Fall in Love with Literature

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Saturday, February 8th, 2025
4:00 PM to 6:00 PM

The Sidney and Peninsula Literary Society presents “Fall in Love With Literature”

Love is in the air – love of good books and their writers, that is!

Please join us at the cidery to enjoy some beverages and snacks and to spend time with three amazing writers:

Lorna Crozier, Maia Caron, and Chelsea Wakelyn! Victoria’s own Deborah Rogers will moderate our time with the authors. Lorna Crozier - An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honourary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser Universities. Her books have received numerous national awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry. The Globe and Mail declared The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things one of its Top 100 Books of the Year, and Amazon chose her memoir as one of the 100 books you should read in your lifetime. A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, she has performed for Queen Elizabeth II and has read her poetry, which has been translated into several languages, on every continent except Antarctica. Her book, What the Soul Doesn't Want, was nominated for the 2017 Governor General's Award for Poetry. In 2018, Lorna Crozier received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Steven Price called Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), her latest nonfiction book, “one of the great love stories of our time.” Lorna Crozier lives on Vancouver Island.

Maia Caron is a Vancouver-based Metis writer whose short stories and essays have appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Nashwaak Review, the Women Awakening series, and Skeptic Magazine. Her first novel, Song of Batoche (2017), was an historical novel that received multiple accolades, including being chosen by Raven Reads as their spring 2018 Read for Reconciliation. Maia’s latest novel, The Last Secret (2024), was inspired by two remarkable real life heroines – a Ukrainian resistance fighters and a famous landscape artist – and is described as “A sweeping, dazzling dual-time novel centering on two unforgettable women—and their inextricable link to each other decades apart.”

Chelsea Wakelyn – Chelsea is of white settler and Red River Métis heritage. She holds an MA in Health Leadership and has a day job focused on strategic responses to the toxic drug crisis in B.C. Chelsea’s debut novel, What Remains of Elsie Jane, tells the story of a woman who loses her beloved partner to drugs and addiction just as the opioid crisis begins sweeping B.C. It is “a heartbreaking and darkly funny portrait of a woman unravelling in the wake of tragedy… Examining the ceaseless labour of motherhood, the stigma of death by drug poisoning, and the allure of magical thinking in the wake of tragedy, What Remains of Elsie Jane is a heart-splitting reminder that grief is born from the depths of love.”

Tickets are $30.00 and include readings and discussions with our authors, plus a beverage and some appetizers! Tickets are available at Tanner’s Books and online at eventbrite.com.

For more information, please check out our website at sidneyliteraryfestival.ca