October 25, 2015 - The Rivoli in Toronto

This year’s readers and their families came from Argentina, Brazil, Egypt,
England, Guyana, Ireland, Jamaica, Pakistan, Qatar, South Sudan,
United States and, of course, Canada.

The Totally Unknown Writers Festival 2015: Stories includes
the stories read at the festival and one selection from each
writer featured on the Life Rattle Radio Program in 2015.

Carmen Trapez read "The Naked Women of Panchgani"
The naïve observations of a young girl who witnesses destitute women, some little more than her own age, selling themselves along the roadside outside of a hill station in India.

Gabriel Micelli read "Fireworks"
A Canada Day fireworks celebration floods the mind of a young man with bittersweet memories of a lost love and recollections of shared intimacies from the previous year.

Amina Abdelwahab read "The Elevator"
A young woman must risk leaving behind her sister, and endure the violence of her father’s storm of rage as she embarks with her mother to a new country for the promise of fresh opportunity.

Aaron Jervis read "Silver Ladder"
The hellish job being a roofer, with the backbreaking labour of stripping and then reshingling roofs at dangerous heights, is worsened by a contractor who considers all of his employees disposable.

Janine Carter read "Strangers"
The pain of a seventeen-year-old’s decision to terminate her pregnancy merges with the shame that prevented her from reaching out, in a heart-rending encounter between mother and daughter.

Caroline Wade read "Christina"
Scenes of a father’s struggle to calm his frantic daughter book-end this account of a teenager’s plunge into a narcotic tailspin after a dealer sells her a bag of meth instead of the expected cocaine.

Kau Monydhot Makuei read "Binti Kiziwi"
On a hillside in Kenya, a group of teenage boys sit and admire the new girl at school. Encouraged by his friends, one self-conscious boy’s approach turns into a rather awkward first encounter.

Erica May Farazi read "Puffer"
Unexpected details tucked into this tale of a mother and her six-year-old daughter returning home from a doctor’s visit and a stop to pick up asthma medication cause a few serious double-takes.

Fatima Zermina read "Sour Patch Kid"
Teenage cousins, who have shared life experiences in both Pakistan and Canada, escape to the solitude of a rooftop in Karachi, where they reflect till dawn on life and the loss of one’s mother.

Sue Bracken read "Section Twenty-One"
Two sisters visiting a cemetery to arrange the burial of their recently deceased brother’s cremated remains encounter an uncouth funerary salesman whose flippant behaviour will make you squirm.