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A twinning book launch for everyone's favourite nice young man from Newfoundland, William Ping (very obvious gemini), alongside fibre-fiddling, 16mm shootin' poetic/public menace, Benjamin C. Dugdale (aquarius); a literary odd-couple for the ages, touring their debut full-length books through western Canada, with beloved guest reader, the inimitable Naomi K. Lewis. Join us for an evening of poetry, fiction, and lightly manic hijinks from these literary bffs on their penultimate tour stop. WILLIAM PING is a Chinese-Canadian writer from Newfoundland. After completing his Master of Arts at Memorial University in 2020, he was named a Fellow of the School of Graduate Studies. He received the 2022 Cox & Palmer Creative Writing Award as well as the 2021 Landfall Trust. His debut novel, Hollow Bamboo, which he wrote for his master’s degree, received the Award for Thesis Excellence from the English department. His work has previously been featured on the CBC, in Riddle Fence, and in the anthologies Us, Now and Hard Ticket.
BENJAMIN C. DUGDALE (they/them) is a writer, dungeon master, fibre-artist and lapsed experimental filmmaker, currently based in rural AB (treaty 7 territory), working lately on a Canada Council-funded sci-fi suite of near-future stories, wherein vat-grown superqueers try to figure out how to love themselves and others on a planet on the brink of cataclysm. Benjamin has been a reader for PANK, and ARC Poetry magazine, and also works as a freelance poetry editor. Benjamin’s most recent feature film, Contents Under Pressure, is available from the CFMDC. Their chapbook, Saint Rat O’Sphere’s Formica Canticle Poems, was published in 2020 by Anstruther Press, and their book-length poem, The Repoetic: After Saint Pol Roux, is available from Gordon Hill Press.
NAOMI K. LEWIS is a fiction and nonfiction writer, an editor, and a podcaster. Her 2019 memoir, Tiny Lights for Travellers (University of Alberta Press) won three book awards and was nominated for two, including the Governor General’s Award. She is also the author of a novel and a short story collection. Her books, journalism, and editing have won and been shortlisted for awards, and she has served as writer in residence at two Canadian universities and Calgary’s public library.
ABOUT HOLLOW BAMBOO
The hilarious and heartbreaking story of two William Pings in Newfoundland—the lost millennial and the grandfather he knows nothing about
William Ping's millennial life revolves around eating at restaurants, posting online about eating at restaurants, then overanalyzing it. This changes unexpectedly when a dinner with his Chinese girlfriend's family goes sideways and his insecurity about his biracial identity and his ignorance of his own Chinese heritage overflow like lava. During a much-needed break from the dinner table, Will is visited in the men's room by a sarcastic, bullying spirit named Mo. The spirit whisks him into the past to learn about the life of his grandfather, the first William Ping, who emigrated from China to Newfoundland in 1931 to work in a laundry.
Based on a true story, Hollow Bamboo recounts with humour and sympathy the often-brutal struggles, and occasional successes, faced by some of the first Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland. It is a journey of heartbreak, sacrifice, brotherhood and family ties. But most of all, it is about love and survival on the Rock.
ABOUT THE REPOETIC: AFTER SAINT-POL-ROUX
A whorling pseudotranslation of French Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux’s La Répoétique, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is a herniating long-poem, a w(h)orld built by and for the word. Whorld as ever-unrolling unraveling rug; as yawnsense; as slimey timey oneness; as aerated English, Nu-Cue-Ler Alberta English, used-to-be-the-bottom-of-an-Ocean English, as the trembling timbre of the Tinder-Poem’s voice asking “does your English always fight like this, or just at the holidays?” The Repoetic is the realm of the loser, the cruiser, and the havering grief that an immortal Mother asks of us. Sieve for the unreal, forgotten, and trampled, for Lady Di and Dido and Bart Simpson’s unending boyhood. This Res Poetica a long-overdue middle-finger to Plato’s no-poet Res Publica. And though no panacea nor samizdat, it is an annihilating solvent; the joke-rupt-by-hiccup haghounding its way into existence twixt split sycamore Pocky sticks; the stretched elastic embouchure of the things we wish we could say yet can’t couch-twirl thru the threshold. The Repoetic is a singu(hi)larity, the Poem a noise, the Poem annoys.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Shelf Life Books, 1302 4 St SW # 100, Calgary, Canada