Book Signing with Ann Cavlovic

Please join Gatineau-based author Ann Cavlovic for a book signing for her novel, Count On Me.

Filled with hope and humour amid hardship, Count on Me exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface. When Tia’s brother helps himself to their ailing parents’ money, Tia struggles through a complex web of legal and emotional hurdles to protect them while trying to raise her own child. Count on Me is a story about how we come to feel entitled to someone else’s money, and how human relationships can rise above the transactional.

This novel explores issues that so many families face yet are rarely talked about. Evidence suggests that 10% or more of seniors experience some form of elder abuse (financial, emotional, physical, or medical), with over 400,000 seniors living in nursing or retirement homes and nearly 2 million Canadians “sandwiched” between caregiving for both elders and children. 

 Ann will have resource sheets to distribute to families and elders to help navigate these waters.

ANN CAVLOVIC’s fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in the CBC, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Globe & Mail, Grain, PRISM international, Room, and elsewhere. She wrote Emissions: A Climate Comedy, which won “Best in Fest” at the 2013 Ottawa Fringe Theatre Festival. She lives in Western Quebec. Find out more at: anncavlovic.com.

David Jon Fuller Book Launch: Venue 13

Join David Jon Fuller with local host Kate Heartfield to celebrate the launch of Venue 13, his debut novel!

Robert Laliberte has a dream—a dream to convert a run-down building into a premier space for bring-your-own-venue productions in his city’s Summer Theatre Festival, a.k.a. Skeeter Fest. But achieving his dream isn’t easy. Amid mounting debt and numerous technical problems, Robert is unaware that his beloved Venue 13 is also haunted. And if the belligerent ghost has anything to say about it, nobody's shows will go on.

DAVID JON FULLER is a Winnipeg based writer and editor. A long-time staple of the city’s theatre community, David currently works for the Winnipeg Free Press where he has written hundreds of newspaper and magazine features. His speculative short fiction has been published in many anthologies. Venue 13 is his debut novel.

The Other Hill presents Everyday Reconciliation by Derek Aronhie:nens Montour and Elin Sandberg Miller

Join us on June 17th for an evening of intimate conversation, thoughtful reflection and practical guidance with Derek Aronhie:nens Montour and Elin Sandberg Miller, co-authors of Everyday Reconciliation: A Guide to Action and Change For All Of Us. Moderator to be announced.

This event will provide a chance to learn about the journey that brought these two friends with vastly different backgrounds together, to understand what inspired them to share their vision for a reconciled country, and to benefit from their wisdom on how to grapple with tough questions about home, land, culture, language and more; pushing all of us to recognize how small, daily actions can make a monumental difference.

Everyday Reconciliation will be available for purchase at the event through Perfect Books.

Doors at 5 pm

Moderated conversation from 6 to 7 pm

Please RSVP for your free ticket as space is limited.

Book Signing with Ayla Vejdani

Join Ayla Vejdani for a book signing for her debut novel, YOU X ME!

YOU x ME is a series of modern entanglements: Noura swipes right on Luna with a little help from her group-chat, Maryam and Nilou fall for each other between shared playlists, while Paz and Ale reminisce about the sweat-soaked dance floor of their youth. Set in cosmopolitan settings from Los Angeles to Montréal, this hot and hopeful QTBIPOC contemporary romance offers escape, self-discovery, and a dose of glamor. As Maya Angelou encourages, this book calls readers to “have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.” YouxMeBook.com

“You x Me is a remarkable kaleidoscope of the tangled and tender terrain of human relationships. With nuance, emotional precision and vulnerability, Ayla Vejdani renders queer, cross-cultural dynamics to reveal how intimacy can at once unsettle and sustain us.” — Zaina Arafat, author of the award-winning novel YOU EXIST TOO MUCH

“The poetic language and thoughtful representation offer a smart, sexy panorama of what love can look like. … This book is unlike any other romance.” — KIRKUS Reviews 

AYLA VEJDANI (she/her) is a storyteller, holder of space and curator of experience. Raised and educated all over the world, she has a master’s in human rights, is an inclusive leadership consultant, and the co-host of The SHIFT podcast. She speaks four languages and laughs in all. Ayla is a queer Iranian-Canadian from Tkaronto/Toronto living in Tiohtia:ke/Montréal, raising her two young children. She is an insatiably creative, romantic realist who believes in magic. Her forthcoming novel YOU x ME is a series of queer, BIPOC love stories. These modern entanglements are the kind of romances that make us lose sleep, love letters to the friendships we can’t live without, and a celebration of our endless journeys of self-discovery. @ayla.author

Elee Kraljii Gardiner Book Launch: sometimes, forest

Don’t miss Vancouver Poet Laureate, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, in Ottawa to launch her third collection of poetry, sometimes, forest, alongside host and fellow reader Chris Turnbull, and Ottawa poet laureate David O'Meara!

sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker yearns for in herself. But the coastal temperate rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. Returning daily to the same woods, the speaker notices minute seasonal changes and considers her own internal changes too.

Meanwhile, fires, heat domes, and landslides mirror hormonal heat and biological surges. Considering how networks of lateral support mitigate and challenge hierarchical, individualistic structures, sometimes, forest develops a theory of hylofeminism that attends to a deep, communal connection with nature as a relational way of being with the self and the more-than-human world.

ELEE KRALJII GARDINER is the author of three poetry collections, serpentine loop, Trauma Head and, most recently, sometimes, forest from Talonbooks, as well as editor of two anthologies (V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Against Death: 35 Essays on Living). A frequent collaborator, she works across disciplines and administers the Warland Award for hybrid literature. She also directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive and is the seventh poet laureate of Vancouver. 

Michael Decter Book Launch

Join former Ontario Deputy Minister of Health Michael Decter to launch his book, The Canadian Health Care Guerilla Handbook: How to Fight For What You Need!

Unlike traditional policy books, The Canadian Health Care Guerrilla Handbook focuses on what individuals can actually do when faced with delays, denials, or barriers in the health care system. Packed with real-world examples and practical tools, it serves as a survival manual for Canadians navigating wait lists, treatment approvals, and access to specialists.

MICHAEL DECTER is a former Ontario Deputy Minister of Health and author of numerous books on health policy, investment, and politics. Mike McCarthy is a nationally recognized patient advocate who played a key role in securing justice for victims of the tainted blood scandal and has spent decades fighting for improved access to treatment in Canada.

 

 

Amanda Sung Book Signing

Join Amanda Sung for a book signing from How to Break a Girl!

Think Sex and the City—if Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha were Asian Canadian immigrants navigating not just love and career, but the complexities of intergenerational baggage, cultural curveballs, and all the gendered nonsense the world throws at them. This isn't a sob story—it's the sisterhood and sass you love, with a sharper edge and a deeper heart.

AMANDA SUNG is a Taiwanese-Canadian writer who crafts her stories from the inside out—How to Break a Girl, drawn from the scars and triumphs of her own journey as a satellite child growing up in Canada without parents. Amanda holds a Bachelor’s in Communication from Simon Fraser University and a Master of Journalism from the University of British Columbia. How to Break a Girl evolved from her graduate thesis—originally conceived as a memoir, now reimagined as fiction.