Canadian Writers in Person continues with a reading of The Eyelid by S.D. Chrostowska
If you love meeting talented writers and hearing them read from their published work, or just want to soak up a unique cultural experience, don’t miss the opportunity to attend the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series.
The series gives attendees an opportunity to get up close and personal with an eclectic group of 11 authors while having the unique opportunity to engage with them in a dialogue about their work.
Canadian Writers in Person is a for-credit course for students. It is also a free-admission event for members of the public. All readings take place at 7 p.m. on select Tuesday evenings via Zoom. Links for each reading can be found here: https://cltr.huma.laps.yorku.ca/canwrite/.
This year’s lineup consists of a unique selection of emerging and established Canadian writers, whose writing explores a broad range of topics and geographical and cultural landscapes. Featuring seasoned and emerging poets and fiction writers, the series highlights Canada’s ever-growing literary talent.
The series will continue on Feb. 2 with a reading of The Eyelid (Coach House Books) by S.D. Chrostowska.
Chrostowska is a professor of humanities and social & political thought at York University. She is the author of Literature on Trial: The Emergence of Critical Discourse in Germany, Poland, and Russia, 1700-1800 (2012); Permission: A Novel (2013); and Matches: A Light Book (2015, 2nd enlarged ed. 2019), and co-editor of Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives (2017). Chrostowska teaches courses in utopian thought and literature at both the undergraduate and graduate levels; in modernity’s cultural moods of melancholy and nostalgia and their intertwined histories; and in the literature of transgression from the Middle Ages to the present. She currently lives in Toronto.
In Greater America, with sleep under siege, The Eyelid depicts the end of human reverie. An unnamed, unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, diplomat of ‘Onirica,’ a foreign republic of dreams, to resist a prohibition on sleep in near-future Greater America. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people’s nightmares and dreams. As ‘Comprehensive Illusion’ – a social media-like entity that hijacks creativity – overtakes the masses, Chevauchet, the old radical, weakens and disappears, leaving our narrator to take up Chevauchet’s dictum that “daydreaming is directly subversive” and forge ahead on his own.
Other presentations scheduled in this series are:
- Feb. 23: Kaie Kellough, Dominoes at the Crossroads (Vehicule Press)
- March 9: Terry Watada, Mysterious Dreams of the Dead (Anvil Press)
- March 23: Cecily Nicholson, Wayside Sang (Talonbooks)
Canadian Writers in Person (AP/CLTR 1953 6.0A) is a course offered in the Culture & Expression program in the Department of Humanities in York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. For more information on the series, visit yorku.ca/laps/canwrite, or email Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca or Professor Leslie Sanders at leslie@yorku.ca.