Five-time Manitoba author Ariel Gordon of Winnipeg and Jessica Lake’s Mitchell Toews will join forces on Thursday, November 9 to launch new books! Toews is well-known to regulars at “The Listening Room” in Lac du Bonnet where he has presented many of his short stories on Open Mic Wednesdays.

Winnipeg’s At Bay Press publisher Matt Joudrey will be on hand to support these two authors. Filling out the evening for attendees are local musicians/singer-songwriters BERNADETTE CARLSON, LEFTY AUGER, and PAUL McINTOSH who will perform during the event. Refreshments, poetry, and prose will be available for purchase. Introductions, readings, music, and an author question period are planned. Doors open at 7 P.M.

Siteseeing is a poetry collection, a call-and-response co-written by Ariel Gordon and Saskatchewan writer Brenda Schmidt. The poets wrote about the natural world and people making their way through it all. They wrote home as they found it. Gordon and Schmidt share a pronounced love for nature and their poignant verse is particularly well-suited to boreal and prairie audiences alike.

Pinching Zwieback is the debut short fiction collection from Mitchell Toews. It is focused on recurrent, related characters with a common reality: small town Mennonite life. Toews, who grew up in his parents’ bakery in Steinbach Manitoba, employs a gritty style with ample psychological depth, humour, and a unique slant on the people once known as “the quiet in the land.” He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and most recently a finalist for the prestigious 2023 Nona Heaslip $15,000 “Best Canadian Short Fiction” Competition and Award (Exile Quarterly).

The artists are honoured to be performing on Treaty 1 and 3 lands in the homeland of the Métis Nation, the Winnipeg River basin.