Collective Vancouver book launch

On Friday, October 28 at 6pm, join Massy Arts Society, Massy Books and Metonymy Press for a celebration of authors and their latest works including: H. Felix Chau Bradley and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch. Exploring new queer intimacy (and anarchy!) and mapping trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, these readings offer a riot within us that both affirms and uncovers. The two are joined by guest reader, Amber Dawn.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
Registration is free, open to all and required for entrance. Masks are mandatory. The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.
Covid Protocols: Attendees must wear a mask (N95 masks are encouraged and recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

The Books

Personal Attention Roleplay by H. Felix Chau Bradley follows a young gymnast who crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships—with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band’s summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.

The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected—in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley’s precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.

Shortlisted for the 2021 TWUC Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the eighth annual Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

The Good Arabs by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch swings from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer–with verse and prose poems that ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker’s communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.

The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.

Honourable Mention for the 2022 Arab American Book Award and Jury Selection for the 2022 Grand Prix du livre de Montreal

With Guest Reader

Amber Dawn is a writer and creative facilitator living on unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (Vancouver, Canada). Her debut novel Sub Rosa (2010) won the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (2013) won the Vancouver Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her poetry collection Where the words end and my body begins (2015) was a finalist for BC Book Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her sophomore novel Sodom Road Exit (2018) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the BC Book Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her collection of long poems My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems (2020) was a finalist for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes.

She is the editor of three anthologies With A Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn (co-ed. Trish Kelly, 2005), Fist of the Spider Women: Fear and Queer Desire (2009) and Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry (co-ed. Justin Ducharme, 2019).

All of her books are published with Arsenal Pulp Press.

Donating to Massy Arts Society

Massy Arts Society is primarily funded by Massy Books, an Indigenous woman-owned and operated bookstore on the unceded territories of XwMuthkwium (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. To date we haven’t received any operating funds from any grants and are now providing the option for folks to contribute to keeping our events accessible and doors open. All proceeds from your donation will go towards operation costs of our community hub while we focus on supporting the practices of Indigenous and over-excluded artists. Consider donating when you register for your next event.