A Truce That Is Not Peace
with Miriam Toews
Hosted by Elizabeth Hay
Toews’s prose has the power stop the reader in her tracks… At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed."
Join us for an evening with one of Canada’s most acclaimed voices, Miriam Toews, as she tells her own story for the first time in A Truce That Is Not Peace.
“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempt at an answer from Toews—all unsatisfactory to the organizer—surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister’s suicide more than fifteen years ago. She has been keeping up, she realizes, an internal correspondence with her beloved sibling, attempting to fill a silence she can barely comprehend. As Toews turns to face that silence, we come to see that the question “why I write” is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.
A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact every creative person makes with memory.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.