About this Event
On Thursday, October 6 at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books, and Indigenous authors Justene Dion-Glowa and Tyler Pennock for An Evening of Daring Dreams, a double launch event of their books Trailer Park Shakes (2022, Brick Books) and Blood (2022, Brick Books).
At this in-person event, Dion-Glowa and Pennock will be joined by guest host Denise McCuiag for a night to celebrate literature, and to question how creative writing can be a platform to address injustice, violence, community, and connection.
This event is free + open to all of our community, and registration is mandatory.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.
Covid Protocols: For all in-person events, attendees must provide proof of vaccination, wear a mask (N95 masks are encouraged and recommended as they offer the best protection), and consent to having their temperature checked at the front door. We ask that if you are showing any symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
Please be sure to register for this event.
You can purchase Blood by Tyler Pennock at Massy Books.
You can purchase Trailer Park Shakes by Justene Dion-Glowa at Massy Books.
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Authors + Books
Trailer Park Shakes is a book that seems to want to hold everything — an entire cross-section of lived experience — written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words’ embrace. Dion-Glowa’s poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic. This poetry collection, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice — how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love.
Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis creative, beadworker and poet born in Win-Nipi (Winnipeg) and has been residing in Secwepemcú’lecw since 2014. They are a Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity alumni. They have been working in the human services field for nearly a decade. Their microchap, TEETH, is available from Ghost City Press. Trailer Park Shakes is their first full length poetry book.
Blood centres around a protagonist who at first has difficulty knowing the difference between connection and pain, and we move with them as they explore what it means to want. Pennock weaves longing, intimacy, and Anishinaabe relationalities to recentre and rethink their speaker’s relationship to the living — never forgetting non-human kin. This book is a look at how deep history is represented in the everyday; it also tries to answer how one person can challenge the impacts of that history. It is a reminder that Indigenous people carry the impacts of colonial history and wrestle with them constantly. Blood explores the relationships between spring and winter, ice and water, static things and things beginning to move, and what emerges in the thaw.
Tyler Pennock, author of Bones (2020), is a Two-Spirit Queerdo from Faust, Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. They were adopted from a Cree and Métis family, and reunited with them in 2006. Tyler is a graduate of Guelph University’s Creative Writing MFA program (2013), as well as the University of Toronto (2009). They have lived in Toronto for the past 25 years.
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Host
Denise McCuaig is an accomplished Métis woman with an excellent knowledge in Aboriginal health and mental health and addictons.
Denise has been an Indigenous Advisor through a number of boards and commitees, including but not limited to, the Mental Health Commission of Canada, San’yas Indigenous Cultural Safety Training program, Healthcare Excellence Canada and was the Director, Aboriginal health for the Interior Health Authority.
Denise recently joined the Lii Michif Otipemisiwak Elders Council and has been a supporting Elder to the Métis Nation BC Ministry of Youth for the past 5 years. She is passionate about Métis identity and cultural knowledge as support for mental wellness.
Denise has been a sought-after speaker on topics of Cultural Safety, healing through cultural renewal, suicide prevention and living with mental illness. Denise speaks from lived experience in a manner that many audiences have been able to relate too.
In 2006, The Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health (CAMIMH) awarded Denise with a Champion Mental Health Award. In 2003, closer to home in Kamloops, BC, the YMCA awarded Denise with a Woman of Distinction Award.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Massy Arts Society, 23 East Pender Street, Vancouver, Canada
CAD 0.00