Join Anita Lahey and Pauline Conley for the Winnipeg launch of The Fire Monster (Palimpsest Press) hosted by Ariel Gordon.

The launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream featuring live chat. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

Would you return to the landscape you watched burn as a child, especially if you and everyone else believed that the manic, wind-fuelled, merciless fire was your fault?

Set in a fictional version of the real Main-à-Dieu, Nova Scotia, where a 1976 wildfire caused catastrophic devastation, The Fire Monster tells the tale of a skilled oil sands worker who returns to the Cape Breton fishing village where, as a child, he was blamed for causing the fire that tore through the local community, consuming bush, trees, houses, boats, cars, animals and the century-old gothic church. At once a poetry collection, a story inspired by true events, and a visually stunning comic-book adventure, The Fire Monster is a mixed genre story for the ages that explores the aftermath of tragedy, the frayed bonds of friendship and family, and love’s redemptive power.

Anita Lahey’s latest book, The Last Goldfish: a True Tale of Friendship, was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. Series editor for the Best Canadian Poetry anthology, she’s the author of two poetry collections (Spinning Side Kick and Out to Dry in Cape Breton), as well as The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture. Anita lives with her family in Ottawa, on unceded Alongonquin, Anishinabek territory.

Pauline Conley recently forayed from an established career as a painter and explainer to 'do comics.' The Fire Monster is her first graphic novel.

Host Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. Her fifth book, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate change across the prairies, written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt, will be published by At Bay Press in fall 2023. Gordon’s work has appeared recently in Canadian Notes and Queries, Canthius, periodicities, and The Quarantine Review and is forthcoming in FreeFall and Grain, as 2nd place winner of the Kloppenberg Hybrid Grain Contest.