Montreal launch of nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon

How do you honour blood and chosen kin with equal care? A groundbreaking memoir spanning nations, prairie punk scenes, and queer love stories, Lindsay Nixon’s nîtisânak is woven around grief over the loss of their mother. It also explores despair and healing through community and family, and being torn apart by the same. Using cyclical narrative techniques and drawing on Nixon’s Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis ancestral teachings, this work offers a compelling perspective on the connections that must be broken and the ones that heal.

Join Lindsay and special guests Arielle Twist, Gwen Benaway, and Kai Cheng Thom for a night of readings in honour of the book’s much-anticipated release.

LINDSAY NIXON is a Cree-Métis-Saulteaux curator, award-nominated editor, award-nominated writer, and McGill Art History PhD student. They currently hold the position of Editor-at-Large for Canadian Art. Nixon has previously edited mâmawi­-âcimowak, an independent art, art criticism, and literature journal, and their writing has appeared in Malahat Review, Room, GUTS, MICE, esse, Inuit Art Quarterly, Teen Vogue, and other publications. nîtisânak is their first book.

ARIELLE TWIST is a writer and sex educator from George Gordon First Nation, Saskatchewan, based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a Nehiyaw, Two-Spirit, trans femme supernova writing to reclaim and harness ancestral magic and memories. Within her short career pursuing writing she has attended a residency at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity and has work published with Them, Canadian Art, Fiddlehead and PRISM International. She also works as a freelance editor with GUTS Magazine and her debut collection of poetry Disintegrate/Dissociate is forthcoming Spring 2019 with Arsenal Pulp Press.

GWEN BENAWAY is a bisexual feminist Gemini trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent. She has published three collections of poetry, Ceremonies for the Dead, Passage, and Holy Wild. Her fourth collection of poetry, Aperture, is forthcoming from Book*hug in Spring 2020. Her writing has been published in many national publications, including CBC Arts, Maclean’s Magazine, and the Globe and Mail. She is currently editing an anthology of Fantasy short stories by trans girl writers and writing a book of creative non-fiction, trans girl in love.

KAI CHENG THOM is a writer, performer, lasagna lover, and wicked witch. She lives and dreams from the unceded Indigenous territories that make up colonial-era Canada. A prolific poet, fiction writer, and essayist, her published book-length works include the award-winning Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir (Metonymy Press), a place called No Homeland (Arsenal Pulp Press), and From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (Arsenal Pulp Press).

//

Bar le Ritz is wheelchair accessible and has gender-neutral washrooms. This is a free event.