10/05/2026
LITFEST 2026: October 17. Together and Alone: Normalizing Grief Panel.
Panelists Lisa Martin, Richard Harrison, and Zena Sharman sit down to discuss the process of grief and its many nuances.
In NIGHTHAWKS, Lisa Martin traces a creaturely interconnectedness, traversing land, ecology, and other boundaries amid crises unfolding at a global scale. These poems parse aspects of human embodiment—emotion, relationship, mortality—and reflect on how to live through moments of intense personal and political upheaval. Long verses about the remnants of marriage and divorce, and a sonnet cycle about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, sit alongside lyrical explorations of midlife loneliness, mothering, and grief. Philosophical ruminations on form and language are also present, asking what good is a poem, a verse, in a world so full of things one might hold an aversion to? “What if I write a line, follow it in, what if/the line tears what I didn’t mean to open?” Martin’s experimental collection engages in exquisite emotional truth-telling, asking how we can hold and tend the world with more attunement and care.
In this latest collection Richard Harrison has created a companion to his Governor General Award–winning collection On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. In My Mother Joins the Resistance, Harrison considers his mother’s life – from her time as a child during WWII’s Operation Pied Piper, up until its end, in 2017, when terminally ill with cancer, she chose MAiD – with elegant, deeply felt poetry. These are beautiful poems, ones that piece together a person, a life and a family over generations. These are poems that examine the wounds passed down through a family, alongside the love, and see the echoes of both – the wounds and the love – in the world around us.
Staying Power: On Queerness, Inheritances, and the Families We Choose by Zena Sharman is a beautiful and honest memoir of care work, grief, parenting, and chosen family in the wake of intergenerational trauma. It recounts the author’s experiences of raising three children in a four-parent q***r family after her mother’s death and a divorce drastically reshaped her life. Staying Power asks, “If leaving has helped you survive, how do you learn to stay?” It finds answers in q***r kinship, femme erotics, Leatherdyke lineages, and the radical possibilities inherent in doing motherwork outside of motherhood, recognizing that sometimes you fight the thing you want most.
Date: Saturday, October 17
Time: Doors: 3:30 pm, Program: 4:00 pm
Tickets: $20, $10 (student/low income)
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