Three writers explore how attention shapes our understanding of the worlds we inhabit. In Dead Bees Still Sting, Susan Cormier offers a lyrical reflection on nature, belonging, and the quiet cycles of change that mark the living landscape. M.A.C. Farrant’s Seventy-Two Seasons: A Memoir About Noticing finds humour and wonder in close observation, tracing the small, luminous shifts that often go unseen.
Brian Kaufman’s Cascadia Subduction Shift moves into the unsettled terrain of coming of age, where absence, risk, and rupture shape the edges of experience. Together, these works explore how meaning is made through noticing — whether in the natural world, the everyday, or the fractured spaces of memory and growth.
Location: Room C400, UBC Robson Square
Type: Panel, Reading
Sponsored by:
Moderator: TBA
Readers: Susan Cormier, Dead Bees Still Sting: Tales of Life at the Edge of Nature (Greystone Books) | M.A.C. Farrant, Seventy-Two Seasons: A Memoir About Noticing (Ronsdale Press) | Brian Kaufman, Cascadia Subduction Shift (Guernica Editions)
About The Readers
Susan Cormier
Susan Cormier is a beekeeper, caretaker of assorted small critters, and author of "Dead Bees Still Sting," a collection of stories about living in the urban wildland interface of South Langley. Her lyrical essay “Advice to a New Beekeeper” won the 2022 CBC Prize in Nonfiction. She has also won or been shortlisted for such awards as CBC’s Prize in Poetry, Arc Magazine’s Poem of the Year, Anvil Press/SubTerrain Magazine’s Lush Triumphant, and the Federation of B.C. Writers’ Literary Writes award. Susan produces Vancouver Story Slam, Canada’s longest-running live indie storytelling competition.
M.A.C. Farrant
M.A.C. (Marion) Farrant has been writing and publishing in Canada since the 1980s: 20 works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir; two produced plays, countless book reviews for the Vancouver Sun and Toronto Globe & Mail; many anthology contributions, and over a dozen chapbooks. Her books have been a finalist for many awards, among them the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Ethel Wilson fiction prize, two Jessie Richardson theatre awards, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the ReLit Award, the Gemini Awards for the Bravo short film adaptation of her story, Rob’s Guns & Ammo, and the Victoria Book Prize (three times), the last of which she won in 2014 for her collection of miniature fiction, The World Afloat. Her 2021 non-fiction book, One Good Thing, was a BC Bestseller, and in February, 2026, her latest book, Seventy-Two Seasons. entered the BC Bestseller list at #5 and has remained there for several weeks now. Farrant is well-known for her acerbic wit and laugh-out-loud humour. BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most ascerbic and intelligent humourist”. Bill Richardson has called her “a master of the Zen-like art of delivering weight in a way that is featherlight”, further noting that she’s “the most accomplished and unapologetic miniaturist in Canadian letters.”
Brian Kaufman
Brian Kaufman writes fiction, poetry, memoir, and drama. He lives in what is called “Vancouver” on the ancestral and unceded land of the Coast Salish people. Cascadia Subduction Shift is his first published collection of fiction.
