(Re)Viewed by James K. Moran: Return to the Tree Reading Series, as Audience Member

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Return to the Tree Reading Series, as Audience Member

Thanks to literary event organizer Pearl Pirie, here's a pic of me reading at last night's Feb.27 Tree Reading Series at Black Squirrel Books & Espresso Bar. My voice was rough, and I have been having some rough times, having lost a friend recently. Still, l wanted to attend a series I once ran from 2000 to 2005 - but this time as an audience member.

On that note, MC Chris Johnson did an admirable and affable job hosting. Jennifer LoveGrove, whose novel Watch How We Walk (ECW Press) I admittedly champion, delivered moving poems from Beautiful Children With Pet Foxes (BookThug, now Book*Hug) about supporting someone close to you who has mental illness. Nigerian poet and performer Segun Akinlolu involved the good-sized audience in his charming, folksy and roots musicality.

I was heartened to see familiar writerly faces, including Grant Wilkins, Sandra Ridley, Michelle Desbarats, and Brian Pirie. And, of course, I got to meet Jennifer LoveGrove for the first time (and shamelessly comp her my book Town & Train after I bought another copy of Watch How We Walk for her to sign).

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About Fear Itself

Canadian author James K. Moran's debut collection of dark fiction offers fantasy, sci-fi, and horror shot through with hope and friendship. Inside, readers will discover sea serpents among the roiling waters of the St. Lawrence River under a dilapidated international bridge; a misguided bi mage negotiating with a demon he accidentally summoned into his dorm; a baby monitor issuing the voice of an inter-dimensional dark god; a couple in Picton County fleeing an ancient entity they cannot see directly that demands a blood sacrifice; queer ghosts haunting a British nightclub; two salty old ranch hands outside Lethbridge, Alberta, betting on who is a better shot in what may be the apocalypse; a shape-changing huckster seducing apathetic suburbanites; a gay rare-collectibles hunter hunted by a being moving between the Internet, film, and fact; a cat-fished giant marauding the backroads of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry counties; a gay wine shop manager discovering more than a dusty Moscato lurking in the musty basement; and a pterodactyl loose downtown.

About Town & Train

In a small Ontario town, seventeen-year-old John Daniel wakes by the railroad tracks with no recollection of how he got there. Something called him from his bed. Officer David Forester, a recent transfer from Toronto, struggles to fit into the local police force, despite resistance from established circles. Both soon suspect a more pervasive and menacing collusion occurring in town when an antique steam train arrives late in the night. At the phantasmal engine, a conductor promises the desperate locals escape from their town dying with so many closed stores and shattered dreams--but there is no denying what the stranger really brings is the stuff of nightmares.

"Though they traffic gleefully—sometimes ruthlessly—in the terrors that haunt his fraught characters’ dreams (and, all too often, realities)—James [K.] Moran’s stories inhabit a shadowland filled with sights and experiences worth having or remembering: the first, sleep-famished months of parenthood; the memory of lost friends; Canadian woods and waterscapes; the hunt for impossibly rare films, which is almost always more fun, and—in the case of these stories—definitely safer, than completing one of those hunts. These are characters not just clinging to but immersing in their lives. Not that that’s going to save them, of course..." —Glen Hirshberg, author of Infinity Dreams and the Motherless Children trilogy

(Re)Viewed by James K. Moran

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Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Return to the Tree Reading Series, as Audience Member

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