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Watch: Queer & Italian in Montreal

Last month, Violet Hour presented Queer & Italian in Montreal at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Montreal as part of the Fierté Montréal Pride celebrations.

I got the idea for this event after learning that Montreal’s Pointe a Calliere Museum had recently wrapped their Italian Montreal exhibit with no real mention of the contributions of LGBTQ Montrealers of Italian origin. I felt this would be a good opportunity to correct that omission, celebrating our accomplishments while also creating a conversation around what more can be done to create change and foster acceptance among the old guard.

The event took the form of a screening of the short documentary Creative Spaces: Queer and Italian Canadian and a panel discussion about the past, present and future of queer Italian-Canadian culture in the city featuring Gaspare Borsellino (Gruppo Italiano Gay e Lesbico di Montreal), V Di Gregorio (CIAO – Canadian Italians Against Oppression), and Steve Galluccio (Mambo Italiano). I hosted the talk, which you can now watch below.

There was a lot of electricity in the room that night and many of us left wanting more events like this (I’m working on it, so stay tuned).

Big thanks to my partners on this one: Istituto Italiano di Cultura Montreal (Sandro, Laura), Fierté Montréal Pride (Guillaume, Oswaldo) and Accenti Magazine (Licia, Domenic).

Read “Pictures and Parades”

Given that June is Pride Month, Accenti Magazine asked if they could publish my essay, “Pictures and Parades,” about a series of photographs taken by me or my friends at Montreal’s Pride parade over the years (the first image I write about is below).

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I worked for Divers/Cité, the organization responsible for producing Montreal’s LGBTQ Pride Celebrations at the time (here’s a super clip of some of the interviews I did). Landing that job was life changing for me in the same way that Pride parades were also transformative. I used to buy upwards of a dozen rolls of film to capture the week(back when we didn’t have smart phones or digital cameras). Sifting through the physical copies over the years, they all tend to blend one into the other, but in some of the images there are the invisible moments of my then young queer life.

The essay appears in last year’s Here and Now: An Anthology of Queer
Italian-Canadian Writing
(along with “The Sun in Our Bodies,” a short story I wrote that inspired part of The Family Way). But you can read “Pictures and Parades” by clicking here.

Queer & Italian in Montreal

On Thursday, July 21, I’ll be hosting a special event at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Montreal called “Queer and Italian in Montreal.” An official part of this year’s Fierté Montreal Pride, this event will be a festive celebration of queer Italian-Canadian life and culture in the city

The idea for this event came after I learned that the 2021 “Italian Montreal” exhibit at the Pointe-à-Callière Museum (which set out to shine “a spotlight on the daily lives of Montréal’s earliest Italian immigrants and on the ways in which the community has evolved over the past century) neglected to include any information about the contributions made by LGBTQ Italians. Most notable was the omission of the work of writer Steve Galluccio, whose year 2000 play Mambo Italiano made an enormous impact in the city and put a spotlight on the love lives of Montreal’s gay Italian-Canadians.

Well, we hope to correct that oversight with this event.

Joining me and Steve on stage will be Gaspare Borsellino (president of the Gruppo Italiano Gay e Lesbico di Montreal, a social club for LGBTQ folks of Italian origin that played a significant role in queer cultural life in Montreal in the 1990s) and Vee DG (writer, photographer and co-founder of CIAO – Canadian Italians Against Oppression). Together, we will talk about the past, present and future of queer Italian-Canadian culture in the city.

As part of the event, we will also be screening Creative Spaces: Queer and Italian Canadian (Licia Canton, 2021), a short documentary that explores the intersections of queerness, creativity and culture with three Italian-Canadian writers living in Montreal. Featured in the documentary are Domenico A. Beneventi, Liana Cusmano, Steve Galluccio, and yours truly.

“Queer and Italian in Montreal” is free and takes place on Thursday, July 21, 2022, from 7 PM to 9 PM at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Montreal (1200 ave du Docteur-Penfield). Click here to reserve your place.

Big thanks go out to Sandro Cappelli and his team at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Montreal, as well as Fierté Montreal Pride, and Accenti magazine. I couldn’t have done it without everyone’s support.

Hope to see you there.

F.G. Bressani Literary Prize

Just over a month ago, The Family Way was shortlisted for the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize—an award that goes to a book written by an Italian-Canadian author. This is the first nomination I’ve received for either of my books, and it feels wonderful to finally be recognized by one’s peers this way.

Literary prizes are anxiety-provoking. If a writer tells you that they pay them no mind, they’re probably lying. We all get swept up in award season. If you have a book out, your antennae go up as you enter the fall. Then, the shortlists come at you fast and hard, one after the other: The Giller, the GG, the Writer’s Trust, Canada Reads. In Quebec, we also have the QWF Literary Awards and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. And when you are LGBTQ, you also have the Lambdas and Publishing Triangle to look forward to every summer. So, for about 12 months you’re on your toes.

After Pluto received no nominations back in 2014, I told myself I wasn’t going to pay attention this year. I didn’t want to be as disappointed as I was time, missing out on prizes I thought I had an actual shot at. Well, I failed at that completely. Even though I had removed certain dates in my calendar and unfollowed various social media accounts, I still felt a sense of anticipation. It’s a strange thing to put a book out into the world and wait with bated breath to see how people respond. I wish I could say I’m above it all, but I’m not. Wrapping up your expectations (or your dreams, more likely) in accolades can be dangerous. It can play with your confidence and make you feel like an imposter and a fraud. Sometimes, that’s how I feel.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of my books. And I know how random awards are. For years, I administered the CBC Literary Prizes and chaired dozens of juries. It was something to be a fly on the wall and listen as legendary writers debated the merits of different works of literature. Sometimes great stories ended up off shortlists because jurors had to negotiate and compromise. And the writers of those works will never know how close they came to being feted. Juries can be fickle, and decisions political. Another set of jurors would choose a completely different shortlist. So, what’s the point in getting caught up with the idea of “best” when there’s no such thing?

Still, I do know what winning or even being nominated for a prize can bring. In the case of the CBC Literary Awards, it often brought the interest of agents and further publication. Being able to include that you were shortlisted for a prize can get your next text bumped to the top of the submission pile. And having your book nominated for even the most modest of prizes can mean things like invitations to festivals, more reviews and interviews, offers of translation, additional sales and, of course, new readers.

I don’t know what, if anything, being nominated for the Bressani will bring to my career. I don’t know how competitive the competition was, or if I even have shot at winning. Still, whatever the outcome, I mean it when I say—I am just happy to be nominated.

Encounter in Quebec City

Earlier this week I was interviewed on stage at the Morrin Centre as part of their Imagination Writers’ Festival. I had a great time unpacking the contents of The Family Way with the event’s host, Luc Mercier. His questions were inspired and fun. It’s always a pleasure when an avid reader engages with your work in such a meaningful way.

As with most literary events, there was time for a book signing at the end. Somehow, I recognized a pair of eyes on a masked person in line. She soon came up and asked if I knew who she was.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re Sarah.”

I hadn’t seen Sarah in maybe 25 years. She and I were peer health educators at Concordia University for a short time back in the 90s. I don’t remember how long we knew each other, maybe a year? Truth be told, there’s not much I remember from that time, or how well we really knew each other. So much has happened between now and then, for both of us.

As we began to catch up, I realized something about Sarah and the book in my hands. She had inspired a part of it.

Let me back up a bit… Earlier in the evening, Luc had asked me about some of the details in my book. He was interested in how I had selected the various bits of minutia about domestic life that I included and where my ideas came from. I had said it was important for me to include the small mundane moments of our lives to give my characters authenticity, and that I often carried a notebook around to jot down anything that stuck out to me as real.

Well, that’s exactly what happened with Sarah. Once, at a party, I remember her telling me—a shine to her eyes—that she had baked a cake for her mother’s birthday. At the time, I remember thinking it odd. I knew Sarah’s family was in Halifax and that she lived alone in Montreal. How could she give this cake to her mother? It was only later that I learned that her mother had passed away years before, and that baking a cake was a way to honour her memory.

I found that act to be so beautiful and loving, and Sarah’s actions stuck with me for decades. So much so, that when it came time to write about my character Paul losing his mother, it was one of the first things I reached for. In the novel, Paul bakes a strawberry pie every year on his mother’s birthday and shares it with the people in his life. It’s not important to the plot, nor is it something I expect most readers to recall after finishing the book, but still, it’s a subtle moment within the pages that gives the reader a deeper sense of who Paul is and what is important to him. And it’s details like this, I believe, that bring characters to life.

“You’re going to make me cry,” Sarah said after I told her. “I’m going to have to sit up all night reading it now.” She then introduced me to her daughter, and after exchanging a few more pleasantries, we said our goodbyes. I’m not sure when I will ever see her again.

I’ve been thinking about this encounter all weekend, how magical it was and how lucky I felt that I got to share this with her. Neither of us knew it back then, but Sarah had given me a gift those many years back, helped me to begin building the outline of a character who would one day become very important to me. And I was fortunate to be able to return the favour, to let her know that the special love she has for her mother had had a ripple effect and had lived on with me for more two decades, making its way into the pages of the book in her hands.

The Geography of Pluto Book Trailer

I had such a great time creating a book trailer for The Family Way, I decided to make one for The Geography of Pluto, too. Back when my first novel came out, in 2014, technology wasn’t like what it is today and I’m impressed by all the tools now available for design novices like me.

Although similar in voice, both of my books are very different, with The Geography of Pluto being more dark and emotional. It’s about distance and loneliness, and I wanted to mimic the atmosphere of the novel as best I could with the visuals.

I used a template from Canva to create the bones of the trailer and then sourced images online. The images come from NASA and from Unsplash, which is a great online source of free photos. Big thanks to the photographers whose images I used: Jp Valery, Etienne Delorieux and Robbie Koeck.