Cosmo Lava Bridge with Anton Piatigorsky, Spencer Gordon and Barry Webster

In Person Fiction

Admission

Free

Tuesday

Oct , 2012

8:30pm

Eastern

Knox Presbyterian Church

120 Lisgar st. (at Elgin) • Ottawa

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Cosmo Lava Bridge with Anton Piatigorsky, Spencer Gordon and Barry Webster

Compulsive, energetic, surreal, and wildly imaginative, Barry Webster’s The Lava in My Bones links human emotions and a cascade of natural events... Webster’s take on desire is like no other.

Marilyn Bowering

Take a walk on the wild side with three bold authors whose work pushes stylistic and thematic boundaries. Join us for a celebration of new writing on the cutting edge that explores lives on the fringes and revels in the unexpected.

Dora Award-winning playwright Anton Piatigorsky’s The Iron Bridge delivers a superbly inspired inquiry into the early lives of the 20th century’s most notorious tyrants. These stories breathe fictionalized life into the adolescents who would grow up to become the most brutal dictators the world has known. We discover a teenaged Mao Tse-Tung refusing an arranged marriage; Idi Amin cooking for the British Army; and a melodramatic young Adolf Hitler dreaming of vast architectural achievements.

In Cosmo by Spencer Gordon, co-editor of the online literary journal The Puritan and an instructor at Humber College, an admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a 3,000-word sentence in defence of his passion. Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal stupefying desert of the soul. An aging porn star dons a grotesque dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of his life. Though shifting wildly in tone, structure and perspective from one page to the next, his stories are drenched in pop culture, the distancing effects of modern communication and the malaise of solitary existence.

A frustrated Canadian geologist studying global warming becomes obsessed with eating rocks after embarking on his first same-sex relationship in Europe in The Lava in My Bones by ReLit Award winner Barry Webster. Back home, his young sister is a high-school girl who suddenly starts to ooze honey through her pores. The siblings are reunited on a ship bound for Europe, where they hope to start a new life. They are unaware that their disguised mother is also on board and plotting to win back their souls, with the help of the Virgin Mary.

The Authors

Anton Piatigorsky

Anton Piatigorsky has twice won the Dora Mavor Moore Award. Eternal Hydra, commissioned by the Stratford Festival, was called “one of the best Canadian plays of the past decade” by NOW Magazine and will open in Vancouver at the Touchstone Theatre in October 2012. The chamber opera,Airline Icarus, for which he wrote the libretto, won the Italian Primo Fedora Award in 2011. He was most recently the playwright in residence for Soulpepper. His new play, Breath In Between, will have its premiere at Toronto’s Summerworks Festival in August 2012.

Barry Webster

Barry Webster is included in the current edition of Canadian Who’s Who. He is originally from Toronto but now resides in Montreal. He has lived for extended periods of time in Barcelona, London, Banff, and Berlin, where he was staying the night the Wall fell. In 2006 Webster’s first book, The Sound of All Flesh, won the ReLit Award for best collection of short stories published by a Canadian press. He has also been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the CBC-Quebec Prize, and the Hugh MacLennan Award. His non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications including The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, Event and Prairie Fire. He has been awarded residences at artist colonies including the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Sage Hill Writing Colony in Saskatchewan, and the Edward Albee Colony in New York. He currently teaches English at Marianopolis College and works as a translator from French to English. He recently translated a high school textbook on palaeontology entitled He moved to Montreal in 1999. Webster had long been fascinated by Quebec and finally moved there to learn French. He also speaks German and is currently studying Mandarin. He believes the learning of languages affects one’s worldview and is an important inspiration for his writing. Music is also an important influence on his fiction. Webster is a classically trained pianist and has two ARCT’s from the Royal Conservatory of Music. In 2003 he completed an M.A. in Creative Writing at Concordia University. He also has a B.A. in English from the University of Toronto. Webster is also an actor and was recently in a production of Sam Shepard’s Savage/Love. He also acted in a radio play based on his short story “Enough” and has performed his fiction at numerous venues.

Spencer Gordon

Spencer Gordon is co-editor of the online literary journal The Puritan and the Toronto-based micro-press Ferno House. His own stories, articles and poems have been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies. He blogs at dangerousliterature.blogspot.com and teaches writing at Humber College. Cosmo (Coach House, 2012) is his first collection of short fiction.