Fawn Parker, David Huebert & Matthew Gwathmey @ Gallery 78

Name: Fawn Parker, David Huebert & Matthew Gwathmey @ Gallery 78
Start: 2024-09-21T19:00:00-03:00
Location: 796 Queen St, Fredericton, NB E3B 1C6, Canada

Schedule

Sat Sep 21 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC-03:00

Location

796 Queen St, Fredericton, NB E3B 1C6, Canada | Fredericton, NB

Westminster Bookmark is pleased to present the launch of three exciting new books by Maritime authors Fawn Parker (Hi It's Me), David Huebert (Oil People), and Matthew Gwathmey (Family Band).
The event takes place at the beautiful Gallery 78 (796 Queen Street) on Saturday, September 21st, 7pm. There will be short readings by all three authors and books for sale. Free to attend. Open to all.
About HI, IT'S ME:
Women Talking meets Study for Obedience in this stunning depiction of fresh grief by Fawn Parker, the Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know.
Shortly after her mother’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs.
In Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?
About OIL PEOPLE:
Part generational saga, part eco-gothic fable, Oil People is a luminous debut novel about history and family, land and power, and oil as an object of toxic wonder.
1987: Thirteen-year-old Jade Armbruster lives with her parents and older sister on the family’s vintage oil farm—a decrepit property built by her ancestor. As her parents fight about whether to sell the land and their failing business, Jade struggles to avoid her best-friend-turned-nemesis and vies for the attention of the enigmatic farmer boy. Meanwhile, the oil swirling beneath her family’s home provokes erratic behaviours and offers murky revelations about her family’s history on this land.
1862: Clyde Armbruster catches his big break, striking Lambton County’s first gusher. The discovery brings wealth and opportunity to him and his wife Lise, but his daily proximity to oil leaves him infertile and may be the cause of his alarming, otherworldly visions. At the same time, Clyde and Lise develop an alliance with their eccentric and wealthy neighbours, a relationship that promises even more success until a fateful moment intertwines the two families, locking them into a bitter rivalry that lasts generations.
As the two narratives coalesce, family secrets and deceits are slowly unveiled, and the slick spectre of oil seeps off the page, revealing a landscape smeared and stained, yet persistently alive. Intense and visceral, agile and lyrical, Oil People is a molten mirror for the petroleum age, and signals the arrival of a profound and vital voice.
About FAMILY BAND:
“What was there to do but to play music?” Thus begins the first and title poem of Matthew Gwathmey's Family Band. What follows describes becoming a family of seven (“It Seemed That We Had Hardly Begun And We Were Already There”), complete with made-up bedtime stories (“Bear The Bear”), the learning of language (“A High Frequency Words List”), road trips (“Stargazing”), pastimes like gardening (“Different Kinds Of Blight”) and fishing (“Salmon Fishing”), games (“Hide & Seek”), TV shows (“Closed Captions Of Sweet Tooth, Season 1, Episode 6”), more games (“The Impossible Game”), and the joys of home ownership (“This House”). These poems catalogue family life up until the moment that the band decides to break apart, and everyone chooses to pursue their respective solo careers.

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FAWN PARKER is the author of the novels What We Both Know, longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Set-Point, and Dumb-Show, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, winner of the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize and the J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. Her story “Feed Machine” was longlisted for the 2020 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and her story “WunderHorse II” was anthologized in André Forget’s After Realism. Fawn is Fredericton's current Poet Laureate and a PhD student at The University of New Brunswick. She is also the host and curator of Westminster Bookmark's monthly reading series, 'The Catch-Up.'

DAVID HUEBERT has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. Huebert’s first story collection, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, among other accolades. His second story collection, Chemical Valley, won the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, received glowing reviews, and was a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the ReLit Award. David teaches MFA in Fiction at the University of King’s College in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), where he lives with his partner and their two children.
MATTHEW GWATHMEY was born in Richmond, Virginia, and currently lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on Wolastoqey Territory, with his partner Lily and their five children. He studied creative writing at the University of Virginia and recently completed his PhD at UNB. He has work published in The Malahat Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead and The Iowa Review, as well as other literary magazines. His first poetry collection, Our Latest in Folktales, was published by Brick Books in the spring of 2019. His second collection, Tumbling for Amateurs, appeared with Coach House Books.