Eden Mills Writer's Festival kicks off their winter 2022 Book of the Month events with award-winning author Myriam J.A. Chancy in conversation with host Bee Quammie.
At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince.
Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster——Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Artfully weaving together these lives, this gripping story gives witness to the desolation wreaked by nature and by man.
Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and——at the same time——an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.
Myriam J. A. Chancy, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised there and in Canada, is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, who currently holds the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College, California. She is the author of four books of literary criticism and of four novels. Her novel, The Loneliness of Angels, won the Guyana Prize for Literature Best Caribbean Fiction Award 2011, and was shortlisted in the fiction category of the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature. Her first novel, Spirit of Haiti was shortlisted for Best First Book, Canada/Caribbean for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2004.
Bee Quammie is a multimedia storyteller: a writer, radio host, TV personality, and public speaker. She has written for publications like The Globe and Mail, Men's Health, Today’s Parent, Macleans, and more. She is the co-host of the Global News Radio show The Kultur’D Show and has been a featured panelist and commentator on shows like CityTV's Cityline, CBC's The National, Global's ET Canada, and CTV's The Social. Bee regularly writes and speaks on topics like race and culture, parenting, mental health, and more, and she resides in the GTA with her two daughters.