Rowan McCandless Book Launch

Join us as we celebrate the launch of Rowan McCandless’s Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments (Dundurn Press). Presented as part of THIN AIR 2021 in partnership with McNally Robinson Booksellers and featuring a conversation hosted by Whitney French.

Rowan McCandless Book Launch 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.

After years of secrecy and silence, Rowan McCandless leaves an abusive relationship and rediscovers her voice and identity through writing.

She was never to lie to him. She was never to leave him; and she was never supposed to tell. Persephone’s Children chronicles Rowan McCandless’s odyssey as a Black, biracial woman escaping the stranglehold of a long-term abusive relationship. Through a series of thematically linked and structurally inventive essays, McCandless explores the fraught and fragmented relationship between memory and trauma. Multiple mythologies emerge to bind legacy and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, racism and intergenerational trauma, mental illness and resiliency. It is only in the aftermath that she can begin to see the patterns in her history, hear the echoes of oppression passed down from unknown, unnamed ancestors, and discover her worth and right to exist in the world.

Rowan McCandless is an award-winning author of fiction and creative non-fiction, and serves as the creative non-fiction editor for The Fiddlehead. She has been longlisted for the Journey Prize, won the Constance Rooke Creative Non-Fiction Prize, and received gold for One of a Kind Storytelling at the National Magazine Awards. Rowan lives in Winnipeg.

Host Whitney French is a storyteller and a multi-disciplinary artist. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter as well as the co-founder of the Black queer feminist press Hush Harbour. Whitney French is the editor of Persephone’s Children. She lives in Toronto.