m. patchwork monoceros Virtual Book Launch
Saturday May 06 2023 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Online via Zoom / Streaming via YouTube
Join us for the virtual launch of m. patchwork monoceros's debut poetry collection Remedies for Chiron (Radiant Press) featuring a reading and a conversation hosted by Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Suzette Mayr.
Registration is required to directly participate in the Zoom webinar. It will be simultaneously streamed on YouTube and available for viewing thereafter. ASL interpretation will be provided.
In the astrological tradition, Chiron represents our deepest wound, and our lifelong efforts to heal it. Remedies for Chiron is a collection of poems that journey through the days of a young, queer, Black, and newly disabled poet trying to find a place to root and exist in the entirety of those intersections. Moving between cycles of grief and self-discovery, Remedies tells the story of a prismatic existence while also offering a balm for the hurts we all experience and the humility that comes with healing.
m. patchwork monoceros is a poet and interdisciplinary artist exploring polysensory production and somatic grief through text/ile and film. Their work considers a collective qrip (queer+crip) consciousness by connecting to marvelous bodies living with complexity as sick or disabled. A Black creator of Jamaican Taino/Arawak ancestry, monoceros lives with their four-legged menagerie: Onion, Dax, Hoa and Essun in Treaty 1 also known as Winnipeg, MB, traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Dene, Cree, Dakota and Oji-Cree Nations and home of the Métis First Nation.
Host Suzette Mayr is the author of six novels including her most recent, The Sleeping Car Porter, winner of the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and longlist nominee for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction as well as the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Mayr’s other novels have won the ReLit Award and City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, and been nominated for the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean Region, the Writers' Guild of Alberta's Best First Book and Best Novel Awards, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. She is a former President of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. Mayr teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
See:
Remedies For Chiron
- m patchwork monoceros 
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In the astrological tradition, Chiron represents our deepest wound, and our lifelong efforts to heal it. Remedies for Chiron is a collection of poems that journey through the days of a young, queer, Black, and newly disabled poet trying to find a place to root and exist in the entirety of those intersections. Moving between cycles of grief and self-discovery, Remedies tells the story of a prismatic existence while also offering a balm for the hurts we all experience and the humility that comes with healing.
The Sleeping Car Porter
- Suzette Mayr
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Reader Reward Price: $21.56
WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022
OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRE
THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022
CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 GEORGE BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTION
When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair
The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.
Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with "George."
On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter's memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
"Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter offers a richly detailed account of a particular occupation and time--train porter on a Canadian passenger train in 1929--and unforcedly allows it to illuminate the societal strictures imposed on black men at the time--and today. Baxter is a secretly-queer and sleep-deprived porter saving up for dental school, working a system that periodically assigns unexplained demerits, and once a certain threshold is reached, the porter loses his job. Thus, success is impossible, the best one can do is to fail slowly. As Baxter takes a cross-continental run, the boarding passengers have more secrets than an Agatha Christie cast, creating a powder keg on train tracks. The Sleeping Car Porter is an engaging and illuminating novel about the costs of work, service, and secrets." - Keith Mosman, Powell's Books
