An Evening with Casey Plett

Saturday, October 7, 2023 from 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm Archived

Streaming online & Atrium, McNally Robinson - Grant Park, 1120 Grant Avenue

Join us for a very special evening with Casey Plett as she returns to Winnipeg to discuss two new books. The first, A Safe Girl to Love (Arsenal Pulp Press), is a reissue of her debut short story collection. The second, On Community (Biblioasis), is a short meditation on the concept of community itself. Plett will read from her new books and discuss them with host Jonathan Dyck at this special event presented in partnership with McNally Robinson Booksellers as part of THIN AIR 2023: The Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

The event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events at the store. The venue is accessible.

The eleven unique short stories in A Safe Girl to Love, Plett’s acclaimed debut story collection, feature young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction when it was first published in 2014, this book is now available in a new edition after a long absence and includes an afterword by the author.

We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In On Community, an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian, Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award and the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Host Jonathan Dyck is an illustrator, designer, and cartoonist based in Winnipeg, MB — Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation. His artwork, writing and comics have appeared in publications such as The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Broadview and Prairie Fire. His debut graphic novel, Shelterbelts, published by Conundrum Press in 2022, won the Doug Wright Award for Emerging Talent, the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.

See:

A Safe Girl to Love

– Casey Plett

A new edition of the acclaimed debut story collection by two-time Lambda Literary Award winner Casey Plett. By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman:eleven unique short stories featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable. A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author. Collapse

On Community

– Casey Plett

ONE OF CBC BOOKS CANADIAN NONFICTION TO READ IN THE FALL

We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it’s slipping away? We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges. Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community’s boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.

Venue

McNally Robinson - Grant Park

  • 1120 Grant Avenue