The Body Remembers: Shannon Arntfield & Christine McNair

Name: The Body Remembers: Shannon Arntfield & Christine McNair
Start: 2025-04-15T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-04-15T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Octopus Books

Schedule

Tue Apr 15 2025 at 06:30 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Octopus Books | Ottawa, ON

a book launch for Shannon Arntfield’s Python Love (University of Alberta Press, 2025) with special guest Christine McNair (Toxemia, Book*hug, 2024).
A reading and discussion focused on maternal mental-physical health, generational trauma, birth, chronic illness, & what the body remembers.
Masks welcomed for the protection of immunocompromised guests.
April 15th 2025
Octopus Books
doors open 6:30
event at 7:00
RSVP via email: [email protected]
https://octopusbooks.ca/events/45662
--------------------------------
Python Love weaves together experiences of childhood abuse, birth trauma, and recovery from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother. In her debut collection, Shannon Arntfield delves into the many ways in which the body recalls what has been done to it. Long, breathtaking sequences set within medical facilities during labour and delivery are juxtaposed with spare, lyrical reflections on ideas of memory, natural spaces, implicit love, and the relationships between parents and children. Full of precise observations, careful renderings, and visceral originality, Python Love is focused on how the body and mind are inextricably linked, how the past can overwhelm and inform the present, and how recovery is tied to love and connection.
Shannon Arntfield is a second-career trauma therapist whose work explores the challenges and rewards of saying ‘yes’ to life’s effluence. Her debut book collection Python Love was published by the University of Alberta Press in February of this year. Her debut chapbook Fallen Horseman was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. She lives in London, Ontario.
--------------------------------------
In this alchemy of anger and love, history and memoir, Christine McNair delves into various forms of toxicity in the body—from the effects of two life-threatening preeclampsia diagnoses to chronic illness, sexism in medicine, and the toll of societal expectations. With catharsis and humour, Toxemia pieces together the complexities of identity, motherhood, and living in a body to reveal deeply recognizable raw truths. McNair captures the wrenching feeling of loss of control in the face of an overwhelming medical diagnosis and the small, endless moments in life that underscore it: worrying about mortality in the middle of the night, revolving medical appointments, self-doubt, and all the ways in which illness interrupts. Toxemia unravels the toxicities that haunt the human body from within and without. Combining lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs, and more, this hybrid work dips between the sacred and profane, exposing—and holding—some of our greatest fears.
Christine McNair is the author of Charm(winner of the 2018 Archibald Lampman Award) and Conflict (2012, finalist for the City of Ottawa Book Award, the Archibald Lampman Award, and the ReLit Award for Poetry). Her hybrid poetic memoir Toxemia was published by Book*hug in fall 2024.