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Wordfest Presents Sarah Polley

@ - MT
$15 + GST & FEES (In-Person Ticket)
POSTPONED
@ - MT

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we must postpone our show with Sarah Polley, originally scheduled for this Saturday, May 28. We are working to find a new date for this much anticipated show within our fall Imaginairium festival, September 29 - October 6.

All ticket holders have been contacted, and they will be automatically transferred to the new show date. If you currently have tickets and would prefer to request a full refund, please contact boxoffice@wordfest.com.

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Wordfest is thrilled to present Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor Sarah Polley and her powerful new book of essays, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations With a Body of Memory.

The hour-long conversation starts at 7:00 PM MT and will be hosted by Shelley Youngblut, Wordfest’s CEO and Creative Ringleader. There will be a signing line, as well as our pandemic-friendly London Book Service, in which attendees can pre-order books for signing in advance. As always, you’ll also receive our unique Digital Doggie Bag after the event with bonus extras sparked by the conversation.

We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible for us to connect with Sarah Polley.

Our Collective Safety & Comfort 

To provide a community-first return to live programming for patrons, authors, Wordfest staff, volunteers and the venue staff, we will be taking the following precautions.

  • Masks are strongly encouraged. We recommend wearing your mask at all times while at the venue, including when seated in the theatre and in the post-show signing line.
  • We will also offer “London Book Service” as an alternative to the post-event book signing. (Patrons can pre-purchase books through Owl’s Nest Books in advance or at the door and authors will sign these copies prior to the event, allowing pre-purchased copies to be picked up before and after the show from a table separate from the book signing line.)

About Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor. After making short films, she made her feature-length directorial debut with the drama film Away from Her in 2006; Polley received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, which she adapted from the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Her other projects include the documentary film Stories We Tell (2012), which won the New York Film Critics Circle prize and the National Board of Review award for best documentary; the miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (2017); and the romantic comedy Take This Waltz (2011). Polley began her acting career as a child, starring in many productions for film and television. Follow her on Twitter @realSarahPolley and Instagram @realsarahpolley.

About Run Towards the Danger

“Fascinating, harrowing, courageous, and deeply felt, these explorations of ‘dangerous stories,’ harmful past events, and trials of the soul speak to all who’ve encountered dark waters and have had to navigate them.”  — Margaret Atwood

Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2022 by Entertainment Weekly, Lit Hub, and AV Club, Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present

These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.

Sarah Polley’s work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.”
 
Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high-risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger.

In this extraordinary book, Polley explores what it is to live in one’s body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing. 

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.

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