This year’s memoir hour panel features three stories of incredible journeys.
Featuring: Vinh Nguyen, Dan Rubenstein, and Sarah Boon
Moderator: Jessica Truong
Tickets: $5 (student/low income), $15 (regular)
Purchase tickets HERE
Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist by Sarah Boon
In Meltdown, Sarah Boon tells us about field adventures in snow and ice, the tough decision of choosing an academic career over that of a writer, and the challenges she faces as a woman in science. Her story blends adventure and academia as she traverses John Evans Glacier on Ellesmere Island, builds weather stations in northern British Columbia, samples proglacial rivers, and scares away grizzlies with helicopters. Along the way, Boon finds inspiration in the stories of historic female explorers like Mary Schäffer Warren and Phyllis Munday, celebrating the tenacity of women in the field. But her path isn’t without obstacles. In addition to the physical and psychological rigors of fieldwork, Boon faces gender bias, departmental politics, and job insecurity in academia. Her journey is also marked by injury, struggles with imposter syndrome, and a serious mental health diagnosis. Meltdown is an honest and reflective narrative about the process of finding your identity, the need for open conversations around mental health and science, and one woman’s pursuit of balance between her career and personal life.
The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memoir by Vinh Nguyen
An inventive memoir about one family’s escape from Vietnam and the father’s mysterious disappearance along the way. This book is an intricate exploration of a searching mind, shedding light on the psyche of a grieving son, as he chases certainty and seeks elusive resolution. With the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.
Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To find his father—and anchor himself in the present—Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for years in broken hearts and guarded silences.
As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and reimagined lives. Part fractured reminiscence, part invented history, and part fictional fabulation, Nguyen’s story is about learning to live with what’s already lost and the memories of what might have been.
Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage bu Dan Rubenstein
In June 2023, writer Dan Rubinstein lashed camping gear to his stand-up paddleboard and embarked on an improbable solo voyage from Ottawa to Montreal, New York City, Toronto, and back to Ottawa along the rivers, lakes, and canals of a landlocked region. Over 1,200 miles and 10 weeks, he explored the healing potential of “blue space” — the aquatic equivalent of green space — and sought out others drawn to their local waters. But the farther Rubinstein paddled, the more he realized that being in, on, or around water does more than boost our mental and physical health and prompt stewardship toward the natural world. He discovered that blue spaces are also a way to connect with the kaleidoscopic cross-section of people he met and the diverse geographies and communities he passed through.
Weaving together research, interviews, and an unmacho, malodorous, anticolonial adventure tale, Water Borne shows us that we don’t need an epic journey to find solutions to so many modern challenges. Repair and renewal may be close at hand: just add water.
SARAH BOON is a freelance writer and editor. She has published essays, book reviews, author interviews, and articles in a range of magazines and journals, including Science, Nature, Longreads, Flyway Journal, Electric Literature, and others. She trained as an environmental scientist and held a tenured position in physical geography before returning to her writing and editing roots. She is a member of the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society and the Federation of BC Writers, and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She was a co-founder of the Canadian science blogging network Science Borealis. She blogs at https://watershednotes.ca/ and lives and works on southern Vancouver Island, traditional unceded territory of the Quwut’sun people.
VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, The Criterion Collection’s Current, and MUBI’s Notebook. He is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the author of the academic book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. His writing has been short-listed for a National Magazine Award and has received the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers.
DAN RUBENSTEIN is a National Magazine Award winning writer and editor, a contributor to publications such as Outside, The Walrus and the Globe and Mail, a former editor at Canadian Geographic, and prior to moving to Ottawa he lived in Edmonton for a decade, where he worker as an editor at several publications, including Alberta Views, Vue Weekly and unlimited magazine. His first book, Born to Walk: The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act, was a finalist at the Ottawa Book Awards and Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. He’s on Instagram at danrubnsteinsup and his website is www.waterborne.ca
JESSICA TRUONG (she/her/hers), (Moderator) is an Edmonton-based, second generation Vietnamese-Canadian whose passion for food began when she was little, helping her mom prep ingredients for their family meals. Her curiosity for all things food has since evolved into sharing stories and creating online food content in honour of her late father at @aspoonfordad. Jessica is a co-producer of the docuseries EATING EDMONTON, which uses food, the people who make it, and experience as a second-generation immigrant to tell richer stories about Edmonton communities. She has shared publicly about her Vietnamese-immigrant family experiences online. Her research background drives curiosity and interest of how events and programs impact the aging community and how stories of diaspora can change and impact Canadian identity.
This event is presented in partnership with Chúng Ta Cùng Nhau
