Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
Publications for Mad Ideas for Precarious Living with Nicole Luongo, Erin Soros, and Henry Doyle, hosted by Isabella Wang.
These brilliant writers and thinkers have undergone incredibly difficult lives and have wisdoms and intersections which they will share with readings from their work, followed by a guided discussion and Q&A hosted by Isabella Wang.
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:
Isabella Wang’s Pebble Swing earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author’s case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water’s reflective surface. This collection is about language and family histories. It is the author’s attempt to piece together the resonant aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which stole the life of her paternal grandmother. As an immigrant whose grasp of Mandarin is fading, Wang explores absences in her caesuras and fragmentation—that which is unspoken, but endures.
Nicole Luongo’s The Becoming is a brutal account of mental illness by a woman who doesn’t believe in mental illness. As the author embarks on a PhD at the University of Oxford, a lifetime of addiction, eating disorders, and trauma culminates in an explosive hospital stay that sees her achieve liberation through psychosis. Her journey from terror to acceptance is grueling, and she makes meaning of it by weaving reflexive narrative with classic and nascent scholarship. Part phenomenological recounting, part social critique, the text disrupts biomedical approaches to altered states by exploring their emancipatory potential. It also illuminates how conventional mental health treatment pathologizes human suffering. In doing so, The Becoming contributes to anti-psychiatry and Mad studies projects, each asking, “What does it mean to be normal?” and “Should we be sane in an insane world?”
Henry Doyle’s No Shelter: Infused with the spirit of Charles Bukowski, these down to earth poems by Downtown Eastside warrior poet, Henry Doyle, take readers on a hard-scrabble journey, starting from Doyle’s early years as a runaway from foster homes, an incarcerated youth, a boxer, and a homeless wage-earner living in shelters and on the streets of Ottawa and Toronto, to his eventual arrival in Vancouver to work in the construction labour pools before landing work as a custodian and maintenance man. Doyle’s potent combination of gritty realism, weary wisdom and wry humour make No Shelter an unforgettable collection.
About the authors:
Nicole Luongo was born and raised on the unceded, traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations (Vancouver, B. C.). She has spent a decade working in solidarity with those living at the intersections of drug prohibition, housing-deprivation, and disability (in)justice, including as a member of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). Her academic background is in medical sociology, and she mostly conducts research in the fields of Mad and critical drug studies. She is currently the Systems Change Coordinator for the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition (CDPC), where she works to advance public and political support for drug policy models that are grounded in the tenets of public health and human rights.
Henry Doyle lives and works in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A long-time member of Thursdays Writing Collective and the Downtown Eastside Writing Collective, Henry has published work in Poetry is Dead, Megaphone, Geist, and the anthologies V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and From the Heart of it All: Ten Years of Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He won Geist magazine’s DTES Jamboree Writing Contest in 2011 and Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize in 2020.
A mad settler living in Vancouver, Erin Soros writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry and theory. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and a visiting writer at Cambridge. She researches psychosis and the psychiatric and police response to it. Her poetry received The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry, silver at the National Magazine Awards and was a finalist for the CBC Literary Award. Her lyric essay “Cord” received gold at the National Magazine Awards for “One of a Kind Storytelling.” Her fiction received the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Award for the Short Story.
About the Host:
Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook, On Forgetting a Language, and her full-length debut, Pebble Swing, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Contest and Long Poem Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest. She is completing a double-major in English and World Literature at SFU. An editor on the Room collective, she is also a youth mentor with Vancouver Poetry House, web coordinator with poetry in canada, and directs her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, 4827 Revise Revision St.