Karen Houle and Lindsay Lerman launch their new books on Wednesday, October 9, 7:00 PM at Fixed Gear Brewery (20 Alma Street South). The event will include some readings and ample time for Q&A with the authors.
Karen Houle is the author of two poetry collections, Ballast (1995) and During (2000). She teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of Guelph. She is also involved with the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming, where her interest in putting environmental ethics into practice has shifted her toward land-based approaches to learning. She lives in Guelph, Ontario. In her new book, The Grand River Watershed: A Folk Ecology, Karen Houle employs the wiliest tool she knows—poetry—to contemplate the complexities of the Grand River watershed in southern Ontario, stretching our notions of what can be known about a river.
Lindsay Lerman holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Guelph. I'm From Nowhere, her first novel. follows Claire as she mourns the sudden death of her husband. She has no child, no job, no agency. She confronts a dying planet and an emerging sense of self. She puts herself in the hands of men--some of her oldest friends--who may have come to save her, a contemporary Penelope with a raft of suitors and unspent erotic capital. Is it possible for a woman to reclaim her life and set its terms without succumbing to suicide or submission? At once intimate and sprawling, this book is an examination of the stories we are told--and the stories we tell ourselves--about identity, permanence, and meaning in our beautiful, hostile world.