Please join us for a special In Her Voice event at the Dora Keogh!

We will be gathering in celebration of Karen Smythe for her novel This Side of Sad

& Sarah Meehan Sirk for her short story collection The Dead Husband Project

When:

Monday, September 18th at 6.30pm

Where:

Dora Keogh Irish Pub

141 Danforth Ave (East of Broadview)

Part mystery, part elegy, This Side of Sad begins with an ending: the violent enigma of a man’s death. Was it an accident, or did James commit suicide? In the shattering aftermath, his widow, Maslen, questions her own capacity for love and undertakes a painful self-inquiry, examining the history of her heart and tracing the fault lines of her own fragile identity. What emerges is a mesmerizing tour of a woman’s complex past, rendered in the associative logic of memory and desire.

A gifted storyteller reminiscent of Alice Munro or Joan Didion, Karen Smythe finds poetic complexity in the seeming trivialities of the ordinary. Meditative, philosophical, and confessional, This Side of Sad is a provocative and piercing novel that explores the disintegration of a marriage; the enduring colloquy between the living and the dead; and the meaning we find within the random architecture of despair and joy.

Karen Smythe is the author of a short-story collection, Stubborn Bones, and Figuring Grief, a groundbreaking analysis of the depiction of mourning in fiction by Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Edna O’Brien, and others. Her stories have also appeared in Grain, the Fiddlehead, the Antigonish Review, and the Gaspereau Review. She lives in Guelph, Ontario.

In this deeply felt, compulsive and edgy work, Sarah Meehan Sirk shines a distinctive light on love and death in their many incarnations, pushing against the limits of the absurd while exposing piercing emotional truths about what it means to be gloriously, maddeningly alive.
In “The Dead Husband Project,” an artist who has planned to make an installation out of her terminally ill husband’s dead body has to recalibrate when his diagnosis changes. In “The Date,” an online dating match takes an unusual turn when the man who shows up to the restaurant has no face. In “Ozk,” a young girl longs to connect with her socially isolated mother, a professor of mathematics who makes a radical discovery.
Uncanny, sometimes violent, achingly sad and always profound, these stories showcase a writer with skill and empathy, and draw us in with a steady, unyielding grip.

Sarah Meehan Sirk is a writer, radio producer and broadcaster. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, PRISM international, Room, Joyland and Taddle Creek, and is anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories. At the CBC, she co-produced and hosted the 2015 Radio One series Stripped, worked on Q (now q) and DNTO, and was a founding producer of Day 6 with Brent Bambury. Before that, she produced a Toronto crime show, hosted sports programs, filed human rights reports with Ghanaian journalists in West Africa, and co-produced and hosted a short TV series on minor hockey that was nominated for a Gemini Award (it lost to the Olympics). She lives in Toronto with her young family and is working on her first novel.