University of Toronto

ALL WELCOME

Fridays, 3-4pm, Bader Theatre, Victoria University, 93 Charles St. West

Hosted by Nick Mount, Department of English, University of Toronto

Karen Hines 6 February

“Pochsy is the light that keeps us laughing as we plunge into the darkness. Beckett would have fallen for her.”

—Simon Houpt, eye Weekly

Karen Hines is an award-winning Canadian writer, director, and performer in film, television and theatre. A Second City alumna, she’s best known as the creator of one of the most memorable characters ever to pout from a Canadian stage: the sexy, psychotic, mercury-poisoned Pochsy. “Imagine,” says the Montreal Herald, “Greek tragedy by Betty Boop.” That’s The Pochsy Plays (Coach House, 2004).

Karen Solie 6 March

“Karen Solie’s work reminds me that there is at the heart of metaphor a delicious amoral joy.”

—poet Don McKay

Born in Moosejaw, raised in southwest Saskatchewan, Karen Solie won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was short-listed for the world’s largest poetry prize, the Griffin, for her first book. Our featured collection is her second book, Modern and Normal (Brick, 2005), written mostly since her move to Toronto and torn between tractor memories and streetcar knowledge. The Globe and Mail called it the work of “one of the best poets of her generation.”

Sam Lipsyte 20 March

“Writing this deep is rare enough—writing this deep and this hysterical pretty much didn’t exist until Lipsyte began pouring it on the page.

—novelist Jerry Stahl

Sam Lipsyte is the former frontman for the noise-rock band Dungbeetle and the current Director of Creative Writing at Columbia University. Our featured work is Lipsyte’s wickedly funny, wickedly smart second novel Home Land (Picador, 2004), a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the first annual Believer Book Award. A taste: “Some nights I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it's not napalm. It’s apple butter. And it’s not a street. It’s my mother.”