PEN Picks: Fiction meets fact as some of PEN Canada’s most celebrated writers—Vincent Lam, Camilla Gibb, Miriam Toews, and Linwood Barclay—present a documentary of their choice. Each author will discuss their personal interest in the film after the screening, and will participate in a Q&A with the audience.
Miriam Toews is the author of five previous best-selling novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness (Canada Reads 2006, Canada Reads Canadian Bestseller of the Decade 2010), The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, as well as one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. Her newest work of fiction, All My Puny Sorrows, will be released this April. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award.
"It's a profoundly moving story about art and suffering and memory and about the lengths an individual will go to to survive and to make sense of his or her world." – Miriam Toews on MARWENCOL
MARWENCOL
After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark builds a 1/6th
scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populates the town he dubs "Marwencol" with dolls representing his friends and family and creates life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helps Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychological wounds of the attack. When Mark and his photographs are discovered, a prestigious New York gallery sets up an art show. Suddenly Mark's homemade therapy is deemed "art", forcing him to choose between the safety of his fantasy life in Marwencol and the real world that he's avoided since the attack.
Single Ticket: $15 ($12 for Bloor members)