10. What We Found
Four memoir writers reflect on writing their stories. [CC]
Session Description
The authors of four riveting memoirs discuss their conflicted and complex relationships to family and to themselves as they come to terms with addiction, disability, adoption, and community – as they reflect on the things they discovered through writing. Dorothy Ellen Palmer, Jesse Thistle, Jenny Heijun Wills, and Lindsay Wong join moderator Farzana Doctor in a discussion about writing stories that are both personal and profound.
Saturday, May 2nd : 2:00pm – 3:30pm EST
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Featured Speaker(s)
Dorothy Ellen Palmer
Dorothy Ellen Palmer is a disabled senior writer, accessibility advocate, retired English/Drama teacher, improv coach, and OSSTF union activist. Her work appears in: Refuse, Nothing Without Us, Wordgathering, Alt-Minds, All Lit Up, Herizons, Little Fiction Big Truths, 49th Shelf, and Open Book. Her novel, When Fenelon Falls, (Coach House, 2010), features a disabled protagonist in the Woodstock-Moonwalk summer of 1969. Her memoir, Falling for Myself, just appeared with Wolsak and Wynn.
Dorothy will appear in What We Found and Reconciliation and Resistance.
Jesse Thistle
Jesse Thistle is Métis-Cree, from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He is an assistant professor in Métis Studies at York University in Toronto. He won a Governor General’s Academic Medal in 2016, and is a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a Vanier Scholar. Visit him on Twitter @michifman.
Jesse is appearing in the Breakfast with Jesse Thistle, What We Found, and Reconciliation and Resistance.
Jenny Heijun Wills
Jenny Heijun Wills has lived, studied, and worked in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and Seoul. Her memoir, Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related won the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction. She currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba.
Jenny is appearing in What We Found and Reconciliation & Resistance.
Lindsay Wong
Lindsay Wong is the author of the bestselling, award-winning memoir The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug-Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family. She has a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University, and she is now based in Vancouver, Canada. My Summer of Love and Misfortune is her first YA novel.
Lindsay will appear in Words Without Borders and What We Found.
Farzana Doctor
Farzana Doctor is the Tkaronto-based author of four novels: Stealing Nasreen, Six Metres of Pavement (which was the One Book One Brampton 2017 winner), and All Inclusive. Seven, will be released in August, 2020. She is also an activist, part-time psychotherapist and amateur tarot card reader.
Farzana will be moderating What We Found.
