I’ll be reading at ChiSeries Peterborough on Tuesday, May 16 at 7 PM with Nathan Adler, Ian Rogers and Heather Spears. Brilliant lineup! I’ll read from Mountain although it won’t be back from the printer yet. The launch is in Toronto at Glad Day on May 24th. I’ll post more about that soon. This excerpt from Mountain is from a short story entitled “Secret Campground,”published in The Peterborough Review’s Shelter Issue in 1994, edited by Julie Rouse and George Kirkpatrick.

I just headed away from it all one day and found myself going up the trail to Lydia’s without having in mind that’s where I wanted to go or even that I wanted to get away, just walking. When I got there things were different. For one thing, she was wearing clothes. A long dark blue thing, long skirt and big loose top. And her hair was out. Lydia had a lot of hair. There were a bunch of other women there too, her friends I guess, and they were all sitting around sewing. It was like a big quilt, and each of the women was working on a different section of it. “What is it?” I asked. “A star blanket,” one of the women answered, and when I got even closer I noticed they were getting the cloth for it out of their clothes. When they needed a new section one of the women would take some scissors and cut a big section out of her skirt. “Why are you cutting up your clothes?” I asked, and they all laughed. “Oh, lots more where this stuff comes from,” and I remembered having heard somewhere in my travels that the universe is constantly expanding. And when I got even closer I saw that they were embroidering the cloth in silver thread. I could make out all the constellations and a lot more I’ve never heard of. That blanket looked very warm, and more than anything I wanted to sleep in it, but I sat on the bench and sang with Lydia and her friends, watching them work. Then when it got so late I wouldn’t be able to find the trail home by myself and they couldn’t work anymore they lay it down on the ground and wrapped me up in it, and I lay beside the fire wrapped up in that star blanket, and listened to the women singing and laughing until I fell asleep. It was the best sleep I’ve ever had. I dreamed the blanket floated up into space, spreading itself out across the sky, and I went with it, travelling to galaxies no one’s ever been to, or even seen, only space wasn’t cold like they always said, but the warmest place I’ve ever been, and that’s the night that cured me of Winter and other predators like him for good. After that it was like I had another eye, a special eye that would tell me who was safe to hang with and who wasn’t, and I’ve never really gotten in any more trouble since.

NATHAN ADLER is a writer and an artist who works in many different mediums, including audio, video, film, drawing & painting, as well as glass. He is an MFA candidate for Creative Writing from UBC, currently works as a glass artist, and is working on a second novel and a collection of short stories. Nathan won the 2010 Canadian Aboriginal Writing Challenge. He is a member of Lac Des Mille Lacs First Nation, and currently resides in Mono, Ontario. In April 2017 Nathan was awarded a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award.

IAN ROGERS is the award-winning author of the dark fiction collection Every House Is Haunted. His novelette, “The House on Ashley Avenue,” was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and has been optioned for television by Universal Cable Productions. His work has been selected for The Best Horror of the Year and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Ian lives with his wife in Peterborough, Ontario. For more information, visit ianrogers.ca.

HEATHER SPEARS is is a poet, author and artist. She won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1989 and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award three times. Part I of Moonfall was originally published in Tesseracts 2 in 1987, and Moonfall appared in 1991. Sequences The Children of Átwar and The Taming were published in 1993 and 1996. Four Chapters from Lofot if I Live were published as “The Road to Sibir” in Prairie Fire, 1994. Other published fragments and appencides, as well as a dictionary, are forthcoming. Heather Spears travels widely in Europe and the Middle East and lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

URSULA PFLUG is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Green Music, The Alphabet Stones, Motion Sickness (a flash novel illustrated by SK Dyment) and the story collections After the Fires and Harvesting the Moon. Her award winning short stories have been taught at universities in Canada and India, and have appeared in Canada, the US and the UK, in genre and literary venues including Lightspeed, Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Leviathan, LCRW, Now Magazine, Bamboo Ridge, The New York Review of Science Fiction and many more. Her books have been endorsed by luminaries including Tim Wynne-Jones, Charles De Lint and NYT bestselling author of The Southern Reach, Jeff VanderMeer. Her latest book is the YA novella Mountain, forthcoming from Inanna in May. She is currently editing a new anthology for Exile, The Food of My People, with Candas Jane Dorsey. Visit her on the web at ursulapflug.ca