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LitFest: Graphic Memoir, with Teresa Wong and Sarah Leavitt
DATE :
DEADLINE: October 18, 2025 - 11:30 pm
Join us for this very special reading and conversation with graphic memoirists Teresa Wong and Sarah Leavitt, featuring their latest graphic memoirs, All Our Ordinary Stories and Something, Not Nothing.
All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey
WINNER of 2 Alberta Literary Awards (the Memoir Award and the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction)
When: Saturday, October 18, 2025 @ 3 to 4:30 pm
Where: Citadel Theatre (Zeidler Hall), 9828 - 101A Ave, Edmonton
From the author of Dear Scarlet comes a graphic memoir about the obstacles one daughter faces as she attempts to connect with her immigrant parents. Beginning with her mother’s stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories – some epic, like her mother and father’s daring escapes from communes during China’s Cultural Revolution, and some banal, like her quitting Chinese school to watch Saturday morning cartoons – Wong carefully examines the cultural, historical, language, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family, seeking answers to the questions “Where did I come from?” and “Where are we going?” At the same time, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life.
A book for children of immigrants trying to honour their parents’ pasts while also making a different kind of future for themselves, All Our Ordinary Stories is poignant in its understated yet nuanced depictions of complicated family dynamics. Wong’s memoir is a heartfelt exploration of identity and inheritance, as well as a testament to the transformative power of stories both told and untold.
Something, Not Nothing:A Story of Grief and Love
Finalist, Will Eisner Award; Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes
A poignant and beautifully illustrated graphic memoir about love and loss and navigating a new life. In April 2020, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. About a month after Donimo’s death, Sarah began making comics again as a way to deal with her profound sense of grief and loss. The comics started as small sketches but quickly transformed into something totally unfamiliar to her. Abstract images, textures, poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink, and coloured pencil – for Sarah, the journey through grief was impossible to convey without bold formal experimentation. She spent two years creating these comics.
The result is Something, Not Nothing, an extraordinary book that delicately articulates the vagaries of grief and the sweet remembrances of enduring love. Moving and impressionistic, Something, Not Nothing shows that alongside grief, there is room for peace, joy, and new beginnings.
For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/