Timely Tasty Talks 2019: Yasuko Thanh (Mistakes To Run With)

Timely Tasty Talks 2019: Yasuko Thanh (Mistakes To Run With)
The Craft of the Remarkably Brave, Scarily Beautiful Memoir
Apr 12 @ 7 PM - 8:15 PM MT 
Memorial Park Library, 2nd Floor
1221 2nd Street SW

Join award-winning author Yasuko Thanh in conversation with Zsuzsi Gartner for a devastatingly frank exploration of how circumstances beyond our control — and the choices we then make — dictate the people we become. 

"Rather than hiding behind a tidy story arc, Yasuko Thanh places value on all life experiences, good, bad, beautiful, scary, and sad. The result is an incredibly rare and generous thing — a memoir that lets me in so close to her life, it changed how I see mine.” — Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal

"I was profoundly moved by Thanh's tenacity amidst dire conditions and odds. With a writer's eye, she finds beauty and hope in lost causes and the strength in language to explain how one survives. Thanh mines her past to make sense of who she is and was always meant to be — a brilliant writer and an exceptional woman.” — Carrianne Leung, author of That Time I Loved You

About Mistakes To Run With

Mistakes To Run With chronicles the turbulent life of Yasuko Thanh, from early childhood in the closest thing Victoria has to a slum, to working as a sex worker and, finally, to her emergence as an award-winning author. Thanh embraced evangelical religion as a child, but rebelled against it and her equally rigid parents by smoking, and shoplifting as a teenager. At fifteen, the honour-roll runaway developed a taste for drugs and alcohol. After a stint in jail at sixteen, feeling utterly abandoned by her family, school, and society, Thanh meets the man who would become her pimp and fell in love. The next chapter of her life takes Thanh to the streets of Vancouver, where she endured beatings, arrests, crack cocaine, and an unwanted pregnancy. The act of writing ultimately became a solace from her suffering. After leaving the sex trade and refusing to settle on any one thing, Thanh forged a new life for herself, from dealing drugs in four languages, to becoming a mother, she emerged as a successful writer.

About Yasuko Thanh

Yasuko Thanh’s story collection Floating Like the Dead was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. One of its stories won an Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Short Story. The title story won the Journey Prize for the best story published in Canada in 2009. Quill & Quire named Floating Like the Dead a Best Book of the Year. CBC hailed Yasuko Thanh one of ten writers to watch in 2013. Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, her debut novel, won the Rogers Writers' Trust for Fiction, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, and was nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. She lives in Victoria with her two children. In her spare time, she writes songs and plays in a punk band called 12 Gauge Facial.