The Elora Writers’ Festival presents an intimate evening with a local author at the festival’s second “Books and Beer” event.
Books and Beer 2 features J.M. Frey, author of the December-released meta-fantasy The Untold Tale, and science fiction adventure Triptych in 2011.
The event will take place on Jan. 26 starting at 7pm at Roxanne’s Reflections Book and Card Shop in downtown Fergus. Tickets are $15 and include an author reading, question and answer period, snacks and beer, the latter sponsored by Wellington Brewery.
Tickets are available in advance or at the door – space is limited. The event was created in 2015 by writers’ festival committee member and short fiction contest chair Jean Mills as a fundraiser for the festival. Last year’s event featured rural noir author Brad Smith.
“It was a successful fundraiser for the 2015 Elora Writers’ Festival and brought literature and libations to a cold January evening,” committee member Dave Beynon said in a press release.
“We’re building on that success with Books and Beer 2, featuring local author, J.M. Frey.”
Beynon added, “The people who came last year enjoyed the intimacy of the event,” he said. “There were a couple of readings, a Q and A session, lively conversation among the attendees and, of course, beer.”
A “fanthropologist” and “professional geek” who’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries and on TV, Frey is also an actor and voice actor – she appeared in last fall’s Vision Theatre production of War of the Worlds.
Triptych was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, won the San Francisco Book Festival award for SF/F, was nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly.
The Untold Tale, the first of the Accidental Turn trilogy, is a meta-fantasy epic in which a woman from our world is drawn into the fictional world of a series of fantasy epics that she’s been a fan of and studied all her life.
The book is both an engaging and modern epic fantasy and a commentary on epic fantasy’s stereotypes, traditions and tropes, organizers state.
Frey has also published several other works, including a short story in the Accidental Turn world and an adult colouring book, and after the next two parts of the Accidental Turn come out later this year, has a steampunk action series, The Skylark’s Saga, scheduled to start in 2017.
Books and Beer 2 will also include featured artwork by local steampunk artist D.W. Mills for auction, as well as information about the upcoming Elora Writers’ Festival in May and the annual fiction contest.
Held at Aboyne Hall at the Wellington County Museum and Archives on May 29 from 1 to 4pm, the Elora Writers’ Festival features Frey; west-coast noir writer Dietrich Kalteis; former editor and publisher Douglas Gibson (Across Canada by Story); poet, children’s author and novelist Pamela Mordecai; and Toronto’s Terry Fallis, returning for a third appearance at the festival.
For details and information, elorawritersfestival.blogspot.ca.
