Join us on August 29 at the Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Avenue (half a block south of Bloor between Bathurst and Spadina subway stations) for an evening with Rod Michalko and friends.

Rod's celebration will include readings by friends and a musical set by singer Chloe Watkinson. The readers include Nate Bitton, Devon Healey, Mel Pyne, Tanya Titchkosky and others.

Rod Michalko is a blind disability studies theorist who has recently retired from teaching at the University of Toronto. His books and essays are known internationally. He has now moved into the realm of short story writing, and Things are Different Here is his first collection. He lives in Toronto

Chloe Watkinson has come out of her musical roots to create her own name in Canadian Music. For 10 years she has played all over North America, with a passion for music, and how it allows her to connect with people. Chloe and her band Park Eddy released their debut album last year which is available on CD Baby, iTunes, and Spotify.

Things Are Different Here
All of Rod Michalko's stories take place in blindness, and things are different here. Michalko tells of how blind people move through the world encountering sighted people with tragic, daring, and humorous consequences. The characters in Michalko's stories invite us to “come along for the ride”—a ride that will take us through the intrigue and mystery of creating a life in blindness.

The university, restaurants and bars, on the street, even in martial arts—it is in these places that you will encounter blindness. These are stories of uncanny dimensions. There is Eli, a young man who is compelled to engage the completeness of his total blindness as it slowly seeps into his entire being; Eli, ironically, goes blind…again. The title story, Things Are Different Here, presents the mystery that Bradley faces in the “blinding light” as he moves, blind, in city streets.

In these stories and in the rest of the collection, Michalko leads us into an unexpected image of blindness, and things are different here.