A book club for conservatives and liberals who want to get out of their echo chambers and bridge the great divide. Buy the book, read it, and come join us for a lively discussion.

We’ve all felt it: Whether we’ve argued pointlessly with someone on social media, felt our blood pressure rise as we’ve fought over politics with family members, or simply veered delicately away from certain topics, it’s hard to ignore the chasm between those who hold opposing political views. And it feels like it’s getting worse, that politics are getting uglier, and that reasonable discussion is falling by the wayside.

What can ordinary people do to bridge the great divide? We can read books that smart and reasonable people have written in defense of their views and we can talk about these books with others who may or may not wear the political stripes we do.

Come to Shelf Life Books for a monthly book club that does just that. Ideally, participants will have read the book assigned for that day, and will come prepared to discuss it. All of the books on our list will be made available by Shelf Life. We will meet from 10 am to noon on the last Saturday of every month.

January 25th:
The Right to Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Join us for a wonderful afternoon of classical guitar performances brought to you by the Classical Guitar Society of Calgary. Free admission!

Performers:
Tony Xie
Mustafa Kamaliddin
Eri McAuley
Yu Nakamura

The Classical Guitar Society of Calgary was founded in 1974 to promote interest in and study of classical guitar. That is still their goal. The society brings some of the best classical guitarists from around the world to Calgary to perform and teach masterclasses. They also hold social gatherings where local amateur and professional guitarists perform for each other.

http://www.classicalguitarsocietyofcalgary.com/

Join us for Storytelling Alberta's next story café, featuring storytellers Madiha Madda and Cassy Welburn, jazz musicians Nate Chiang and John Wielebnowski, as well as an open mic. Hosted by Karen Gummo.

Are you a BIPOC artist or writer with burning questions about

• the writing process
• the publishing process
• grant writing
• CV writing
• social media/self-promotion
• organization/self-motivation
• touring
• performing?

Email events@shelflifebooks.ca to make an appointment to consult with Vivek.

Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, and film. Her best-selling book I'm Afraid of Men was heralded by Vanity Fair as "cultural rocket fuel," and her album with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part-Time Woman, was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize. She is one half of the music duo Too Attached and the founder of the publishing imprint VS. Books. A five-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, Vivek was a 2016 Pride Toronto Grand Marshal,was featured on The Globe and Mail's Best Dressed list, and has received honours from the Writers' Trust of Canada and The Publishing Triangle.

Can You Hear Me Now? is a Jr High and High School open mic and poetry slam event that takes place monthly in Calgary, and in Edmonton - with numerous events - culminating in a big final provincial poetry slam event!

Join us for the hometown launch of K.B. Thors's debut poetry collection, Vulgar Mechanics, with guest reader Jenna Butler.

In Vulgar Mechanics, K.B. Thors seeks to invent new strategies for survival through the two most basic tools available to the speaker: language and the body. The work begins in collapse, the poems acting as witness to the death of a mother. The speaker documents how, as her mother's physical body disintegrates, hidden knowledge rises to the surface in the form of "seismic legacy data." As dark secrets are released, the desire for justice demands improvisation. Moving from the fracked landscapes of the prairies to the steep verticality of New York, this is a collection concerned with hunger, anger, and the shifting fault-lines between play and pain. The poems celebrate the body as a vehicle of excavation and self-determination in a world in which there may be no such a thing as a safe word. Thors pushes against the boundaries of language - the material of sense, meaning - in order to claim a quantum vision of the self, one who transforms trauma into energy through its own multiplicity. The body becomes both ghost and machine, burning the past in its engine to make something beautiful and new, "a thunder egg / bucking the fire pit."

K.B. Thors is a poet, translator, and educator from rural Alberta, Canada. Her translation of Stormwarning (Phoneme, 2018) by Icelandic poet Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir won the American Scandinavian Foundation's Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize and is currently nominated for the PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation. She is also the Spanish-English translator of Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else by Soledad Marambio (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). Her poems, essays and literary criticism have appeared around the U.S., U.K., and Canada. She has an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow in Poetry.

Jenna Butler is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, Seldom Seen Road, Wells, and Aphelion; an award-winning collection of ecological essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge the of Grizzly Trail; and a new travelogue, Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard. Her sixth book, a collection of essays titled Revery: A Year of Bees, is forthcoming from Wolsak and Wynn in 2020.

An evening of Poetry, Writing, Art and Music honouring the feminine—however you define that! Readers and performers:

Nazeefa Ahmed
Telmo Dos Santos
Moni Brar
Joshua Whitehead
Skylar Kay
Guest curator: Josephine LoRe
Musical performance: Evan Freeman
Visual art: Terra Simieritsch

Plus a mini open mic!

Suggested Donation of $10-20—pay what you can.

Single Onion is Calgary's longest-running poetry reading series.

Reader info to come!

A book club for conservatives and liberals who want to get out of their echo chambers and bridge the great divide. Buy the book, read it, and come join us for a lively discussion.

We’ve all felt it: Whether we’ve argued pointlessly with someone on social media, felt our blood pressure rise as we’ve fought over politics with family members, or simply veered delicately away from certain topics, it’s hard to ignore the chasm between those who hold opposing political views. And it feels like it’s getting worse, that politics are getting uglier, and that reasonable discussion is falling by the wayside.

What can ordinary people do to bridge the great divide? We can read books that smart and reasonable people have written in defense of their views and we can talk about these books with others who may or may not wear the political stripes we do.

Come to Shelf Life Books for a monthly book club that does just that. Ideally, participants will have read the book assigned for that day, and will come prepared to discuss it. All of the books on our list will be made available by Shelf Life. We will meet from 10 am to noon on the last Saturday of every month.

February 29th:
National Populism by Roger Eatwell

Join us for a wonderful afternoon of classical guitar performances brought to you by the Classical Guitar Society of Calgary. Free admission!

Performers TBA

The Classical Guitar Society of Calgary was founded in 1974 to promote interest in and study of classical guitar. That is still their goal. The society brings some of the best classical guitarists from around the world to Calgary to perform and teach masterclasses. They also hold social gatherings where local amateur and professional guitarists perform for each other.

http://www.classicalguitarsocietyofcalgary.com/

Can You Hear Me Now? is a junior high and high school open mic and poetry slam event that takes place monthly in Calgary.
 

Join us for the launch of Katherine Fawcett's new collection of short stories, The Swan Suit.

Yearn for a life of celibacy? Why not try sealing each of your orifices one by one with silicon caulk from the hardware store until your randy husband gets the message and turns into a tree? This is a totally reasonable chain of events—if you’re a character in one of Katherine Fawcett’s dark, quirky stories. Blending banalities of everyday human dilemmas and routines with elements of fairy tales, magic, the macabre or the downright inventive, Fawcett’s fiction is anything but predictable.

Katherine Fawcett’s previous short story collection, The Little Washer of Sorrows (Thistledown Press, 2015) was shortlisted for the ReLit Short Fiction Award and for a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her short fiction has also appeared in Event, Geist, FreeFall, Grain, SubTerrain and Other Voices. She lives in Squamish, BC.