It’s the most dynamic author duo of Spring 2023! As one of the coveted stops on their North American tour, Wordfest™ is thrilled to welcome Hazel Jane Plante and Casey Plett to our Memorial Park stage. This event, hosted by Wordfest’s Creative Ringleader Shelley Youngblut, starts at 7:00 PM MT and will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing, fuelled by Shelf Life Books.
We are grateful to Arsenal Pulp Press for making it possible for Wordfest to connect you with Hazel Jane Plante and Casey Plett.
About Any Other City
By the author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian): the fictional memoir of a trans indie rock musician that reveals how the act of creation can heal trauma and even change the past.
Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.
Side B finds Tracy in 2019, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.
Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex—a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.
About Hazel Jane Plante
Hazel Jane Plante is a librarian, cat photographer, and writer. Her debut novel, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)(Metonymy Press, 2019), won a Lambda Literary Award (in the category of transgender fiction) and was a finalist for both a Publishing Triangle award (for trans and gender-variant literature) and a BC and Yukon Book Prize (for writing that provokes). She wrote a slippery, illustrated novella about Sadie Tang’s classic queer film Miscellaneous Kisses that was included in a deluxe reissue (ӕmbidextrous әditions, 2021).
Plante writes songs and plays guitar for the indie rock band Certain Women and occasionally releases solo music under the name lo-fi lioness. She also helms the podcast t4t, which is about writing while trans. Plante has been a good enough Zen Buddhist for over twenty-five years and currently lives with her gorgeous and skittish cat Gus on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱w.7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓l.lwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
About A Safe Girl to Love
A new edition of two-time Lambda Literary Award–winner Casey Plett’s acclaimed debut short story collection.
By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman, eleven unique short stories 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. These stories, shiny with whisky and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show that growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never 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 that reflects on trans writing and representation in our current political climate.
About Casey Plett
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, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Plett is a former bookseller and book publicist and currently teaches creative writing. While she has lived many places throughout the United States and Canada, she will forever call the prairies home, specifically Winnipeg and Southern Manitoba, Treaty 1 Territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation. Find her on Twitter @caseyplett and Instagram @plettsky.
About Host Shelley Youngblut
Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. A former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM, she is now a weekly panelist on CBC Radio’s Daybreak Alberta. Follow her on Twitter @youngblut and Instagram @youngblutshelley.
Curiouser?
Amid Record Book Bans, Queer Writers Come Out Swinging in 2023 -NBC News
A Literary Scene Where Parties Are Part of the Agenda -The New York Times
Listen: lo fi lioness on Bandcamp
Senator Patti LaBoucane-Benson is a Métis from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta. She is currently the Government Liaison and is the first Indigenous woman to hold a leadership position in the Senate. Her 30-year career has been dedicated to serving her community in Alberta, across Canada and around the world—as the director of a Boys and Girls Club in St. Paul in 1990, through 23 years of service at Native Counselling Services of Alberta (NCSA), and Conference Director and Lead Facilitator of the Nelson Mandela Dialogues in Canada, an international gathering of freedom fighters that took place on Enoch Cree Nation in 2017.
Dr. LaBoucane-Benson’s research for her PhD in Human Ecology focused on how Indigenous families and communities experience their own resilience in response to multiple forms of trauma. Her lifelong work has become an extended conversation about healing from historic trauma.
Dr. LaBoucane-Benson brought her PhD research to life through a work of creative non-fiction, an award-winning graphic novel—The Outside Circle—that tells the story of an inner-city Aboriginal family who transcend poverty, gang affiliation, and hopelessness. Her teaching materials are used in classrooms across Canada and in training sessions for professionals.
Appointed to the Senate in October 2018, the Senator lives fully in the space that helps define Canada. She is an avid gardener and her husband Allen is a traditional Nehiyaw (Cree) hunter; they believe that food security includes the respectful harvest of food from the land. They live near Stony Plain, Alberta, with their son Gabriel, on an acreage that has hosted ceremony, workshops, and dozens of transformational conversations with Elders, elected officials, and leaders from around the world.
Winner, CODE’s 2016 Burt Award for First Nation, Inuit and Métis Literature
In this important graphic novel, two brothers surrounded by poverty, drug abuse, and gang violence, try to overcome centuries of historic trauma in very different ways to bring about positive change in their lives.
Pete, a young Indigenous man wrapped up in gang violence, lives with his younger brother, Joey, and his mother who is a heroin addict. One night, Pete and his mother’s boyfriend, Dennis, get into a big fight, which sends Dennis to the morgue and Pete to jail. Initially, Pete keeps up ties to his crew, until a jail brawl forces him to realize the negative influence he has become on Joey, which encourages him to begin a process of rehabilitation that includes traditional Indigenous healing circles and ceremonies.
Powerful, courageous, and deeply moving, The Outside Circle is drawn from the author’s twenty years of work and research on healing and reconciliation of gang-affiliated or incarcerated Indigenous men.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
