Accidental Memoirs: Creating Longform from Shortform

Join Rona Altrows (author of Anxious Kid Makes Pretty Good), Richard Kelly Kemick (author of Decadence), and Louise Bernice Halfe (author of wîhtamawik/Tell Them) as they discuss the process of curating a collective work of memoir from individual pieces. Moderated by Jennifer Bowering Delisle (author of Micrographia).

Anxious Kid Makes Pretty Good (Rona Altrows) is a candid, often wry collection of essays tracing one woman’s life with high anxiety, ADHD, and recurring depression-and the winding, determined path that eventually leads to a vocation as writer and editor. After years of earnest but unfulfilling jobs, she discovers that the very traits that once felt burdensome have become part of her creative engine. Told in two parts, the first offers a memoir-“All Day Long I Wondered”-chronicling the author’s struggles, stumbles, and small triumphs. The second, “Messy Process Does Not Mean Messy Result,” gathers hard-won reflections on writing and the writing life, delivered with clarity, empathy, and humour. Both writers and non-writers alike will find insight, encouragement, and recognition in these pages.

In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick’s “accidental memoir of a sort,” the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions—volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high school plays, Christmas villages, love—out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminiscent of the three Davids—Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace—these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life—quiet and desperate as it may at times be—worth celebrating.

In never-before-collected essays and new poems, poet and kêhtê-aya (Elder) Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer tells the story of how she woke up from the trauma of separation and found the source of her inspiration: her culture and the land. In Cree, inspiration is described as a sudden insight. It can come from visits from spirit, from the charged reciprocal experience of being taught by Elders and teaching the next generation, from speaking Cree, which allows the poet to “somersault into memory,” and from the practice of observing and being in relationship with the land as it “constantly gives birth to itself.” wîhtamawik/ Tell Them is a stunning love song to nêhiýaw ways of knowing—ways which Halfe has spent her life working to reclaim from the violence of colonization—to celebrate their survival and share their enduring teachings with future generations.

As Jennifer Bowering Delisle was on her path through infertility towards motherhood, she was simultaneously losing her own mother to a rare degenerative neurological disease and an approaching medically-assisted death. The lyric essays in Micrographia explore how losses can collide and reverberate both within our own lives and in our relationships with the rest of the world. How much do we share of our stories, and how much do we understand of what others are experiencing? Ultimately, this is a book about connection; “micrographia” is both the term for the diminished handwriting caused by neurological disease, and the narrative fragments offered here. 

This event takes place Saturday, October 17, 2026 at 10:00 am at the Muttart Theatre at the Stanley A Milner Library. Tickets are $20, or $10 (student/low income).

To purchase tickets and to learn more visit https://litfestalberta.org/events/accidental-memoirs-creating-longform-from-shortform/