Peterbrough’s Pride week featured the usual staples of drag queens, club nights, marches, and family friendly brunches.
But this year a different event was held at Sadleir House on the Thursday night.
Speculating The Queer: An LGBTQ2 Speculative Fction Reading paired up Pride with ChiSeries Peterborough, our branch of ChiZine Publications that showcases speculative fiction readings that take place across Canada.
Speculative fiction is the blanket term that covers anything fantastical. Great genres such as sci-fi, horror, and fantasy fall under the spec-fic name. And even though brazen lesbians, catty drag queens, and small town gays in the big city for the first time all very much exist in our world, these three Canadian authors mixed their blend of real world queerness with elements of fantasy, magic, and horror.
Author Tanya Huff started the night off. Huff is an Aurora Award winning fantasy author known most for her Blood Books series.
She kicked things off by reading excerpts of her book Swan’s Braid and Other Tales of Terizan, about the exciting adventure and romantic tension between a thief and a mercenary.
Don Bassingwhite is known for writing novels in the Dungeons and Dragons series. He treated us to a perfect Pride themed spin on fantasy.
Reading one of his Darby Cavendish stories, the tales of a gay supernatural investigator, Bassingwhite had the whole room laughing as he told us about a drag queen’s performance taking a turn for the worse due to some ill-willed fairy magic.
The last reader of the night left Peterborough in the Halloween spirit. Michael Rowe, who’s won the Lambda Literary Award, the Randy Shilts Award, and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, treated us to a much scarier tale, reminding everyone to always be wary of talking to strangers, and even more wary of trusting them.
The whole night was hosted by Peterborough’s own Dereck Newman-Stille, an Aurora Award winning PhD student here at Trent who runs a popular spec-fic review blog called Speculating Canada.
The next ChiSeries will be happening on October 16 at 8pm back at Sadleir House.