Events Schedule

Poets and visual artists come together in an evening of live-painting inspired by the poets’ work. This event pairs each prominent poet with an artist who will seek to capture the essences of the words on their canvases. Poets Dwennimen, Doyali Islam, Liam Coady, Claire Kelly, and Megan Dart join visual artists Rebecca Pickard, Adriana Onita, Alyson Davies, Lindsay Knox, and Hilary Mussell.

This event is sponsored by the Pratch Family Foundation.

The Fighting Normal event is spun off a multi-discipline art installation created by poet Amy Willans and painter Laurie MacFayden, which examines the stigma and isolation of mental illness through a combination of paintings, poetry text fragments and collage. A powerful presentation featuring four Edmonton writers whose lives have been impacted by mental illness.

This is a BYOV event. Admission to this event (if applicable) is not included in a festival pass.

Performers

• Mandie Lopatka is a true confessionalist who has been reading her poignant, heavy-hearted poems around Edmonton for more than two decades. She writes with brutal candor about her experience with depression/mental health issues, and believes raw honesty and compassion, especially self-love, can heal us all.
• Laurie MacFayden is an award-winning writer and artist who has published three poetry collections with Frontenac House. She has written a suite of poems in conversation with her paternal grandmother, Clementine, who committed suicide during the Second World War when the eldest of her four children was just 16.
• Shima Aisha Robinson (Dwennimmen) works for APIRG on the University of Alberta campus. She is a MacEwan University BA candidate who advances her enthusiasm for anti-oppression and social justice work volunteering, interning and working with local groups that address systemic issues of oppression and marginalization in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton).
• Amy Willans is a highly-sought public speaker and award-winning mental health advocate and educator on topics including support, wellness and recovery. Using her own story to affect social change, her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper, various literary anthologies, and her poetry chapbook, Haunted by Blue.