Double Lives & Lovely Afternoons: Kevin Chong & Patti Flather with Guests

On Thursday, November 2nd at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books, Simon & Schuster, and Inanna Publications for ‘Double Lives & Lovely Afternoons: Kevin Chong & Patti Flather with Marcus Youssef and Christine Quintana’.

The Double Life of Bensen Yu was just shortlisted for a Scotiabank Giller Prize and Kevin Chong will be joining this event remotely from the Maritimes.

This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

Registration is free and required for entrance.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

About the books:

The Double Life of Benson Yu (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

This fresh and unique work of metafiction follows a graphic novelist losing control of his own narrative as he attempts to write a polished retelling of his fraught upbringing in 1980s Chinatown.

In a Chinatown housing project lives twelve-year-old Benny, his ailing grandmother, and his strange neighbor Constantine, a man who believes he’s a reincarnated medieval samurai. When his grandmother is hospitalized, Benny manages to survive on his own until a social worker comes snooping. With no other family, he is reluctantly taken in by Constantine and soon, an unlikely bond forms between the two.

At least, that’s what Yu, the narrator of the story, wants to write.

The creator of a bestselling comic book, Yu is struggling with continuing the poignant tale of Benny and Constantine and can’t help but interject from the present day, slowly revealing a darker backstory. Can Yu confront the demons he’s spent his adult life avoiding or risk his own life…and Benny’s?

Such A Lovely Afternoon (Inanna Publications, 2022)

Such a Lovely Afternoon is a dazzling debut collection from award-winning Yukon writer Patti Flather.

A feisty young tomboy grapples with gender roles with sometimes hilarious results, a refugee single dad struggles for dignity in his northern community, and a malfunctioning compost toilet and wacky neighbours upturn a woman’s island cabin life, among other tales.

Against vivid landscapes from Canada’s West Coast to Hong Kong to the Yukon, Flather reveals poignant beauty, compassion and humour in everyday lives, with characters searching for identity and belonging, delving into their resilience and humanity. Published by Inanna Publications.

“Fall into Such a Lovely Afternoon in the middle of the night. These take-no-prisoners, let-your-hair-down stories are a heart-to-heart with your BFF about love, loss, and the lives of women making themselves up in the late 20th century, choice by choice, at the edge of the world. Patti Flather’s stories are literary lightning.” – Linda Svendsen, Guggenheim winner and author of Marine Life and Sussex Drive

About the authors:

Kevin Chong is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the new novel The Double Life of Benson Yu. Those titles have been named books of the year by Globe and Mail, National Post, and Amazon.ca, listed for a CBC prize, a BC Book Prize, and a National Magazine Award, optioned for film and TV, and published in the US, Europe, and Australia. His creative nonfiction and journalism have recently appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Rumpus, and the South China Morning Post. An Associate Professor at the UBC Okanagan, he lives in Vancouver with his family.

Patti Flather is an award-winning author. Her plays Paradise and Sixty Below have been shared on stages across Canada and published. Where the River Meets the Sea won the Canadian National Playwriting Competition, her radio play West Edmonton Mall was nominated for a Canadian Screenwriting Award, and her stories have appeared in literary magazines. A winner of the Borealis Prize for Yukon literary contribution, Patti has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of BC. She grew up in North Vancouver, BC, and lives in Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwäch’än territory in Whitehorse, Yukon. www.pattiflather.com

About the guests:

Marcus Youssef’s fifteen or so plays all investigate some aspect of difference and belonging. They have been produced in multiple languages in in twenty countries across North America, Europe and Asia, from Seattle to New York to Reykjavik, London, Venice, Hong Kong, Vienna, Athens, Frankfurt and Berlin. He is the recipient of Canada’s largest theatre award, the Siminovitch Prize for Theatre, for his body of work as a playwright, as well as Berlin, Germany’s Ikarus Prize, the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award, the Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award, the Chalmers’ Canadian Play Award, the Seattle Times Footlight award, the Vancouver Critics’ Innovation award (three times) and the Canada Council Staunch-Lynton Award.

Christine Quintana Born in Los Angeles to a Mexican-American father and a Dutch-British-Canadian mother, Christine is now a grateful visitor to the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Christine is an actor, playwright, co-Artistic Producer of Delinquent Theatre, and artistic associate of Neworld Theatre. Winner of a LA Drama Critic’s Circle Award, Dora Mavor Moore Award, Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, Tom Hendry Award, a Governor General’s Award nomination, and the Siminovitch Protégée Prize for Playwriting, Christine’s works have been translated and performed in Spanish, French, German, and ASL. As a performer, she’s acted on stages big and small, in a camper van, in neighbourhoods across East Vancouver, and on a farm. She is currently working on a commission for the Manhattan Theatre Club, and will premiere 4 new works next year across Canada. She is a graduate of UBC’s BFA Acting Program. christinequintana.ca