Belated thanks to Farzana Doctor—now a Lambda Award winner for Six Metres of Pavement, woohoo! yay, Farzana!—and Sharanpal Ruprai, who host the Brockton Writers Series in Toronto and welcomed me there for the Toronto launch of Gay Dwarves of America in early May. They like to mix things up, something that always makes me happy, so the evening included readers of memoir (Donna Kirk, with a memoir of meeting, after her adult son’s death, the mother of a daughter who died on a plane on 9/11), poetry (the soft-voiced, confident, mesmerizing young Doyali Farah Islam reading from Yusuf and the Lotus Flower), and novella (Alec Butler with a piece about growing up intersex in Cape Breton).
People turned up from many corners of my life — former students from Kelowna, now living right down the street from the venue in Toronto, friends from my summer camp, family friends, my mother-out-law, my dad, my sister, my friend-from-babyhood—and packed the warm brick-lined Full of Beans Coffee house on Dundas.
I got to meet Zab, Gay Dwarves’ wonderful designer, and thank her in person for such a handsome book (I especially love the little notebook pages for “Puke Diary.” They make me happy.) and to remeet the equally wonderful Beth Follett from Pedlar Press, who treated the manuscript with such affection and respect.