This year’s New Voices event features two authors with remarkable debut memoirs. Carly Butler’s memoir, Apocalypse Child, tells of her conspiracy-filled upbringing and the struggle to find her true self. Tara Sidhoo Fraser’s memoir, When My Ghost Sings, recounts her fight to recall and regain her life after a stroke left her with amnesia. New Voices is moderated by Megan Cole.
Carly Butler is a bisexual Indigenous woman with ancestral roots in Mexico. She spent the first ten years of her life in the US, and was brought to Canada illegally in 1998. She has been a babysitter, a house cleaner, a barista and a birth doula, and now she is a stay-at-home-disability-mom and author. Her writing has appeared in Loose Lips Magazine. She lives with her husband and two children in Langley, BC. Apocalypse Child is her first book.
Tara Sidhoo Fraser (she/her) is a queer writer and creator who lives on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, Canada). A woman of South Asian and Scottish ancestry, she is split between family histories. She graduated from the University of Victoria with a BA in Anthropology in 2016 and has since published stories with Autostraddle and Anathema magazine. Her first book, When My Ghost Sings: A Memoir of Stroke, Recovery, and Transformation, is a love story centred in selfhood and who is left behind when the past is obliterated.
As a journalist, moderator Megan Cole has worked for community newspapers, CBC Radio and Canadian Press. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Hungry Zine and more. As a podcast and event host, Megan has interviewed Michelle Good, Steven Price, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ivan Coyote and more. When Megan isn’t writing, reading, knitting or cooking, she’s working as the director of programming and communications for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes. She lives and works on the territory of the Tla’amin Nation in BC.
