The Life We Have Plannedwith Joseph Kertes, Lee Henderson and Eric McCormack

Hosted by Neil Wilson

In Person Fiction

Admission

Free

Sunday

Oct , 2014

4:00pm

Eastern

Knox Presbyterian Church

120 Lisgar Street (at Elgin) • Ottawa

Add to my Calendar Map

The Life We Have Plannedwith Joseph Kertes, Lee Henderson and Eric McCormack

The Afterlife of Stars is a remarkable achievement. It takes us to some of humanity’s darkest places, though in a voice so infused with life and so attuned to life’s wonder that it manages to wrest from them a sense of resounding affirmation.

Nino Ricci

Joseph Campbell once said, “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” Three gifted authors all explore the twists and turns of life’s journey and the unexpected crossroads that can define us.

The Afterlife of Stars by Joseph Kertes, founder of Humber College’s distinguished creative writing and comedy programs, explores displacement and uncertainty in a dark time from the perspective of two boys filled with wonder at the world around them. In the waning months of 1956, while Russian tanks roll into the public squares of Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution, brothers Robert and Attila Beck flee with their family to the Paris townhouse of their great-aunt Hermina.

The Road Narrows As You Go, by award-winning author and artist Lee Henderson, is simultaneously the portrait of a young woman struggling to find her place and a bright, rollicking, unflinching depiction of the 1980s. It embodies all the brash optimism and ruthless amoralism of the decade, as well as its preoccupation with repressed memories, and fully captures the flavour of an uncertain but deeply vibrant era.

Cloud, the long-awaited new novel from Eric McCormack, is a gripping, darkly imagined story about the nature of love. Harry Steen, a businessman travelling in Mexico, ducks into an old bookstore and makes a serendipitous discovery: a mid-nineteenth-century account of a sinister storm cloud that plagued an isolated Scottish village and caused many gruesome and unexplainable deaths. Harry knows the village well: It was there that he met the woman whose love and betrayal have haunted him every day since. Presented with this astonishing record, Harry resolves to seek out the ghosts of his past and return to the very place where he encountered the fathomless depths of his own heart.

The Authors

Eric McCormack

Eric McCormack was born in a small village in Scotland. He moved to Canada in 1966 and attended the University of Manitoba. He taught English for over thirty years at St. Jerome's College at the University of Waterloo, specializing in seventeenth century and contemporary literature. He has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Governor General's Award. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Joseph Kertes

Joseph Kertes was born in Hungary but escaped with his family to Canada after the revolution of 1956. He studied English at York University and the University of Toronto, where he was encourged in his writing by Irving Layton and Marshall McLuhan. His first novel, Winter Tulips, won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. His third novel, Gratitude, won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the U.S. National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Kertes Founded Humber College's distinguished creative writing and comedy programs. He is currently Humber's dean of creative and performing arts.

Lee Henderson

Lee Henderson is the award-winning author of The Broken Record Technique and The Man Game. His writing appears in the PEN Canada anthology Finding the Words and the speculative fiction anthology Darwin’s Bastards. For a decade he has written about contemporary Canadian artists for Border Crossings magazine. He has exhibited artwork in Vancouver, Toronto, and elsewhere, and curated shows of contemporary art and experimental music, including the inaugural selection for Hamish Hamilton Canada’s online gallery, The Looking Glass. He has led workshops for UBC and the Summer Literary Seminar and mentored at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria.