Join us for a quadruple billing for the ages!
Anna Swanson (all the way from Newfoundland)
Kate Braid from Victoria/Pender Island
Michael V. Smith (from Kelowna)
with everyone's favourite local impresario Emmett MacMillen!
Sunday Oct 26th, 2025
Doors 6:30pm, show at 7pm
Free, with books for sale at the event
Location:
Paul Phillips Hall/Little Fernwood Gallery
1923 Fernwood Road, Victoria, BC, V8T 2Y6
Want to know more?:
Anna Swanson launches The Garbage Poems:
Created entirely out of words found on trash collected at local swimming holes, Anna Swanson’s garbage poems reclaim hyperbolic corporate marketing-speak for the expression of physical pleasure, queerness, and vulnerability. Written in the years following a head injury, this book traces the connections experienced in the fiercely embodied act of swimming with a chronically ill body. Paired with tender watercolour illustrations of the source garbage by award-winning artist April White, these poems refuse to conform to an illness-and-cure narrative and instead become a vibrant archive of the process of piecing together a voice back together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy.
Kate Braid (re-)launches The Erotics of Cutting Grass:
Forget everything you think you know about growing older. In The Erotics of Cutting Grass, Kate Braid’s perspective is anything but conventional. In these love stories to life and living, Kate dismantles the tired clichés about aging and the female body. From weightlifting in her senior years to questioning why older people in love are seen as “cute,” but not “hot,” and even delving into the mysteries of "remembering" past lives, Kate's stories are a refreshing take on what it means to age with audacity.
Michael V. Smith launches Soundtrack: a lyric memoir:
From award-winning writer Michael V. Smith comes a poetic memoir about growing up gay in the shadow of AIDS. Embodying an elusive part of queer history, these song and album-inspired poems capture the last three decades of the millennium and reveal how music has an uncanny ability to remind us not just where we were at a given moment in time but who we were.
With inimitable host & performer Emmett MacMillen:
Victoria-based writer-performer Emmett MacMillen will host this wonderful event, kicking the night off with a few choice words of their own.
*EM's photo courtesy of @courtz.photo; MVS photo courtesy of Jessica Zais Photography; Anna’s photo courtesy of April White; Kate’s photo courtesy of Eve Pollard.
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