Presented by the Vancouver Writer’s Fest and the Vancouver Public Library.
The 2023 Incite season premieres with a powerful duo of debut novelists already making review headlines. Journey Prize-winner Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree has made waves among critics and contemporaries alike, with Eden Robinson calling the work and its characters “wry, moody, and subversive” and Cherie Dimaline noting that once the story starts, “there’s no backing out, no pause, no stall.” Some Hellish, by Nicholas Herring, is the winner of the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, noted for Herring’s “passion for the language of work, […] droll and philosophical, ribald and poetic.” Both join esteemed Festival friend and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize-finalist Carleigh Baker for an evening of literary magic with two acclaimed, propulsive debuts.
About Bad Cree
Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, Mackenzie’s life spirals into a living nightmare—crows are following her around and she’s getting texts from her dead sister on the other side—it becomes clear that these dreams have terrifying, real-life consequences. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in an attempt to uncover what is happening. Haunting, fierce, and an ode to female relations and kinship, Bad Cree is a gripping, arresting debut by an unforgettable voice.
About Some Hellish
Herring is a hapless lobster fisher lost in an unexceptional life. One December day, he cuts a hole in the living room floor and installs a hoist, altering the entire course of his life. His wife leaves with their children. He buries the family dog on Christmas Eve. He and his friend Gerry crash in a field, only to be rescued by a passing group of Tibetan monks. Later, they find themselves caught in a storm. Herring falls overboard, lost at sea for days, and is assumed dead. And then, he is found, miraculously, alive. Some Hellish is a story about anguish and salvation, the quiet grace and patience of transformation, the powers of addiction and fear, and the immense capacity of friendship and of love.
