About this Event
How Strangers, Stories, and Breaking Silence Help Us Heal: Anne Aspler in conversation with Kimmel Alcide
This October, Off the Shelf welcomes emergency physician and debut author Anne Aspler to The Green Room for an intimate conversation about Rise After Silence: An ER Doctor and the Patients Who Healed Her, a Publishers Weekly Editor's Pick arriving in stores the day before this event.
Drawing on sixteen years in emergency medicine, Anne's memoir weaves ten patient encounters together with her own story of family violence, foster care, faith, and motherhood, and with the long work of naming a childhood history she had spent decades trying to outrun. It is a book about the ways patients and physicians quietly transform one another, and about what becomes possible when the stories we've carried in silence are finally given language.
Guiding the conversation is Kimmel Alcide, founder of The Everyday Yogi, whose work in mindfulness helped Anne move through the creative and emotional blocks of writing this book. She saw parts of it take shape firsthand, and she brings a rare warmth to conversations about the stories that stay with us.
The evening will include selected readings, a guided conversation, and an audience Q&A, and it closes with something a little different: The Strangers on Our Shelves, where we'll ask everyone in the room to name a book by a writer they've never met whose words changed something in them. We'll gather those titles into a shared reading list so the conversation can keep going long after the night ends.
Some readings and discussion reference sexual assault and family violence. The conversation will be thoughtful and non-graphic, and you're welcome to step out and take care of yourself at any point.
Book signing to follow.
Event venue & nearby stays
Book Bar, 600 Markham Street, Toronto, Canada
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