Is It Hard to be Funny? with Christian McPherson and Miriam Toews

Curated and Hosted by The Ottawa Citizen’s Peter Simpson

In Person Fiction

Monday

Oct , 2011

12:00pm

Eastern

Knox Presbyterian Church

120 Lisgar Street (at Elgin) • Ottawa

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Is It Hard to be Funny? with Christian McPherson and Miriam Toews

Toews’s ability to generate comedy and heartache at the same time just soars.

Maclean’s

As anyone who has ever endured an open-mic set at a comedy club can tell you, it’s not easy to make people laugh. From setup to punchline, Peter Simpson turns to Christian McPerson and Miriam Toews to find out what it takes to get humour just right on the page.

Miriam Toews, winner of the Governor General's Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, a National Magazine Award for Humour and finalist for the Giller Prize and the Stephan Leacock Medal for Humour and the author of A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans and Irma Voth, shares the stage with Ottawa writer Christian McPherson, whose first novel, The Cube People, is a hilarious and slightly surreal tale of discontented bureaucrats in the federal civil service in Ottawa. Peter Simpson, the Ottawa Citizen's arts editor at large and writer of the Citizen's Big Beat blog on the city's arts scene hosts the conversation on how to be funny and still be taken seriously.

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The Authors

Christian McPherson

Christian McPherson's work has been published in Kiss Machine, Queen's Quarterly, The New Quarterly and dANDdelion, and in the anthologies Open Window III and Seeds 3. His stories and poems have won several awards and honourable mentions, including the John Spencer Hill Award, the Ottawa Public Library Short Story Award, and the Canadian Poetry Association's Poetry Competition. His books include Six Ways to Sunday (shortlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award for Short Fiction), two collections of poetry--Poems That Swim from My Brain Like Rats Leaving a Sinking Ship and The Sun Has Forgotten Where I Live--and his debut novel The Cube People, which was listed as one of the "44 Reasons to Love Ottawa" in Ottawa Magazine. He has a degree in philosophy from Carleton University and a computer programming diploma from Algonquin College, and he lives in Ottawa with his wife Marty and his two kids, Molly and Henry. Read Christian's blog at http://christianmcpherson.blogspot.com/.

Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews is the author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one prior work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. Several of her novels have been made into feature films, including All My Puny Sorrows and the Oscar-nominated Women Talking. Miriam Toews lives in Toronto.