Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison with Kristjana Gunnars & Marisa Grizen

On Tuesday, February 7 at 6pm, join Massy Arts Society, Massy Books and Coach House Books for the launch of Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison. The Mezzanine meets Ducks, Newburyport in this meandering and captivating debut novel.

Morrison will be joined by co-reader Kristjana Gunnars, who will read from The Scent of Light, her collection of five autofiction novellas. Both authors transverse the baroque landscape of thought, allowing life’s big questions to remain beautifully unanswered. Hosted by editor and writer Marisa Grizenko, this evening will invite us to examine how thought itself is a lens, and how it may be communicated in writing.

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, open to all 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.

The Books

by Geoffrey D. Morrison is a captivating novel from a new talent. The novel begins on a hot summer night with Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, who thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, waiting to meet someone who never shows, he sifts through the pieces and traverses the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel’s letter to an Irish newspaper, the sanctity of baseball, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres. These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird.

by Kristjana Gunnars is a collection of five autofiction novellas, available together for the first time in a single, handsome volume with an introduction by Kazim Ali. From a childhood in Cold War Iceland to love affairs and deaths, these short works document a life of perpetual motion, told in a discontinuous, subversive style to reflect the singular, feminist, nomadic life of the narrator. The short stories included in this collection are The Prowler, Zero Hour, The Substance of Forgetting, The Rose Garden and Night Train to NykøbingI.

The Authors

Geoffrey D. Morrison is the author of the poetry chapbook Blood-Brain Barrier (Frog Hollow Press, 2019) and co-author, with Matthew Tomkinson, of the experimental short fiction collection Archaic Torso of Gumby (Gordon Hill Press, 2020). He was a finalist in both the poetry and fiction categories of the 2020 Malahat Review Open Season Awards and a nominee for the 2020 Journey Prize. He lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory (Vancouver).

Kristjana Gunnars is a writer and painter, author of several books of various genres, and she frequently exhibits her artwork in Canada. She has participated in Buddhist groups and retreats with Tibetan teachers in years past. She lives in British Columbia, Canada. She is currently Visiting Professor in Languages and Literature at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.

The Host

Marisa Grizenko lives and works on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Holding a Bachelor of Arts from Concordia University and a Master of Arts in English from UBC, she is the reviews editor for EVENT Magazine and writes the newsletter Plain Pleasures.

Host or Publisher Massy Arts Society