26@26: Torrey Peters & Casey Plett

@ - MT
Series Pass $89
Single Ticket $15
Online
@ - MT
Single Ticket: Oct 26 Casey Plett & Torrey Peters
$14.29 + GST
26@26 Series Pass
$84.76 + GST

The stars have aligned! Ever since Torrey Peters took the publishing world by storm with her debut novel Detransition Baby, everyone from Brooklyn to Berlin has been waiting for her to be in conversation with Casey Plett, whose new collection of short stories is the long-awaited follow-up to her Lambda and Amazon First Novel Award-winning Little Fish. Plett, who is adored in her native Canada, also won the Firecracker Award, and if you’ve watched the trajectory of Peters’ career, you know that adjective applies to the American supernova too.

The one-hour livestream event on Wordfest.com starts at 7:00 PM MT. (The pre-show begins at 6:50 PM.) The day after the show, we'll email you our unique Digital Doggie Bag, featuring links and extras sparked by the conversation. 

Can't watch live? Want to rewatch? Purchasing the 26@26 series pass or a single ticket gives you exclusive access to this show on demand until midnight on April 30, 2022. 

We’re grateful to Arsenal Pulp Press and Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible for us to connect you with these authors.

About Torrey Peters

Torrey Peters is the author of the novellas Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker which are available for free on her website torreypeters.com. Her novel Detransition, Baby was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. Peters grew up in Chicago and now lives in Brooklyn.

Follow her on Twitter @torreypeters and Instagram @torreyadora.

About Detransition, Baby

Detransition, Baby is so good I want to scream.” Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese – and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby – and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it – Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family – and raise the baby together?

This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.

About Casey Plett

Casey Plett is the author of the novel Little Fish, the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love, and co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers. She wrote a column on transitioning for McSweeney's Internet Tendency and her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Maclean's, The Walrus, Plenitude, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. Plett is the winner of an Amazon Canada First Novel Award, a Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction and received an Honour of Distinction from The Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. She lives in Windsor.

Follow her on Twitter @caseyplett and Instagram @plettsky.

About A Dream of a Woman

Casey remains one of THE authors to read if you want to understand the interior lives of trans women in this century. Meredith Russo, author of If I Was Your Girl

Award-winning novelist Casey Plett returns with a poignant suite of stories that center transgender women.

A Dream of a Woman is Plett's first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centred on transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York City warehouses, in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days.

In Hazel and Christopher, two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In Perfect Places," a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In Couldn't Hear You Talk Anymore, the narrator reflects on her tumultuous life and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman.

An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.

About Host Shelley Youngblut

Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. A former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada Am, she is now often unconventionally opinionated on CBC Calgary’s Eyeopener.

Follow her on Twitter @youngblut and Instagram @youngblutshelley.

Curiouser?

  • The Insider Insights of Detransition, Baby The New Yorker
  • Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters review  a comedy of manners The Guardian
  • Torrey Peters on Publishing the Most Subversive Book of the Year Rolling Stone
  • For award-winning writer Casey Plett, the beauty of trans lives resides in the details Xtra*
  • Casey Plett: What Does It Mean to Belong? Literary Hub
  • Casey Plett on truth, fiction, and the illusion of community -Quill and Quire

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