Becoming a published author is undeniably a memorable experience for every writer, whether for the first time or the twentieth time. Launching that newly published book into the world of readers comes a close second.
The Manitoba Writers’ Guild is thrilled to offer a new program whereby members with a recently published book can launch their literary achievement in the artistic surroundings of Winnipeg’s thriving Exchange District.
All of our members with published books, whether self-published, indie press published, or traditionally published are eligible for this member benefit.
Spring 2023
- March 11 – Scott Ellis
- March 19 – Anna Stein
- March 25 – Roxanne Anderson
- April 15 – Den Valdron
- April 22 – Joanne Epp
- April 30 – Elizabeth Struthers
If you are interested in learning more about the program or having your book launched, please email MWGEvents@gmail.com.
How to Apply
- All MWG members who have published a book within the current and previous year are eligible to apply for a book launch.
- A Call for Applications will be sent to all members in mid-November and mid-May every year.
- These applications will request information about the book, a brief author bio, and a photo of the author, and the book cover, front and back, as well as your preferences about the launch: refreshments, format, technology, etc.
- Within a week of the deadline, dates for the launches will be negotiated between authors and the book launch coordinator.
- After the date has been agreed, you will be asked to sign an author’s agreement with the MWG and to pay an administrative fee of $25.
If you have any questions, please contact MWGEvents2022@gmail.com and put Book Launch in the subject line.
Upcoming
March 11 – Scott Ellis
Scott Ellis has been a door-to-door salesman, professional malingerer, show groom, bonsai lumberjack, phone interviewer, arts scene curmudgeon, peculiarly well-rated credit risk, freelance ontologist and entrance-level maladroit for many years now.
“Scott Ellis has a penchant for sophisticated, intelligent themes manifested through realistic, complex characterization. Some of it is lighthearted, much of it makes demands on the reader. Not a book to skip through. Be prepared to think and ponder. Overall, quite a treat to read.”
Amazing Stories Magazine
Benny the Antichrist and Other Stories
Benny the Antichrist – He’s the arch-arch-villain, the most made guy in this universe or any other. And he’s looking to make a career change…
The Reason of Sleep – How do you make your way in a world ruled by those who never sleep and those who live in dreams?
Fae-Dar – There’s this bar, see, full of gods, trolls, pixies and every other being out of myth and legend. And in walks an accountant…
In the Shaft – Two guys getting high and playing b-ball in a skyscraper elevator shaft, what could go wrong?
Saccade – He has no illusions. That’s his problem.
Magic Phone – A lyrical conversation about guns, long distance and neutrinos
The Deep Crew – Who handles the psychic garbage of an entire city? A special kind of sanitation worker.
Crawling to the Moon and Other Stories
Fossil Cove Press presents CRAWLING TO THE MOON, The second collection of stories and vignettes from noted science fiction and fantasy storyteller, Scott Ellis, featuring…
Crawling to the Moon: A tornado, a talking doberman, fate and beauty in a Florida horse show, ca 1971.
System Crash: Sometimes being rich, cool and the boss doesn’t pan out all that well…
Sidecar, the path to world peace, through nanotech and alcohol.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain: Two homeless men find themselves in a boxcar with a soldier from a space empire.
Cup of Trembling: A drink means greatness, death or madness. And you have to choose right now.
Dragon Dilemma: A warrior, a princess, a dragon: There are only a few ways this story can go, right? Well, not necessarily….
The New People: What happens when the rich, beautiful and famous have their own dimension?
March 19 – Anna Stein
The Black of the Room
After much soul searching about improprieties in the Sleep Deprivation Research Lab, Kay decides to act. What she does next will affect the rest of her life. What occurs and how her life unravels at inopportune moments provides the heartbeat of The Black of the Room.
March 25 – Roxanne Anderson
Before I read a book, (I enjoy mysteries and memoirs) I always study the last chapter first. When I was a 17-year-old high school student, I wrote an article for the Winnipeg Tribune on school bus safety. Now that I am 62 years, I recently wrote a piece on retirement that was published in CBC’s First Person series. I co-authored a fictionized memoir with my late father, called Broken Harnesses. The story is told through the voice of Ross Reid, a young boy growing up during the Great Depression in the Canadian Prairies. When Ross runs away from home to escape the horror there, he dreams of owning a farm one day but instead finds himself a soldier of war. Moving the Flood is a memoir of my experiences with localized artificial flooding. I reside on an acreage, along the Red River, north of Selkirk, Manitoba.
Moving the Flood
This memoir illustrates the harsh reality of living on River Lot 95 beside the ever-changing Red River. The land had not flooded during the Great Flood of 1826 or the 1997 Flood of the Century. Why then did River Lot 95 first flood in 2009? Using photographs, historical maps, media records, and archival research, Moving the Flood attempts to answer that question.
April 15 – Den Valdron
D.G. Valdron is a Manitoba Writers’ Guild member notable for his many contributions to the MWG, including workshops on publishing, world building, copyright, writing characters and other subjects. He is also a longtime Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer and author of many titles including The Mermaid’s Tale, Dawn of Cthulhu, Bear Cavalry, Giant Monsters Sing Sad Songs and others. Nonfiction work includes LEXX Unauthorized, and Doctor Who, the Pirate Histories. He’s done regular readings and panels at the World Fantasy Convention. His work, fiction and nonfiction, can be found at many places online. He used to own a cat.
Drunk Slutty Elf and Other Stories
A drunken elf thief hooks up with a grey space alien; a vampire is pursued by his fans; somewhere an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters plots rebellion; ghost hunters confront non-Lovecraftian horrors; fairy tales go horribly wrong; the antichrist brings Armageddon, and nobody cares.
April 22 – Joanne Epp
I’m a poet with interests in books, music, and art. I have lived in Manitoba for twenty years now, but still think of myself as being from Saskatchewan. My first full-length poetry collection, Eigenheim (Turnstone Press), was published in 2015; my second, Cattail Skyline (Turnstone Press), in 2021.
Cattail Skyline
Joanne Epp’s second poetry collection “celebrates the tiny marvels and shifting layers of the Prairie landscape.” As a meditation on nature and place, it offers close-ups on particular landscapes – Omand’s Creek in Winnipeg; Star Lake in the boreal forest; a certain stretch of prairie road. By discovering a place for the first time, or finding the new within the familiar, or revisiting once-familiar places after many years, Epp questions how we know a place, how our perception of it changes, and what is impossible to know.
April 30 – Elizabeth Struthers
Elizabeth Struthers is a counsellor, a traveller, and a storyteller. As a lover of historical fiction, she has visited historical sites and museums across Canada. She was inspired to write A Prayer for Thérèse after touring the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. This visit spurred her deep dive into the realities of 18th-century colonial life and the challenges facing women in that period. In 2015, she deepened her understanding of the French colonies with a two-week immersive volunteering and research experience at the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, where she collaborated with staff to capture the details of life on Île Royale. A Prayer for Thérèse encapsulates the rich, sinuous history of Louisbourg through Elizabeth’s nuanced characters and vibrant storytelling. Elizabeth has a master’s degree in social work and fifteen years’ experience as a vocational counselor for adults with disabilities. She believes in providing equal opportunities for all persons, and this commitment informs her writing. She was trained by Sage Hill writing programs in 2016, and her short stories were recognized by the Lake Winnipeg Writing Group.
She now lives in Winnipeg with her cat, kitty Karmella.
A Prayer for Thérèse
Everything can change in an instant. Thérèse Laserre is a young French woman who travelled to the fortified town of Louisbourg in 1749 to work as a servant for a wealthy family. In her precious spare moments, she met the love of her life, married him, and started a life in the colony.
Then, her world falls to pieces. Her husband dies on a stormy sea, leaving her pregnant and alone to survive in this rough, unknown land. Armed with nothing but her faith and her determination to survive, Thérèse must tackle a new wave of challenges. She receives unwanted attention from a dubious soldier, faces an outbreak of the dangerous grippe spreading among the colonial families, and suffers the consequences of a dry fishing season. The threat of encroaching British ships is ever-present, and her future is increasingly uncertain. How will she manage her husband’s fishing business and provide for her children? Will the British invade the fortress and put her family at risk? Was she unknowingly involved in a thieving scheme? Will a new love awaken her heart?
A Prayer for Thérèse is a powerful story about strong women who need to make difficult choices. Elizabeth Struthers paints an evocative portrait of eighteenth-century colonial life and the challenges facing women of that period. Like so many before and after her, Thérèse will have to draw on her allies, her strength, and her unwavering faith to survive.
Past Launches
Fall 2022
Bellec was born in Richmond, BC and raised in Langley, BC, before settling in Winnipeg, MB. His first adventure was a career in Finance, where he spent 15 years developing his business skills. His highest achievement was the Certified Payroll Manager designation. He currently still consults with businesses on their systems and processes. Over that period of time, he also attended Lights Film School where he started to nurture his early creative abilities.
A self-starter always interested in research, he taught himself many of the aspects of storytelling through reading books, screenplays, and material online. Whenever he found an inspirational piece of art, he quickly went to the source to find the story behind the artist who created the work. It took many years after attending film school for him to finally combine his creative skills with his life experience and tell these stories he had been holding back.
He is an advocate for art as a form of expression and supports artists through these various organizations and social media.
Pulse is a plot-driven multi-POV dystopian sci-fi horror thriller set in 2040, centered around a corporation, a creature, and a music festival. Think Fyre Festival, Black Mirror, and X-Files combined. The story deals with themes of capitalism, consumerism, business, politics, pandemics, climate change, activism, and technology while bouncing between a diverse group of characters sure to entertain almost anyone. The book is already being praised for its fantastic use of horror, engaging world-building, and genre-bending approach utilizing some screenplay-like formatting. This is the first entry in a new series with the sequel well underway.
Bryan “B.A.” Bellec’s debut novel, Someone’s Story, won the Reader Views Reviewer’s Choice Literary Award for 2021 Young Adult Book of the Year (and other honors) with its endearing, soulful take on teen mental health. Around the same time, he also was also awarded a Digital Originals grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to make music. Both Bellec’s novels feature musicians and Bellec takes it one step further by actually producing songs inspired by his books.
Fisher Lavell is a working-class writer. Born to generations of rural poor, she was blessed with a trove of untamed stories and the stubborn will to tell them.
She was raised on the outskirts of Swan River, Manitoba, in a one-room shack; no plumbing, no phone, no vehicle. A curtain strung over a rope separated the area with the bed from the one with the wood-burning stove, the table, and one small, hopeful window.
They were poor. Yet, they had each other, her mother’s bedtime books, her father’s Country guitar, and a wealth of stories told and retold by mom and dad and aunts and uncles and neighbours in their working-class, storytelling culture.
Rosie Kelvey is a spirited and willful prairie woman of the early twentieth century whose ache to pursue her own desires goes against the harsh and limiting moral landscape of her time. She has what the neighbours teasingly call “two men on her hook”: an older, passive husband and a virile, young lover.
But life is perilous for those who are poor and female, a fact with which Rosie wrestles as her baby sister dies of fever, a starry-eyed teen sister succumbs to a botched abortion, and an angry, “bad-behavin’” sister is dragged away to the Winnipeg Home for Wayward Girls, to be sterilized under the eugenics policies of the time.
Yet, Rosie’s ache for fun, excitement, passion is “in full swing” and undeterred by the misfortunes befalling others all around her, she is drawn headlong towards an all-consuming flame.
Through Rosie’s eyes and in her fresh, lusty voice, Fisher Lavell explores themes of poverty, loss, and upheaval. Based closely on the hardscrabble lives of the author’s errant aunties, A Seven Year Ache paints their tragedies, heartaches, and passions on a large and vibrant Prairie canvas.
Born in Europe in 1956, Robert Stermscheg was exposed to many wonderful writers, among them Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alexandre Dumas, even Karl May. The element Robert appreciated most about their writing was how their portrayal of life opened up his imagination to vivid new worlds. Due to frequent moves necessitated by his father’s career—Stermscheg the elder was an electrical engineer— Robert became an avid reader. To soften the blow of the moves— and broaden his son’s education and imagination— Stermscheg supplied his son with a steady supply of books, principal among them Karl May novels.
1944. American bomber pilot, Jack Swaggart, has led his squadron countless times into hostile German territory, hit the assigned target, and returned to base none the worse for wear. Eventually, Jack’s luck runs out. With his B 26 Marauder heavily damaged by flak, Jack is forced to ditch his crippled airplane in the German countryside. Separated from his crew, Jack trusts an unlikely ally, Hilde Augsberg, a plucky young woman, a decision which catapults them into an adventure neither could have envisioned. Coincidentally, they spot a new type of German warplane in flight – a design unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. In that moment, Jack realizes that the Nazis have developed a formidable new bomber. In the blink of an eye, Jack’s mission shifts from survival to thwarting the Germans just when the Allies are on the verge of triumph.
