Garry Thomas Morse Book Event

Join us as we celebrate Garry Thomas Morse’s latest poetry collection Scofflaw (Anvil Press). This event will feature a reading and a conversation about the book hosted by author and publisher M. C. Joudrey. Presented as part of  THIN AIR 2021 in partnership with McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Garry Thomas Morse Book Event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. The video will be available for viewing thereafter. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

Scofflaw is a long poem, a playful exploration of Indigenous-Settler relations amid globalized pressures. For the most part, the poem is a lyrical dialectic flowing between a shadowy figure known as Scofflaw and an enigmatic “we.” The content ranges from the effect of pesticides on Manitoba butterflies to the reworking of a John Newlove poem on Indigenous peoples to Native remains beneath the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The text culminates in a “lexicon standoff,” where Scofflaw uses metaphysical means to avoid a character assassination, battling against the culling of words from the language.

Garry Thomas Morse is a two-time nominee for the Governor General’s Award for his poetry collections, Discovery Passages and Prairie Harbour, and a two-time nominee for the ReLit Award for his speculative fiction novels, Minor Episodes/Major Ruckus and Rogue Cells/Carbon Harbour. His most recent title is a novel, Yams Do Not Exist. Morse has served as the 2018 Jack McClelland Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto, and as the 2019 Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg.

Host M. C. Joudrey is a Canadian writer, artist and designer. His second novel Of Violence and Cliché was released September 2013, followed by his collection of short stories Charleswood Road: Stories in August 2014, which was nominated for the 2015 John Hirsch Award. His novel, Fanonymous was released in 2019 and won the Independent Publisher gold medal for best work of fiction for Western Canada. It was also nominated for two Manitoba Book Awards, including the Margaret Laurence Award for best work of fiction. In addition to his writing, he is also publisher of At Bay Press, an award-winning Manitoba publishing house.