Date and Time
- Thursday, Jun 5, 2025 1pm - 1pm
Location
Signature Paint Protection Film
821 Folsom St
Details
The GEGENÜBER magazine of the Goethe-Institut in North America presents a series of online conversations with contemporary German-language authors. Contribution from the Goethe-Institut Montréal Milk Teeth Talk and reading with author Helene Bukowski and arts reporter and program host Shelley Pomerance Synopsis Skalde writes her thoughts on pieces of paper, making new discoveries and revelations, and finding scraps with which to understand her limited world. Her mother Edith tells her little, preferring the solitude of her room. Their house is full of silence, and secrets. Skalde has only ever known life in the territory, a terrain of farms and forest cut off from the rest of the world and blanketed by a perpetual fog. Mother and daughter’s isolation is further deepened by their neighbor’s view of them as outsiders, despite it having been decades since Edith’s arrival. Then one day the fog dissipates, and is replaced by an oppressive unceasing heat. The territory dries out, and its people become increasingly erratic, and desperate. When Skalde finds a strange girl called Meisis in the forest, she instinctively takes her in. With Meisis a new and covert family unit forms, even as tensions rise between Skalde and Edith. Meisis’s presence means there has been a critical breach in security for the territory, and once discovered, Meisis will be blamed for other, more deadly anomalies. Beautifully written in immersive, spare prose, Helene Bukowski’s debut novel is about what it means to care for one another at the end of the world, about living with the impacts of climate change, and nationalism and the way we view „outsiders“. Jen Calleja’s translation from German is a lively rendition of this modern-day fairy tale, of three women living on the brink. Helene Bukowski Helene Bukowski, born in Berlin in 1993, is studying creative writing and cultural journalism in Hildesheim. She is the co-author of the documentary film Zehn Wochen Sommer, which won a Grimme Special Cultural Award in 2015. Her writing has appeared in various journals and anthologies, and she was the co-director of BELLA triste. Milk Teeth is her debut novel. Shelley Pomerance Shelley Pomerance is the host of Writers Unbound, a series on Montreal’s English-language writers, on MAtv. From 2016-2021 she was a programmer with Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival and for over 20 years was a presence on CBC Radio as an arts reporter and program host. This event will be held in English.