Join us on April 21st at 7:30 p.m. for the 2022 CLC Kreisel Lecture with Cherie Dimaline, the bestselling and award-winning author of The Marrow Thieves, Hunting By Stars, and Empire of Wild. Dimaline’s lecture is titled An Anthology of Monsters: How Story Saves Us from Our Anxiety. The event will take place at the TIMMS CENTRE for the ARTS (masks strongly recommended).

PLEASE NOTE: Tickets are pay-what-you-can and will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis, so please arrive early! Due to the ongoing situation with COVID-19, the venue will be at 2/3 capacity.

About the talk:

Told from the viewpoint of someone with life-long anxiety (who also happens to be an author), this lecture/essay focuses on the stories we tell ourselves—both the very excellent and the very horrible.

The Rougarou as both belonging and responsibility, witches as empowerment and fear—using examples like these from her own published and forthcoming work, Cherie Dimaline examines the ways in which we empower, crush, survive, and succeed all through stories. We’ll also hear about ways to collect and curate these stories so that we don’t end up buried in an ‘edit reel’.

Basically, this is the tale of an intricate dance with anxiety and how story can help reshape the ways in which we think, the ways we cope, and the very choreography of that dance. And yes, this is largely biographical.

Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves shot to the top of the bestseller lists when it was published in 2017, and has stayed there. It won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, and was a fan favourite in CBC’s Canada Reads (2018). It was also a Book of the Year on numerous lists including National Public Radio, the School Library Journal, the New York Public Library, Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and the CBC. Pressure from her young fans spurred Dimaline to write Hunting by Stars, the 2021 sequel to The Marrow Thieves. This new novel has been described as “lush, devastating, and hope-filled” (Kirkus Reviews). Dimaline’s adult novel, Empire of Wild, was an Indigo #1 Best Book of 2019.

From the Georgian Bay Métis Community, she lives in Midland, Ontario.