Northern Exposure
with Michel Jean, Norma Dunning and Michelle Porter
Fall Festival In Person Streaming Fiction History
Michelle Porter is a gem of a writer. I will always excitedly read anything she writes. Giving voice to our natural kin, A Glacier’s Guide to Dying is a poignant novel, light in its delivery but full of weight in its afterglow. I loved this one.
Join us for an unforgettable evening with three brilliant storytellers celebrating new novels that illuminate, celebrate and centre Inuit and Métis life in modern Canada.
In Ninan: Tiohtiá:ke, Montreal, by Michel Jean (translated by Susan Ouriou) a young Innu man finds himself adrift on the streets of Montreal after serving time for his father’s murder. Banished for life from his community, Nutashkuan, he heads south to Montreal, where he becomes part of a new community?Cree, Nakota, Inuit, Innu, Mohawk and Atikamekw come together in Cabot Square. With tenderness and unflinching honesty, he reveals lives scarred by violence and addiction but also sustained by resilience, kinship, and the faint, persistent light of hope.
Naoyak: A Novel by Norma Dunning is a blend of social satire and a loving ode to Inuk women and mothers. Naoyak Aupak promised herself she would leave Iqaluit for “The Easy Life” in Canada’s south before she turned twenty-five. Her exit plan sends her and her young son Andy on a chaotic journey with a painfully clueless southern researcher named Drew. As Nao wedges herself and Andy into the bougie comforts of Drew’s home in Sherwood Park, Alberta, she must reckon with a world of class assumptions, casual racism and paternalism. But Naoyak is not containable. She is a trickster, a champion of her people and an irresistible agent of change.
Michelle Porter, the award-winning author of A Grandmother Begins the Story, returns to the Festival stage with A Glacier's Guide to Dying, a contemporary story of identity and belonging, loss and healing, within families and with the immortal land itself. A young Métis man searching for his missing father finds himself arguing with a dying glacier in this compelling, profane, and ultimately hopeful novel about the burdens and blessings of inheritance
Books are available for purchase from our friends at Perfect Books.
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