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Open Secrets

With Heather O’Neill, Caroline Adderson, Deepa Rajagopalan, Sarah Hampson, and Sue Goyette

Reading and writing with a trauma-informed point of view
Friday, November 8
12:30PM – 2:30PM (Doors Open at 12:00PM)
The Carleton (1685 Argyle St, Halifax)

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Description

Proceeds for this event go to Avalon Sexual Assault Centre

Content note: CSA

When Andrea Skinner wrote in the Toronto Star about being assaulted by her stepfather when she was a child, and about how her mother chose to stay with the man instead of to stand by her daughter, many survivors saw their own experience reflected in her story and felt the reverberations. At the same time, Alice Munro’s daughters asked readers to continue engaging with their mother’s work, but through a new lens.

In this two-part conversation, Heather O’Neill, Caroline Adderson and Deepa Rajagoplan join journalist Sarah Hampson to talk about how they’re reading Alice Munro now. Then, poet Sue Goyette presents new and recent work that dives deeply into her own experience in an unsafe house, and how trauma moves through image and language on the page. 

You may recognize yourself in these conversations. Please do what you need to in order to care for yourself before, during, and after this event.

Speakers

  • Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads, was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives there today.

  • Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels (A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice, The Sky Is Falling, Ellen in Pieces, A Russian Sister), three collections of short stories (Bad Imaginings, Pleased to Meet You, A Way to Be Happy) as well as many books for young readers. Her work has received numerous award nominations including the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. In 2017, she was a YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Arts, Culture and Design nominee. Her awards include three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement, and a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction.

  • Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, shortlisted for the 2024 Giller prize. She won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award for the title story of the collection. Her writing has appeared in literary magazines such as The New Quarterly, Room Magazine, The Malahat Review, and the anthologies like the Bristol Short Story Prize 2023. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.

  • Sarah Hampson is an award-winning journalist and author, who was a columnist and feature writer for over 20 years with The Globe and Mail.

  • Sue Goyette has published nine books of poems and a novel. Her collections include Monoculture, The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, and Ocean (for which she was awarded the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017) and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spray painted on a sidewalk and tattooed. She was nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several national awards. She lives in Halifax (K'jipuktuk) and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.