Cottonwood Reading

Tickets:
Prose: $25
Poetry: $20
Novella: $15

Elephant Mountain Lit Fest is proud to present some of Western Canada’s most riveting storytellers and writers in a reading together on Friday, September 15th at 7:00pm. Join Ivan Coyote, John Vaillant, Sonnet L’Abbé, and Deryn Collier in a celebration of dynamic, important stories, and writers and wordsmiths who bring them to life.

Writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote will be gracing the stage to speak about their 13th book, Care Of. Born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, they are the author of thirteen books, the creator of four films, six stage shows, and three albums that combine storytelling with music. Coyote’s stories grapple with the complex and intensely personal topics of gender identity, family, class, and queer liberation, but always with a generous heart, and a quick wit. Ivan’s stories manage to handle both the hilarious and the historical with reverence and compassion, and remind us all of our own fallible and imperfect humanity, while at the same time inspiring us to change the world.

John Vaillant’s acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national bestsellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Vaillant has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He lives in Vancouver.

His newest novel Fire Weather was released earlier this year. In masterly prose and cinematic style, John Vaillant weaves together an enthralling, multifaceted story of how Fort McMurray revealed a new normal of fires burning longer and with greater intensity than at any other time this planet has ever known. From the large-scale histories of North American resource extraction and climate science, to the intimate tales of lives scarred by the Fort McMurray disaster, Valliant’s urgent work is a book for — and from — our new century of fire. (From Knopf Canada)

Sonnet L’Abbé is a Canadian poet, performer, editor, and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, Anima Canadensis and Sonnet’s Shakespeare. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books. They had their first solo performance of songs and poems at Nanaimo’s Port Theatre in 2021.

In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L’Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a space they will inhabit, as a place of power they will occupy. Letter by letter, they sit their own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare’s poems, until they overwhelm the original text and effectively erase Shakespeare’s voice by subsuming his words into theirs. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet’s Shakespeare sits one “aggrocultured” Shakespearean sonnet–displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced.

Deryn Collier has dreamed of writing mystery novels since reading her first Nancy Drew in the second grade. She has written two previous novels, Confined Space, which was nominated for a Best First Novel award by the Crime Writers of Canada, and Open Secret. Based on the true story of her aunt, Deryn’s new postwar historical novel A Real Somebodycharts the journey of a talented young writer who dares to break the conventions of her time during one pivotal season of her life.

Performance venue:

The Capitol Theatre

421 Victoria Street
Nelson, BC V1L 5R2
Phone: (250) 352-6363