Come to my book launch at the Book Warehouse on Main Street in Vancouver on March 18. Doors open at 6:30, event at 7:00pm. Jill Yonit Goldberg, author of After We Drowned will be there too. I’ll be doing readings on Haida Gwaii in late April or early May, and in Calgary, Prince George, Smithers, Terrace and Prince Rupert in August. Still working on Victoria and other spots!
Former Haida Gwaii reporter and freelance writer Heather Ramsay makes her fiction debut with a startling coming-of-age novel about challenging old beliefs and finding one’s place in the world. In A Room in the Forest, nineteen-year-old Lily knows she doesn’t belong at a dead-end job in her father’s small-town Alberta furniture store, not when she’s been offered a job in the ancient forests of Haida Gwaii. But her search for a sense of place becomes more complicated when a band of tree planters she meets on the road question her assumptions about whose land she is moving towards.
After We Drowned is a tragic coming-of-age story with a stealthy, yet kick-ass, feminist subplot set in the swampy heart of Cajun America. After an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico explodes, everything in fifteen-year-old Jesse’s life deep in rural Louisiana is derailed. Taking his father’s lessons to heart, Jesse lashes out, getting into fistfights, chasing sex, and finding iffy ways to earn money. When he sets in motion a chain of events that leads his family into danger, Jesse must finally decide if he can save his loved ones by being true to his gentle nature, or if proving himself means adopting the cruelty of his father and his surroundings.
When: March 18th
Where: Book Warehouse Main St.
Time: Doors at 6:30 PM; event at 7 PM
Authors
Heather Ramsay lives and writes in unceded Ts’elxwéyeqw territory (otherwise known as Chilliwack, BC) and is heavily influenced by place: the ten years she lived on Haida Gwaii; the seven years she lived in Wet’suwet’en territory; her childhood in Treaty 7 – Tsuutʼina and Blackfoot Territory (otherwise known as Calgary, Alberta)—it’s all in there somewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.
Jill Yonit Goldberg is a Prairie-born former Montrealer living in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish territories. She is co-author on The Fire Still Burns: Life In and After Residential School (Purich Books/UBC Press, 2023). Jill is half of a tango dancing pair, a half-decent photographer, and a very occasional half-marathoner. She teaches literature and creative writing at Langara College.
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