Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
On Wednesday, October 11th, join Massy Arts, Massy Books and House of Anansi Press in celebrating Rachael Moorthy’s debut novel, River Meets the Sea. Rachael will be joined by guest reader Invisible Boy author Harrison Mooney.
“Brilliant and inventive, River Meets the Sea is elegantly told in heartrending poetry, flowing smoothly between the protagonists’ histories, the forces that propel them, and their inevitable meeting.” —FRANCESCA EKWUYASI, AUTHOR OF BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD
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 book:
River Meets the Sea (House of Anansi Press, 2023)
An enthralling nautical epic, River Meets the Sea traces the dual timelines of two men with displaced Indigenous identity: a white-passing foster child in 1940s Vancouver and a teenage immigrant in the suburbs of Nanaimo who is racially coded as Black in the 1970s.
A natural-born storyteller, Ronny is a left-handed “alley mutt” without a birth certificate who searches for his mother everywhere — most powerfully, he hears her voice in the surging Stó:lō River. Born in the middle of the ocean on a merchant ship departing Ceylon, Chandra is a dark-skinned Dravidian boy with complicated roots and who finds his haven from his colourist mother and the pressure to assimilate by swimming and surfing in the Salish Sea.
Moving gracefully between these parallel stories like a wave, the novel traces the seemingly separate lives of these sensitive young men, their displaced Indigenous identities, and their everlasting connections to water. When their troubled paths inevitably cross, they form a sacred bond based on the mutual understanding of what it means to be othered, illuminating the interconnectedness of humanity and our innate relationship with the natural world.
About the author:
Rachael Moorthy is a storyteller of all trades from the Salish Sea to Switzerland. She grew up identifying the way the world told her to: half Black, half white, because including the complexity of her diasporic and displaced Indigenous roots often took too much breath. Today she exists in a perpetual state of Mixed Girl Blues. Her debut novel, River Meets the Sea, featured on CBC’s Canadian Fiction to Read in 2023 list and Capsule Stories Most Anticipated Books of 2023, follows the seemingly separate timelines of two young men with displaced Indigenous roots: one coded as Black, one white-passing, until their lives ultimately intersect on the sequoia-lined Salish Coast. Her writing was short-listed for The Malahat Review’s 2020 Far Horizon Award and has appeared in publications such as PRISM, SAD Mag, and TSOW.
About the guest reader:
Harrison Mooney, Invisible Boy (HarperCollins, 2022) is a writer and journalist. Born to a West African immigrant mother, he was adopted as an infant by a white family and raised in the Bible belt of British Columbia. He has worked for the Vancouver Sun for nearly a decade as a reporter, an editor and a columnist. His writing has also appeared in the National Post, the Guardian, Yahoo and Maclean’s. Harrison Mooney lives in East Vancouver with his family.