What does it mean to write (or paint or sing or crochet) in times of profound change?

Join me and three remarkable authors for a free, intimate, online conversation on Existential Crisis, tomorrow, Tuesday, February 11, at 7 PM Eastern/4 PM Pacific. This one-hour event is hosted by Pen Parentis, a literary organization supporting writers who are parents. Each author will do a three minute reading and then we’ll chat and take questions.

I’m so eager to hear the others—Sarah Kain Gutowski, Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho, and Lisa Bird Wilson—describe what they’re doing creatively and how they’re doing it when everything seems to be falling down around us. Timely, right?

Here’s a little about each of them:

Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of The Familiar and the award-winning Fabulous Beast: Poems, with work appearing in The Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Southern Review. A Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College, she has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects combining poetry with visual and audio art, and her writing spans poetry, criticism, and mixed-genre work.

Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho is an award-winning author whose work appears in River Teeth, PRISM international, and other literary journals, with her manuscript The Feral Children of Dunbar Streetexploring transnational “astronaut” families earning First Runner Up for the 2021 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award. An active member of her literary community, she serves on multiple writers’ association boards and volunteers with prominent literary festivals in Vancouver.

Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Saskatchewan Métis and Cree writer whose internationally published novel Probably Ruby (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, while her previous works include the award-winning short story collection Just Pretending and poetry collection The Red Files, which explores the legacy of residential schools. The CEO of Gabriel Dumont Institute, Canada’s first Métis post-secondary education and cultural institute, she is also a founding member of the Saskatchewan Ânskohk Writers Circle Inc and was recently awarded the 2024 Carol Shields Prize Foundation Residency at Joy Kogawa House.

I hope you’ll join us online at 7 pm Eastern (4 pm Pacific). RSVP to Pen Parentis (HERE) and they will forward you the event link.