Climate Change Fiction: Reckoning and Resilience
Description
Join us for this live virtual panel discussion, and be sure to check out our full list of sessions for this year's event at: FictionFest.ca/events
Lineup
Margaret Sweatman
Margaret Sweatman has published seven novels, most recently Night Birds (Goose Lane Editions, 2026). She also writes stories, plays, song lyrics, poetry, libretti, essays, and is a musician and performer. Her novels have won the McNally Robinson and the Margaret Laurence Awards, as well as the Rogers Writers Trust Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Carol Shields Award and a Genie. Her plays have been produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, Popular Theatre Alliance, and the Guelph Spring Festival. She has performed with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, and the National Academy Orchestra, as well as with various ensembles and her own Broken Songs Band (vocals and harmonica). Her short stories are published by The Fiddlehead and Prairie Fire, with a story included in Best Canadian Stories 2026 (Biblioasis, 2025).
Alanna Rusnak
Alanna was born in the wrong decade and dreams of abandoning everything to live in a van and travel across Canada. She'll call it "a book tour," but it's really an excuse to unleash her inner hippie. A collector of typewriters and John Travolta VHS movies, she believes life is too short to not indulge in the things that bring you joy — and in keeping with that philosophy, she left a stuffy office job of 18 years to launch a full-time indie press out of a chicken coop on her childhood property. An author of literary and speculative fiction, Alanna likes to play in dark spaces, but always leaves room for redemption. Her latest novel is about burning down the world in order to set things right. Settled in West Grey as a four-year-old, it has always been her home and source of inspiration. She's working hard to build bridges between arts communities — though she'll certainly leave it all behind the moment her husband gets on board with the van-life idea.
Jason Pchajek
Jason Pchajek (Pay-Jack) is a writer, radio host, and corporate researcher from Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is best known as the play-by-play voice for the University of Manitoba Bisons Men's Hockey team, and co-host of The Hockey Show on 101.5 UMFM. A writer of science fiction and fantasy, Jason is particularly interested in the climate fiction genre, seen in his debut novel Bounty, and it's upcoming sequel, Bounty: A Price to Pay.
K.A. Wiggins
K.A. Wiggins (Kaie) writes award-winning speculative fiction that explores the tangled webs of society, environment, and identity through intricate, dreamlike tales of monsters and magic. Best known for “eco-apocalypse + monsters in dystopian Vancouver” YA fantasy series Threads of Dreams, her short fiction also appears in Year's Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Brave New Weird: Best New Weird Horror, Lightspeed Magazine, and Strange Horizons, among other leading fiction markets. She makes frequent appearances at regional and international conferences and festivals as a public speaker and workshop leader and spends her days with books on the traditional unceded territory of the K’omoks and Pentlatch peoples, leading the Children's Writers & Illustrators of British Columbia Society, teaching with the Creative Writing for Children Society, and working as a school library tech, and when she's not writing. Find her and her work at kawiggins.com
HOSTED BY: Steve Hugh Westenra
Steve is a trans author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror (basically, if it’s weird he writes it). He's also a book reviewer, a SFINCS and SPFBO judge, and runs the Trans Reading Group discord. He grew up on the eldritch shores of Newfoundland, Canada, and currently lives and works in (the slightly less eldritch) Montreal. He holds advanced degrees in Russian Literature, Medieval Studies, and Religious Studies. His current academic work focuses on marginalized reclamations of monstrous figures. He has taught the History of Satan; Religion and its Monsters; and Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion. Steve is passionate about queerness, Late Antiquity, and spiders.
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