Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness

Thursday, March 18, 2010,
7:00 PM
Nickle Arts Museum
on the University of Calgary Campus
2500 University Drive NW

Clem Martini, Olivier Martini, and Freehand Books will be at the Nickle Arts Museum to celebrate the launch of Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness. Olivier Martini’s artwork will be on display, and Shattered Dreams, the 1989 documentary written and narrated by Clem Martini, will be screened. There will be a reading and Q & A with both authors to follow. Wine and snacks are provided, and a chance to win some great art.

In 1976, Ben Martini was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A decade later, his brother Olivier was told he had the same disease. For the past thirty years the Martini family has struggled to comprehend and cope with a devastating illness, frustrated by a health care system lacking in resources and empathy, the imperfect science of medication, and the strain of mental illness on familial relationships.

Throughout it all, Olivier, an accomplished visual artist, drew. His sketches, comic strips, and portraits document his experience with, and capture the essence of, this all too frequently misunderstood disease. In Bitter Medicine, Olivier’s poignant graphic narrative runs alongside and communicates with a written account of the past three decades by his younger brother, award-winning author and playwright Clem Martini. The result is a layered family memoir that faces head-on the stigma attached to mental illness.

Free Admission, but donations will be accepted on behalf of the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta.

Conni Massing
“Roadtripping: On the Move with the Buffalo Gals.”

March 18, 2010
7:30 PM
Upstairs at Pages Bookstore on Kensington
1135 Kensington Road NW

The men and women who make up the Buffalo Gals first set out on road trips in July 1999 to experience the unusual and charming roadside attractions of south-central Alberta.  Each year a new destination is chosen and the weekend-long travel begins. Traditions have evolved including elaborate scrapbooking, eating in gourmet dining rooms (when available) and excessive snacking (without fail), wild rose country, stuffed gophers, political fanaticism, mad cows and more. Beyond the joys and challenges of being on the road and a deepening bond of friendship, this book is a love poem to Alberta, a province often misunderstood and mislabelled as being the right-wing cowboy haunt of Canada.

Conni Massing is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. A recipient of a Queen’s Jubilee Medal, Conni was honoured as one of 100 people who have made a contribution to Alberta theatre in the last 100 years. She is the current writer in residence at the Edmonton Public Library and is a sessional instructor in playwriting and screenwriting at the University of Alberta. Born and raised in central Alberta, Conni lives in Edmonton.

A POETRY READING with
Jan Horner, “Mama Dada: Songs of the Baronness’s Dog” and Richard Harrison, from works in progress.

Wednesday, March 17
7:30 PM
Pages Bookstore on Kensington,
1135 Kensington Road N.W. Calgary

Jan’s work offers a viewpoint from the imagined perspective of Baroness Else von Freytag Loringhoven,  called the “first American Dada,”  an eccentric whose performance art and radical lifestyle marginalized her from the rest of society. She was a contemporary of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and other modernists.

Jan Horner’s sharp and elegant poems reveal Else’s character and her rough and extravagant life. She peels back the divided nature of Else’s personality, revealing how she chased love, and scorned it, with the same kind of determination she chased art and imagination.

The poems are sardonic yet lyrical, broken yet fearless, twisted yet sublime. The voices of Else and her friends and suitors are heard—from her husband Fredrick Philip Grove to her dog, Pinky. Mama Dada: Songs of the Baroness’s Dog is a burlesque, an art-house of poems and secrets.

A Literary Roundtable for the Bookish Community

The Writers Guild of Alberta, Pages Bookstore on Kensington and the University of Calgary Creative Writing Research Group have decided to hold a sequel information session offering advice and resources that relate to the writing life.

Topics include:

Tax tips for writers, presented by freelance writer and accountant Toby Welch.

• Copyright & electronic rights, presented by lawyer David de Vlieger.
• The Google settlement, presented by author and Alberta rep for the Writers Union of Canada, Brian Brennan.
• How e-books are changing the nature of publishing and the future of the book, presented by managing editor of Freehand Books, Sarah Ivany).

Each speaker present their respective topic for 15-20 minutes. Discussion and  Question and Answers follow the presentations.

7:00 PM
Upstairs at Pages Bookstore on Kensington,
1135 Kensington Road N.W. Calgary