Events

Ira Wells at Kingston Writers Fest: You Can’t Read That!

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Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, will be speaking at the Kingston Writers Fest event “You Can’t Read That!” Ira will be joined by politics and culture critic David Moscrop in a robust discussion of public and private book banning. Is it wrong to embrace the books of people who do things we abhor? What is ‘equity-based weeding’? How can we know the true scope of book banning when according to a study by the American Library Association 82 to 97 percent of all library challenges go unreported? Do we have a national, communal history? If so, how can we best protect it?

The event will take place in the Limestone City Ballroom (Kingston Marriott) on Friday, September 19 at 3:30PM.

Tickets and more details here.

Grab a copy of On Book Banning here!

ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING

The freedom to read is under attack.

From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.

ABOUT IRA WELLS

Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

Steven Heighton’s Sacred Rage: Kingston Writers Fest

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Steven Heighton’s second posthumous story collection, Sacred Rage, will be included in the Kingston Writers Fest event, “Bushwacked by Inspiration: Short Stories.” Excerpts from Sacred Rage will be read by Sarah Tsiang, who will also be joined for the event by Catherine Bush, Deepa Rajagopalan, and Jamal Saeed in a discussion of writing short-form fiction, and its challenges and particular satisfactions.

The event will take place in the Rideau Room (Kingston Marriott) on Friday, September 19 at 7PM.

Tickets and more details here.

Grab Sacred Rage here!

ABOUT SACRED RAGE

“A writer only feels like a writer when in the act. And the will, I said, is never enough . . . Where does inspiration, that sacred rage, originate? Maybe it’s just a matter of stubbornly starting something new and writing your way into the slot.”—Steven Heighton

In the years before his unexpected death, Steven Heighton wrote to his longtime editor John Metcalf to say that he understood that the short story marked his most important contribution to literature, and that “after the novels, rereading and writing short stories again felt like returning home.” In the fifteen stories taken from across his four collections, Sacred Rage offers us Heighton as the moral explorer of the global suburbs, as chronicler of our innermost stories of love and fear, sleeping and waking, of a rebel “unabashedly devoted to the old pursuit,” as he once called it, “of truth and beauty.” These are stories of grace and the lack of it; of elegy and requiem; of hope and care in a world where these seem increasingly alien, stories by one of our most sharp-eyed and generous writers, whether you’re discovering them for the first time, or once again.

ABOUT STEVEN HEIGHTON

Steven Heighton (1961–2022) was a writer and musician. His twenty previous books include the novels Afterlands, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and the bestselling The Shadow Boxer; the Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize finalist memoir Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos; and The Waking Comes Late, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.