An evening of Poetry, Writing, Art and Music to honour the feminine - however you define that.
+ a mini Open Mic!

Featuring:
Kat Heger
Trynne Delaney
Dania Idriss
Nikki Maud-Marie Reimer
Jess Nicol
Maryam Gowralli
Maeve Hanna

Visual art by:
Stacey Walyuchow

Plus a Mini OPEN MIC - 4 spots 3 minute each
sign up at 6:45

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

featuring 

 

Josh Smith, Clara Joseph, Stuart Ian McKay, and Peter Midgley

Join us for an afternoon with Sharon Wood, author of Rising: Becoming the First Canadian Woman to Summit Everest.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
In Rising, Wood explores the pivotal experiences, influences and effort that led to her successful ascent. Often the only woman on expeditions, Wood was an outlier in the world of high-altitude alpine climbing. Recounting her career-defining climb, she shares inspiring triumphs over personal and physical adversities, the camaraderie and rivalry of elite climbers and the challenges of falling in and out of love, all while never losing her drive to keep going. Rising also investigates life in Everest’s long shadow, Wood’s struggles with unexpected acclaim and expectations following her successful ascent—and how she ultimately found her place in the world.

Sharon Wood is the owner of her own speaking and mountain guiding business, Adventure Dynamics. She has co-authored an ebook with Pat Morrow, Everest: High Expectations (Bungalo Books, 2012) and has been published in several anthologies, including Everest: Eighty Years of Triumph and Tragedy (Mountaineers Press, 2001). This is her first full-length memoir. Wood can now be found in Canmore, AB, writing, public speaking and, of course, climbing mountains.

Odysseus, Fiddlin' Tam and a Russian Prince are coming to Shelf Life Books for our first Story Cafe of the new storytelling season. Join us for "Epic" tales of heroes and perilous journeys. Refreshments served. Entry by suggested donation of $10.

"While one need not be grieving to find resonance here, those who grief has touched will not feel silenced or pushed outside. In eloquent, luminous prose, these essays will be a companion to many and will be a collection to return to (again lives inside against)."

Please join us for the Calgary launch of Against Death: 35 Essays on Living, featuring readings by Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Nikki Reimer and guests.

Thursday, Sept. 26
7-9 p.m.
Readings start at 7:30
Shelf Life Books
Free

Against Death: 35 Essays On Living articulates the personal experiences of each author’s “near-deathness,” utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what “magical thinking” proposes. These pieces are incisive and articulate, avoiding the usual platitudes, feel-good bromides, and pep talks associated with near-death encounters. The writing moves past the sob story and confronts the tough circumstance of facing death with truth and compassion, no matter how ugly or (in)convenient.

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Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of the book of poems serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016), nominated for the 2017 Raymond Souster Award. She is the co-editor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), a City of Vancouver Book Award finalist, and she is the founder of Thursdays Writing Collective as well as the editor and publisher of eight of its anthologies. Her chapbook Trauma Head (Otter Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award and is a precursor to a second book of poetry by the same name (Trauma Head, Anvil Press, Nov 2018), which was shortlisted for the Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

NIKKI REIMER writes poetry, essays and criticism. Her published books are My Heart is a Rose Manhattan, DOWNVERSE and [sic], which was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her writing has also been shortlisted for the Lit POP poetry and PRISM International Creative Non Fiction Prize. Reimer is the sister of late Calgary musician Chris Reimer, guitarist for Women, and The Dodos in 2011. Nikki is a co-founder of the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society: https://www.cjjrlegacyfund.com/

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Land Acknowledgment
We acknowledge that this event takes place on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprising the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations), as well as the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations). The City of Calgary is also home to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III.

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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.

September 28th:
Mindful Politics by Melvin McLeod (Ed.)

Hosted by Shelf Life Books, join Gail’s husband, Jon Hall for an afternoon of conversation and stories about the Maps, Markets, and Matzo Ball Soup and Jon’s life with Chef Gail Hall.

Maps, Markets and Matzo Ball Soup follows the life of Gail Hall who, over the course of two decades, was an institution in the culinary community in Edmonton, AB, and abroad. Having led 30 culinary tours to local, national, and international destinations, she brought countless recipes and stories back home to be broadcasted on both TV and Radio. Gail was a presenter at Christmas in November at the Jasper Park Lodge for 22 years, a regular contributor to Avenue magazine, a CBC Edmonton food columnist for five years. She is considered a figurehead of Edmonton’s food scene who never wavered from supporting of good, fair, local food producers.

Jon Hall has retired from a 40-year career in the not-for-profit sector working for Scouts-Canada, REALTORS® Association of Edmonton, and his own association management company. His volunteer activities include numerous leadership positions in community and homelessness advocacy organizations and is currently chair of Arts Habitat Edmonton. Although he never worked with-or-for Gail’s companies, he stood beside his wife of 34-years on international tours, local events, and business adventures. He has now transitioned into a book publisher, speaker, and trust fund manager in support of the ChefGail Fund administered by the Edmonton Community Foundation.

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 launch of Talonbooks fall 2019 poetry titles. The authors will be present for readings and signings.

Eight Track by Oana Avasilichioaei:
JUST LIKE I LIKE IT by Danielle LaFrance
Pots and Other Living Beings by annie ross

Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Shelf Life Books, 1302 4th St. SW, Calgary, AB
Doors at 6:30 p.m.
Event starts at 7:00 p.m.

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In JUST LIKE I LIKE IT, Danielle LaFrance combines poetry and
autotheory as a means of targeting ideological infatuation, spilling into an obsession with ideological abolishment. JUST LIKE I LIKE IT searches for ways to kill and abolish “it,” seeking means to get it done right, even when attempted slowly and stupidly, even if the only way out is death. LaFrance draws on stupidity, sadomasochism, pretend power, parasitism, and violent revolutionary desubjectification to shape a felt experience, not so much asking as inhabiting a series of questions, including: “What are the implications of abolishing the self as it is racialized, gendered, and classed?” and “Can a theoretical framework hold every contradiction in tandem when every contradiction is substantial and felt?” Each page of JUST LIKE I LIKE IT pokes “it” awake all over again, culminating in a number of accomplished failures, including “It Makes Me Iliad,” a reworking of Homer’s Iliad. Poetry, it seems, is the best weapon for wiping it out with fewer casu
alties – which is why it is never enough.i.

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Pots and Other Living Beings is a literally and visually compelling first poetry collection by upcoming Indigenous artist annie ross. The text combines socially conscious poems with geographically grounded photographs, each describing an aspect of living in the postmodern, neoliberal age. All compositions emphasize in evocative ways our times’ disillusions and disenchantments, promised and failed utopias, material and cultural ruins, alienations and dispossessions. The work stems from the poet’s gathering of thousands of photographs and field notes during a research trip to the Southwestern United States, exploring the founding, making, dreaming, and proliferation of nuclear weapons since the 1940s.
The poems in Pots and Other Living Beings hint at and reflect upon the food, arts, schools, hospitals, family farms, and alternate existences peoples could have enjoyed if our resources, imagination, time, and energy had been directed towards l i f e, in all of its forms.

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Poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei’s Eight Track is a transliterary exploration of traces. Sound recordings, surveillance cameras, desert geoglyphs, drone operators, refugee interviews, animal imprints, and audio signals manifest moments of inspired wonder, systems of power, slippages, debris. In “the great era of seeing” when the boundary between tracking agent and monitored subject is worn thin by politics and commerce, Eight Track assembles a set of discordant melodies, polyphonic voices, transcriptions, theatres, and images in a struggle to hold on to agency and awe. Stirring from languages of oppression to languages of resistance, Eight Track echolocates the nameless, the noisy, the scattered, and the voiceless. This is ultimately a book of relations—of each of us to each other, to other life forms, to environments, to cultures, to the obsolete and the absolute, to the animal vitality we share.

We're overjoyed for the launch of An Honest Woman by Shelf Life's own JoAnn McCaig! Join us on October 3 for an evening of readings, mingling, refreshments, and a book signing with the author.

About An Honest Woman: If there ever was a time and place to explore the territory of mature women and their journeys this would be the time. The subjects of sex, passion, confidence in JoAnn McCaig’s An Honest Woman are beautifully played out against society’s stereotypes of women as they age and as they confront the truths of themselves outside the societal frameworks in which they have been boxed.

JoAnn McCaig is a very bookish person, and is the author of a novel, The Textbook of the Rose, and of a critical study, Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives. She taught university English for many years and now is the co-owner of an independent bookstore in Calgary.

Join us for a western-themed fall reading from "Ranching Under the Arch" by Larraine Andrews, with authors Rachel Herbert and Aritha van Herk.
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D. Larraine Andrews makes her home in High River, Alberta, a short distance from the Rocky Mountains and directly in the path of the magical Chinook wind. She is the author of The Cowboy Trail: A Guide to Alberta’s Historic Cowboy Country and Great Walks of the World. She has written extensively for international and national magazines and newspapers and was a contributing author to the 2008 edition of Defining Moments in History.
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Rachel Herbert was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. The great-granddaughter of pioneer ranchers, she returned to her roots and the family ranch near Nanton, Alberta. At historic Trail?s End Ranch she raises and markets old-fashioned grass-fed beef and chases her two free-range kids. When she?s not feeding cows, or kids, she can be found reading, riding, or getting her hands dirty in the garden or on the ranch.
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Aritha van Herk is an award-winning Canadian writer whose work has been acclaimed throughout North America and Europe. Her books include Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address, Places Far From Ellesmere, Restlessness, In Visible Ink, A Frozen Tongue and Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta. She first worked with George Webber on the photography book In This Place, published by Frontenac House. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and a professor who teaches Canadian literature and creative writing in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Aritha lives in Calgary, Alberta.