constrained by the laws of the real world in our writing.”
Stuart is a prolific writer, editor, and teacher. He is the author of twenty books of poetry, fiction, and essays including the novel Pockets, and the poetry collection Motel of the Opposable Thumbs. Stuart is winner of the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Jewish Fiction, The Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and most recently, the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian literature.
Stuart’s most recent title is I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub, a sometimes poignant, sometimes outrageous third story collection deepens that his exploration of the possibilities of the short story and narrative with an arsenal of pathos, absurdism, humour, and cantankerousness. Of his writing, NOW Magazine says ““Ross doesn’t waste a word, and the impact is often breathtaking. He knows how to extend a metaphor so that even the most absurd or hallucinatory episodes—and there are many of these—convey deep meaning.”
Stuart is the acquisitions editor behind the newly formed 1366 Books, home to works of accessible yet innovative and experimental fiction—works that challenge the conventions of narrative and form, and perhaps even challenge the conventions of the sentence or the page itself.
Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario, where he is working on about a dozen new books.
Carolyn Smart
Carolyn Smart is the author of six volumes of poetry and the CBC Literary Contest-winning memoir At the End of the Day. Two of her poetry collections have been internationally staged as full-length performances. Her writing has been widely published, most recently in Malahat Review, Arc, Grain Magazine, and CV2. She has been nominated for the ReLit Poetry award, the K.M. Hunter Award, and Alberta Magazine Awards “Showcase Award”, Hooked won the Dora Mavor Moore Award, and Careen won second prize in the Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry.
Her most recent collection, Careen, is long poem dramatic retelling of the story of Bonnie and Clyde. Arc Poetry calls it “a substantive work about characters united and torn apart by love… Smart’s poetry in these moments is heartrending and private, but avoids sentimentality in a space defined by hardness and hunger.”
Carolyn is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, poetry editor for the MacLennan Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press, and for 32 years she was Director of Creative Writing at Queen’s University, mentoring generations of emerging authors.
Vivian Sun
Vivian is a 17-year-old lover of literature, and a devoted writer of poetry and fiction from the city of Toronto, Ontario. Her work is often influenced by any books, music, or paintings she enjoys, and the people in her life. Vivian hopes to study literature and become a published author in the future, but as of right now, she writes from her bedroom, and spends the rest of her free time playing the violin, petting her cats, and losing at chess.
Paul Vermeersch
“A collection of poetry by Paul Vermeersch is more than a book, it’s an adventure,” says Jeff Dupuis. “It’s a trip to the stars and down memory lane, a voyage into the depths of pulp culture and western civilization… it has heart, wit and the dimensionality to kick the reader’s imagination into overdrive… One of the most original and talented voices in Canada.!”
Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, creative writing professor, and literary editor. He is the author of several poetry collections, including The Reinvention of the Human Hand, a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, and most recently, Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. Shared Universe appeared on best book lists from the CBC, the Writers Trust of Canada, the Winnipeg Free Press and the Globe and Mail. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General’s Gold Medal. He teaches in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College where he is the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. He is also the senior editor of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers where he created the poetry and fiction imprint Buckrider Books. He lives in Toronto.
In-Person Event
Sat. September 30th 2023 + Add to Calendar
Holiday Inn Kingston-Waterfront, an IHG Hotel
