On Friday, April 21 at 6pm, join Massy Arts Society, Massy Books and Arsenal Pulp Press for the launch of Hazel Jane Plante’s new novel, Any Other City.
Any Other City is a hot and wise book about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through queer sex and art making. Hazel Jane Plante will also be joined by writers, artists and beloved friends Chantal Gibson and Onjana Yawnghwe for an evening in celebration of love, pleasure and kinship.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
Registeration is free/by donation, open to all and required for entrance.
Purchase
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.
For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility
Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
About the Author
Hazel Jane Plante is a librarian, musician, coastal creature, and writer. Her debut novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (Metonymy Press, 2019) received a Lambda Literary award and was a finalist for both a Publishing Triangle Award and a BC and Yukon Book Prize. Her second novel, Any Other City, is forthcoming in April 2023 from Arsenal Pulp Press. She releases solo music under the name lo-fi lioness, hosts a podcast about writing while trans called t4t, and lives with her gorgeous cat, Gus, on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
About The Book
Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang. Side B finds Tracy in 2019, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure.
While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings eventually sprout in empty spaces after things have been broken open.
In Conversation With:
Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Her first poetry collection How She Read (Caitlin 2019) won the 2020 Pat Lowther Award and the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow-up with/holding (Caitlin 2021) was nominated for the Raymond Souster Award. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, both graphic poetry collections bring a critical lens to the historical representation and reproduction of Blackness across cultural media. Gibson teaches in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Onjana Yawnghwe was born in Thailand but is a part of the Shan people from Burma. Her first poetry book, Fragments, Desire, was published by Oolichan Books in 2017 and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and long-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second book The Small Way was published with Caitlin Press in 2018 and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book of poetry, We Follow the River, is forthcoming from Caitlin Press in spring 2024. She works as a nurse in mental health and is currently working on a graphic novel about her family set in Burma, Thailand, and Canada.