It’s getting close to that time when my favourite annual conference happens! I’ll be doing a reading and will sit on two panels this year at The Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature, also known as Can-Con. Their 2018 schedule looks really interesting, too!

Can-Con 2018 will be held from October 12-14, 2018 at the Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada. See Can-Con’s website for more info!

I love Can-Con because I not only get to spend time with author buds who live elsewhere, and it’s like a great big family reunion (that doesn’t suck), but I also get to meet more people. It’s such a great place to learn about writing, publishing, own-voice perspectives, and more. There’s also a pretty awesome vendors room, too, where you can buy books and get them signed. They even have pitch sessions with agents and publishers!

I’ll always hold Can-Con in a special place in my heart because that’s where I met my first book (Life in the ’Cosm) in person for the first time! It made its debut on the Renaissance table that year! And I gave my very first public reading at Can-Con, too! Good times.

Can-Con 2016 was also where I noticed a lot of writers who used mobility devices, and it got me thinking, These are only the disabilities I can see. I bet there are more folks who manage invisible disabilities. And two months later, I launched The Spoonie Authors Network. (It’ll be two years old this November!)

Wanna listen to me or meet me?

I’ll be around most of the conference, but here is where you can listen to me read or talk about stuff on panels:

Always refer to the Can-Con website for the latest schedule!

Friday October 12, 2018—Alice Unbound Readings (5:00-5:50 p.m.)

Join me and authors Geoff Gander, Kate Heartfield, Elizabeth Hosang, Dominik Parisien, and Andrew A. Sutherland to listen to excerpts of our short stories from the Alice Unbound Beyond Wonderland anthology!

Saturday October 13, 2018—So We Should Talk: Critiquing Without Bloodshed (6:00-6:50 p.m.)

I’ll have my editing hat on and so will my BFF, Talia. With us both on the same panel, what could possibly go wrong? *cough*

Can-Con’s Panel Description:

It might be up there with getting a root canal or sleeping in a room full of spiders, but critiques can be essential to the writing process. A well-delivered critique leads to a much-improved manuscript. This panel explores how to deliver criticism in a constructive way, and how to find people to give you that necessary root canal. Anita Dolman, Cait Gordon, Talia C. Johnson, Douglas Smith, Costi Gurgu (Moderator).

Sunday October 14, 2018—Frankenstein, an Assemblage of Flesh (12:00-12:30 p.m.)

I’m giddy with excitement as I am such a huge fangirl of Mary Shelley and love Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus to bits. (My short story, The Hilltop Gathering will be in the We Shall Be Monsters anthology, edited by Derek Newman-Stille!)

Can-Con’s Panel Description:

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is celebrating its 200th anniversary. The monster is the ultimate outsider, rejected from humanity at every encounter; it is a sewn together assemblage of flesh, a quilted mosaic of bodies, and this integration of parts allows it to be a figure who is read to be multi-gendered, multi-racial, multi-sexual, and multi-ethnic. Panelists will explore the multiple adaptations and re-imaginings that have made Mary Shelley’s creation so changeable and so continually relevant to our society and the way we think about marginalized people. JF Garrard, Cait Gordon, Derek Newman-Stille, Caighlan Smith, Sean Moreland (Moderator)

Hope to see you there!

It’s really such a blast. If you’re coming, I hope we run into each other!

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Cait Gordon is the author of Life in the ’Cosm, a story about a little green guy who’s on a quest to save half the person he loves. Cait has recently submitted the prequel to ’Cosm called The Stealth Lovers, a military space opera about legendary warriors Xaxall Knightly and Vivoxx Tirowen. When she’s not writing, she’s editing manuscripts for indie authors and running The Spoonie Authors Network, a blog whose contributors manage disabilities and/or chronic conditions. She also really likes cake.