Tickets: $5 (student/low income), $15 (regular), Available HERE
Online event featuring Kristjana Gunnars in conversation with University of Alberta’s 2025-26 Writer in Residence, Cody Caetano, to discuss her memoir, The Silence of Falling Snow.
From an innovator of autofiction comes a meditation on grief, care, Buddhism, and artmaking.
‘This is a story. It is a story about someone accompanying another to the last gate.’
Years ago, Kristjana Gunnars took her husband back to his home in Oslo to die. Through the dark, cold days, she tends to his needs as she feels her own self disintegrating. Later, as she looks back to this slow departure of the man she loved, she weaves together threads from her own life, reflections on the thoughts of Gautama Buddha, discussions of Renaissance art, and considerations of contemporary artists.
Engaging with thinkers as varied as Ingmar Bergman and Jacques Derrida, Henry David Thoreau, and Ursula K. Le Guin, Gunnars — one of the earliest practitioners of “autofiction” — crafts a new kind of hybrid text, with elements of memoir, lyrical essay, Buddhist teachings, poetics, art theory, and meditation.
The Silence of Falling Snow is a deep dive into grief, the way we circle around it, dipping in and out of the pain, finding comfort in art and philosophy and religion where we can. It’s an intellectual cabaret, a Buddhist primer, and a pointillist portrait of grief – above all, it’s the consoling and invigorating reflection we need in this moment.
KRISTJANA GUNNARS was born in Iceland and has lived in Canada since 1969. She served as Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and as Guest Professor at the University of Trier in Germany and the University of Iceland. She lived on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia for twenty years while pursuing a career in the arts (painting), as well as writing. She is the author of numerous books (see websiteskristjanagunnars.com and kristjanagunnarswritings.com for details). Her latest books are The Scent of Light (Coach House, Toronto) and Ruins of the Heart (Angelico, New York). She has published a number of chapbooks, the latest being 112th Street Notebook (akinoga, Baltimore) and At Home in the Mountains (Junction, Toronto). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals in Canada, the U.S.,and Europe.
CODY CAETANO is the author of Half-Bads in White Regalia (Canada: Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2022), winner of two Indigenous Voices Awards, shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and longlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and Canada Reads. An off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation, his mother’s family is from the Manitoba Interlake and his father’s family emigrated to Canada from the Azores in the 1960s. He works as a literary agent at CookeMcDermid.
This event is presented in partnership with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and the University of Alberta’s WIR program
