Cause and Effect with Jared Young, Nathan Whitlock and Iain Reid

Hosted by CBC's Alan Neal

In Person Fiction

Admission

Free

Tuesday

Oct , 2016

8:30pm

Eastern

Christ Church Cathedral

414 Sparks Street • Ottawa

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Cause and Effect with Jared Young, Nathan Whitlock and Iain Reid

Congratulations On Everything is rife with humour, heartbreak, ambition, and failure.

Quill & Quire

An evening with three acclaimed talents whose new novels play with perception, toy with memory and explore the sometimes tenuous link between cause and effect.

In Jared Young’s debut, Into the Current, Daniel Solomon is not having a good day. Somewhere between Bangkok and Tokyo, zipping through the stratosphere, the jetliner on which he’s travelling cracks open like an egg, ejecting Daniel and his fellow passengers into the great blue sky. If only that were the worst of it. Time stops, the wreckage of the plane freezes in place, postponing the inevitable end, and Daniel finds that he can transport himself back into his past. Re-experiencing his memories in real time, but helpless to change the present, he plunges into the detritus of his all-but-concluded life.

Ambition, failure, sex, and the service industry. Congratulations on Everything by Nathan Whitlock tracks the struggles, frailties, and cruelly pyrrhic victories of the middle-aged owner of a bar-restaurant and a lunch-shift waitress. Jeremy has bought into the teachings of an empowerment and success guru, hook, line, and sinker. A Toronto service industry lifer, he’s risen through the ranks until he finally takes the keys to his destiny and opens his own place, The Ice Shack. Everyone assumes Ice Shack daytime waitress Charlene is innocent and empathetic, but in reality she’s desperately unhappy and looking for a way out of her marriage. A drunken encounter sends Charlene and her boss careening. As Jeremy struggles to keep his business afloat, he’ll stop at nothing to maintain his successful, good guy self-image.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the latest from Iain Reid is a tense and atmospheric novel that questions consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude. The Globe and Mail calls it “an unnerving exploration of identity, regret and longing. Delightfully frightening.”

Books available for purchase at every event: Proceeds support our free children’s literacy programs.

The Authors

Iain Reid

Iain Reid is the author of two critically acclaimed, award-winning books of nonfiction. A recipient of the prestigious RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award, Reid has written for a variety of publications throughout North America, including The New Yorker. Oscar-winner Charlie Kaufman is writing and directing a film of Reid’s debut novel, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, for Netflix. Reid will coproduce. This is his second novel.

Jared Young

Jared Young grew up in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and currently resides in Ottawa. His writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, Bangkok Post, Ottawa Citizen, Maisonneuve, and The Walrus; it has also been anthologized in McSweeney’s. He is the co-founder of Dear Cast and Crew and a creative director at the advertising agency McMillan. Into the Current, his first novel, was published by Goose Lane Editions in 2016.

Nathan Whitlock

Nathan Whitlock’s award-winning fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post, Toronto Life, Report on Business, Flare, Fashion, Geist, Maisonneuve, and Best Canadian Essays, and he has appeared on radio and television discussing books and culture. Heather O’Neill called A Week of This, Whitlock’s first novel, “a portrait of people in a small town so intimate that it feels like you are under the covers with them.” He is a contributing editor for Quill & Quire. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

Nathan Whitlock

Nathan Whitlock grew up in the Ottawa Valley, in a small town best known for its military base. (He wrote about the area in his first novel, 2008’s A Week of This.) Whitlock started writing as a teenager, getting his first publication credit by reviewing Oliver Stone’s JFK in the Ottawa Citizen at the age of 17. Whitlock attended Concordia University in Montreal, where he supported himself by, among other things, working nights at a hotel, unloading trucks at a carpet warehouse, and stocking St Lawrence cruise boats in the Old Port. After moving to Toronto in the late 90s, Whitlock ended up managing two busy bar-restaurants on College Street, an experience that inspired his 2016 novel Congratulations on Everything. He later became the managing editor of Descant literary quarterly, then the review editor of Quill & Quire, and then an associate editor at Toronto Life, all while contributing work to the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, the National Post, Maclean’s, and other publications. He also spent some time as an associate at Anne McDermid’s literary agency. In 2014, he began teaching writing and media communications at Humber College in Toronto, where he was also hired to build and run a scholarly press for the college, which he did until 2020, when he was hired as a full-time professor and as the coordinator for the Creative Book Publishing program. He plays music as a hobby, and has regularly played drums with the Toronto Star band at the annual Newzapalooza media battle of the bands. He played in the ‘house band’ (alongside CNN’s Daniel Dale) for the launch of Crazy Town, journalist Robyn Doolittle’s book about former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. Whitlock has three children, and is married to Meaghan Strimas, an award-winning poet and fellow professor at Humber College. They live in Hamilton, Ontario. Whitlock is a cancer survivor who underwent treatment for a tumour in his neck in 2016 while launching his second book. He wrote about this experience in a short memoir piece for Chatelaine magazine. (https://www.chatelaine.com/health/a-little-bit-of-cancer/)