March 12, 2017

March 8-12, 2017
Vancouver, BC (unceded Coast Salish territories) 

The Growing Room Festival is Room magazine’s inaugural literary festival, a celebration of diverse Canadian writers and artists.

Check out the full festival, here

I will be appearing on one panel and one reading:

Writing in (the) Community
Leah Horlick, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Audrey Thomas | Moderator: Amber Dawn
March 12, 10:30am–12:00pm | Free | Multipurpose Room #2 @ Creekside Community Centre

In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award in 2016, Colson Whitehead said, “Be kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power.” Writing of all kinds has always been central to the fight against systemic oppression and injustice—and now, more than ever. As we move forward into an uncertain future, and fight to have our voices heard, writers and community activators Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Leah Horlick, Amber Dawn, and Audrey Thomas discuss writing against the grain and creating spaces for everyone to speak their truth.

[Insert Innuendo Here]
Amber Dawn, Dina Del Bucchia, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Kellee Ngan, Jen Sookfong Lee
March 12, 1:00pm–2:30pm | Free | The Rooftop @ 24 West 4th Avenue

As the winners of the “Bad Sex in Fiction” award highlight each year, writing about sex can be tricky. The wrong euphemism for a body part, a move that defies the laws of physics—and you’ve lost your readers. But there’s no need to worry about any of that here. Five accomplished writers take us between the sheets (and between the pages), with hilarious, romantic, and steamy readings that embrace the messiness of sex, relationships, and everything in between.

April 25, 2017

Ticket Sales, Venue and Access info: http://versesfestival.ca/event/sounds-like-fire-femme4femme/

January 12, 2018

65 Queer and Feminist Books to Read in Early 2018

By Carolyn Yates on January 2, 2018

What queer and/or feminist books should you read this winter and spring and minute? Early 2018 features new work from Mallory Ortberg, Roxane Gay, Michelle Tea, Andrea Gibson, Zadie Smith, Amber Dawn, Casey Plett and more. You won’t have any problems finding something new to read.

Visit Autostraddle for the full list of 65 book titles

Sodom Road Exit by Amber Dawn: Starla Mia Martin returns to live in the now-ghosttown she grew up in when a mysterious force begins to follow her everywhere. This queer paranormal thriller is the second novel from Lambda award winner Amber Dawn. (April 3)

Happy new queer: 18 reasons to be excited for LGBTQ arts and culture in 2018

By Peter Knegt · CBC Arts – January 2

Out with the 2017 best-of lists, in with the 2018 preview lists — and frankly, when it comes to anticipated LGBTQ film, TV, music and books, the latter sure was fun to compile. Say what you want about the state of the world, but the next 12 months seem likely to offer up enough queer cheer to get me excited to ride out the apocalypse.

It wasn’t easy to narrow down (so please excuse any omissions, and feel free to note what you’re excited for the comments), but here are 18 reasons why 2018 is already on track to be an epic year for LGBTQ arts and culture. (And this is only the stuff already on our radar…)

24 works of Canadian fiction to watch for in the first half of 2018

Mark your calendars! These fine works of fiction are coming soon to a bookshelf near you.

Read about all 24 forthcoming works of fiction on CBC Books online.

Sodom Road Exit by Amber Dawn

What it’s about: Amber Dawn’s sophomore novel, Sodom Road Exit, is a supernatural thriller that revels in themes of sexual orientation, economic disenfranchisement and family dynamics.

When you can read it: March 1, 2018

Growing Room feminist literary festival returns to build on strong start

by Brian Lynch

Getting a new, multifaceted literary event off the ground is a challenge, to put it mildly. But the immediate success of Growing Room, the local feminist literary festival that had its inaugural five-day run last March, was no surprise. Like the fast rise of the #MeToo movement in a news year clotted with Trumps and Weinsteins, the gathering had an air of something long overdue.

Organizers are looking to build on this strong start with the lineup of Growing Room’s second edition, set to take place from March 1 to 4 in venues around Mount Pleasant. Joining luminaries from last year’s festival (such as celebrated poet and essayist Betsy Warland and fellow City of Vancouver Book Award winners Amber Dawn and Carleigh Baker) will be a powerfully diverse group of authors that includes Gurjinder Basran, Maggie de Vries, Ijeoma Oluo, Bev Sellars, Gwen Benaway, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Casey Plett, Farzana Doctor, and Caroline Adderson, to name just a few.

They’re the focus of a program comprising nine workshops and 16 panels and readings (many offering admission by donation). And when you’re not attending special events like the recording of Fainting Couch Feminists (a new podcast from the legendary Vancouver-based journal Room, whose publisher operates the Growing Room festival), you can, for a reasonable fee, run your own work past a team of writing mentors and editors featuring Anna Ling Kaye, Chelene Knight, Jen Sookfong Lee, and Adèle Barclay.

Like last year, the whole thing follows a big opening-night party at the Fox Cabaret.

Complete details will be revealed on January 15, and registration starts on February 1.

“Although the festival is branded as feminist,” the organizers’ announcement declares, “events are open to anyone with a passion for literature.” It’s a telling note of welcome that runs directly against the current of the times.

 Author and former Xat’sull First Nation chief Bev Sellars will appear as part of Growing Room’s second edition.

Growing Room: A Feminist Literary Festival will return from March 1-4, 2018, and will take place on the traditional, unceded, and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples.

LINE-UP

Amber Dawn, Caroline Adderson, Joanne Arnott, Carleigh Baker, Marie Annharte Baker, Adèle Barclay, Gurjinder Basran, Gwen Benaway, Molly Billows, Selina Boan, Jillian Christmas, Kim Clark, Jen Currin, Maggie de Vries, Farzana Doctor, Leanne Dunic, barbara findlay, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sierra Skye Gemma, Chantal Gibson, Taryn Hubbard, Katie-Ellen Humphries, Jia Hwang, Sharon Jinkerson-Brass, Jessica Johns, Manal Kamran, Anna Ling Kaye, Jónína Kirton, Chelene Knight, Lydia Kwa, Jen Sookfong Lee, Mica Lemiski, Mary MacDonald, Minelle Mahtani, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Samantha Nock, Ijeoma Oluo, Deanna Partridge-David, Casey Plett, Emily Pohl-Weary, Chelsea Rooney, Clea Roberts, Bev Sellars, Vivek Shraya and Shamik Bilgi (Too Attached), Mallory Tater, Betsy Warland, Rita Wong, Elaine Woo, and more!

Full Schedule Here

Find me at the following events:

Hidden Intersections: Writing Between the Cracks
Amber Dawn, Kim Clark, Farzana Doctor, Chelene Knight
Moderator: Minelle Mahtani

Race and gender—these intersections are at the forefront of every conversation when it comes to writing and publishing. But what about those intersections that aren’t talked about? From single motherhood, class, and lack of access to education, how do people living between the cracks of hidden intersections navigate this tricky terrain? How can allies level the playing field? Join authors Kim Clark, Amber Dawn, Farzana Doctor, and Chelene Knight as they share stories of overcoming adversity—by any means necessary.

Friday, March 2, 7:30pm–9:30pm | By Donation
School Creative @ 112 East 3rd Avenue
This event will feature ASL Interpretation

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Where Does the Page Stop and the Body Begin: Writing the Body
Amber Dawn, Kim Clark, Samantha Nock, Casey Plett
Moderator: Mallory Tater

We welcome all bodies to sit in with us as these writers strip the layers of writing the body. Where does the body belong in the piece and how much do you reveal while exploring the changing body, the exploited body, the body that isn’t yours, and the limbs that have fallen behind? Pulling back the curtain, these writers will discuss and dissect the manner in which the body is used in different genres and how it conveys different identities, ideas and concepts.

Saturday, March 3, 10:30am–12:30pm | By Donation
School Creative @ 112 East 3rd Avenue
This event will feature ASL Interpretation

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What Binds Us: Sex, Bondage, and Fetishes
Amber Dawn, Kim Clark, Lydia Kwa, Samantha Nock
Moderator: Sierra Skye Gemma

Sex, bondage, fetishes. Truth, denial, body. It’s all visceral and connected. Join authors Kim Clark, Amber Dawn, Lydia Kwa, and Samantha Nock as they weave us through past encounters to current desires. From lived experiences to supernatural, and even magic, realism, writing about sex can take many forms. You ready for this trip?

Saturday, March 3, 1:30pm–3:30pm | By Donation
School Creative @ 112 East 3rd Avenue
This event will feature ASL Interpretation

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Crossing Borders: Joys and Challenges of Speculative Fiction 
Amber Dawn, Molly Billows, Lydia Kwa, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Moderator: Emily Pohl-Weary

Join Amber Dawn, Molly Billows, Lydia Kwa, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia for readings and discussions that will transport you from our reality to alternate worlds and other realms. What do writers find most appealing and challenging about writing speculative fiction? Inspired by various traditions such as Chinese legends, Lovecraftian mythos, Mexican folklore, and ghost stories, these authors will discuss how they work with and against the common themes and conventions of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

Sunday, March 4, 4:30pm–6:30pm | By Donation
Native Education College @ 285 East 5th Avenue
This event will feature ASL Interpretation

For almost four decades, Arsenal Pulp Press has been at the heart of alternative publishing in Vancouver. From its subversive beginnings as Pulp Press Book Publishers in 1971 to its transformation into a platform for countlessly diverse voices across the country, Arsenal Pulp Press has provided Canada (and the rest of the world) with over 300 titles covering literary fiction, social justice, LGBT and multicultural literature, graphic novels, cookbooks, and alternative crafts. Join Amber Dawn (Sodom Road Exit) Casey Plett, (Little Fish) and Joshua Whitehead (Johnny Appleseed)—just some of the amazing authors from the Arsenal Pulp Press roster—for a night in celebration of this publishers’s incomparable contribution to the Canadian literary scene.

Incite is a FREE event, but registration is required:

http://writersfest.bc.ca/programs/incite/incite-form/

Presented by the Vancouver Writers Fest with support from the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association and the Vancouver Courier.

Tonic is proud to announce our latest event, quite the spring sizzler, featuring: Ivanna Besenovsky, Amber Dawn, Chelene Knight, and David Ly.

We are proud to launch Amber Dawn’s novel SODOM ROAD EXIT, David Ly’s chapbook STUBBLE BURN, and Chelene Knight’s memoir DEAR CURRENT OCCUPANT. Come congratulate them and pick up hot-off-the presses copies of their fantastic books!!!

Please join us at The Heatly, 696 East Hastings Street! Doors at 7 p.m. Readings at 7:30 p.m.

Books will be sold! There will be cake and festivities!

Admission is, of course, FREE.

This event takes place on unceded Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh land.

Accessibility info: The Heatley is wheelchair accessible and there are wheelchair accessible bathrooms. The space is small and seating could be limited so we’ll reserve seating and space at the front for anyone who needs this. Feel free to contact us ahead of time-we can make sure to save these spots for you so that you can be comfortable for the event.

Amber Dawn’s newest book Sodom Road Exit has been described as “part broken family melodrama part lesbian supernatural thriller.” It was this description that piqued my interested, the novel’s enthralling narrative that prevented me from putting it down, and all the ways Amber Dawn interweaves the complexity of relating to each other—across difference and in difficult situations—that has me thinking about Sodom Road Exit long after having finished it.

In the interview that follows, we ask her about fear, love languages, and who we should be reading next.

GUTS: As the editor of Fist of the Spider Woman, and a self-described genre-hopper, Sodom Road Exit isn’t your first foray into what I’m going to call “scary” writing, such as thriller, horror, suspense. What’s your relationship to genres that work through fear? Do you watch or read a lot of these kinds of works?

Amber Dawn: The first two books I fell in love with were Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love  and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. While they are wildly different books, expressions of fear are palpable in both: fear of the unknown, fear of the other, fear of being othered, fear of not belonging, fear of oneself. Fear—whether expressed through a fictional character or by a nonfiction narrative voice—often helps reveal just what is at stake. When reading, I often focus my attention on what the characters or narrator is afraid of, what external forces are causing those fears, and what choices (or lack of choices) are being made during times of narrative tension and fear.

… Read the full interview at GUTS magazine online

Sodom Road Exit

By Amber Dawn

Arsenal Pulp Press, 408 pages, $21.95

“I’ve submitted to the idea that I will live the rest of my days knowing – no – feeling – no – re-experiencing her hands.”

Amber Dawn’s second novel, Sodom Road Exit, is on the surface a supernatural erotic thriller. In the summer of 1990 , under the pressure of overwhelming debt , 23-year-old Star Martin is forced to leave Toronto for her hometown of Crystal Beach, Ont. Her return comes one year after the amusement park that made the town famous has closed for good. Already in decline, Crystal Beach feels haunted – and that’s before Star unwittingly unleashes Etta, the ghost of a professional “screamer” who died in a roller-coaster accident in the early 1940s.

Beneath this story is another one, however: As Sodom Road Exit queers the horror genre, it also asks what queer horror includes – a critical question right now – and how we heal from that trauma.

The films Sodom Road Exit indirectly references – those of the 1980s’ slasher variety – have already been made queer to an extent through camp. Today’s audiences see a tongue emerging from a phone or a teenage boy swallowed by his own bed – as in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street – and they laugh. Nightmare’s sequel, Freddy’s Revenge, has been called “the gayest horror film ever made” for its overt homo-eroticism, starting with a script that wrote a boy into the role of the “final girl” (the chaste one who survives to the end). Freddy’s Revenge answered the question “What if there was a male scream queen?” What it doesn’t say is why sex is equated with death, or why there has to be a “final girl” at all.

Open this photo in gallery

What if the worst thing that ever happened to you wasn’t your encounter with the supernatural, but instead something much more harmful you lived through years before? This question is what Sodom Road Exit is about, told as a supernatural thriller that constantly looks to subvert the slasher-genre tropes, particularly around sex. This is a ghost story in which the ghost is one-third of a lesbian love triangle. Another person in that triangle is the town stripper. On screen, she would be among the first to meet a sexually violent end; here, she’s the rock in the storm, a person with an emotional maturity beyond her years.

And then there’s the book’s title. You could think of Sodom Road Exit as being about going home after the idea of home has been severely compromised. Instead, home is in a town on Lake Erie you reach via the Sodom Road exit off the Queen Elizabeth Way.

This take on the genre ultimately matters because of what “horror” might mean to queer people these days. The charges against Toronto landscaper Bruce McArthur, accused of murdering a series of gay men, are but a few recent examples, revealing multiple frightening layers of real life. In addition to the murders, there are the actions of police forces, their dismissive attitude toward community concerns, and disturbing evidence that further substantiates fears about police indifference to LGBQT lives.

Ghosts don’t rank compared to such horrors – not in real life, and not in this novel. Having been molested as a child, Star has other, more profound fears. And her childhood pain has left her with a want that can’t be fulfilled, a hunger that drives her back to her mother’s house in Crystal Beach. It’s also what makes her susceptible to someone such as Etta, since the ghost’s embrace consumes her in a way no living person’s can.

This is not Amber Dawn’s first book to use horror or the fantastic to explore ideas of trauma and survival. Readers may also be interested in the anthology Fist of the Spider Woman, which she edited, or her debut novel, Sub Rosa, which imagined a kind of Neverland for “lost girls” who feel a similar want to Star’s.

“Everything from this moment onward is impossible. And real,” says Star. So much queer experience could be described by this feeling of the impossible-real; it’s probably why the otherworldly is so well suited to describing it. That experience includes the after-effects of trauma. Sodom Road Exit addresses the uncomfortable truth that pain can cause a person to hurt others, without malicious intent. Etta turns out to be an antagonist, but she’s no villain. “How did I die? Ask me how I lived, why don’t you?” she implores.

Midway through the novel there’s a premonition: “Tough times are coming, and we need to stick together.” Sodom Road Exit is horror that gives the lie to the idea of the “final girl.” It’s only by sticking together that we can survive our various horrors – supernatural or otherwise.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry

Edited by Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme

Sex workers are one of the most researched groups in the world (even though sex workers do not accrue or collect any benefit as a result). Can the antidote for massive invasive and often bias research be found in verse? Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, edited by Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme, will be a trailblazing collection in which sex workers share their experiential knowledge through the expressiveness, nuance and beauty of poetry.

Self-identified sex workers from any part of the industry (survival or trade, past or present) may submit. Poems specifically about sex work are strongly encouraged, though writing about relationships, healing, identity and other themes that may overlap with sex work is also welcome.

Submission Guidelines:

–       Deadline: Friday August 3, 2018

–       Length: between 1 to 6 pages (6 page maximum)

–       Any and all written poetic forms will be considered, including narrative prose poems

–       Include a short 50 – 100 word bio with your submission (you may use an alias)

–       Email: HustlingVerse@gmail.com with submissions or questions

The book will be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in the fall of 2019.

About the editors:

Justin Ducharme was born and raised in the small Métis community of St. Ambroise, Manitoba. He is a graduate for Vancouver Film School, and the writer/director of four short films, most recently the 2018 drama, Positions, which tells the story of  a queer, Indigenous, male sex worker in Vancouver. Justin has been a Metis dancer since the age of 10, performing with the troupes The St. Ambroise Youth Steppers and the Louis Riel Métis Dancers. He is currently finishing first poetry collection.

Amber Dawn white queer femme survivor currently living in Unceded Coast Salish Territories, Vancouver. She is the author of four books (the most recent of which is the novel Sodom Road Exit) and the editor of two anthologies. Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (2013) won the Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She currently teaches creative writing the University of British Columbia, as well as guest mentors at drop-in, sex work-driven community spaces.

How a highway sign pointed Amber Dawn in the direction of her new novel

CBC Radio · October 1

Book Review: Sex workers speak out in anthology of their writings