Every September since 1997, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival presents THIN AIR, a celebration of books and ideas. Their curated line-up is a perfect fit for curious readers who are ready to discover strong voices and great storytelling in practically every genre. For 2023, they're presenting a hybrid festival featuring more than 60 writers, in-person events, and a destination website.

To watch video content Daniel Allen Cox has prepared for THIN AIR, visit the festival website here. 

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Sometimes it’s obvious how a book will influence your current writing project as soon as you pick it up. Other times, the impact announces itself gradually. Here are a few of the many beloved books whose effects lingered with me as I prepared to write my memoir-in-essays I Felt the End Before It Came. I hope you discover the layers just as I did—in your own way.

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Care Of, by Ivan Coyote

When the pandemic hit, Coyote finally had the time to respond to many of the heartfelt fan letters they had received over the years. This became Care Of, a heart-melting journey into what it means to fully support queer and trans youth. Like Coyote, I found myself at home in quarantine, and I was working towards a book deadline. I envisioned my memoir as a series of breakup letters to my former religion, so the epistolary form of Care Of, and the revelations of what a letter can be, spoke to me in a profound way.

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Leaving the Witness, by Amber Scorah

I don’t think my book would exist without Leaving the Witness. Scorah—who, like me, is an ex-Jehovah’s Witness—writes about being an undercover missionary in China, where she preached in a language other than the one she was indoctrinated in. This memoir makes crucial connections between language and cultic manipulations, which helped me realize I needed to remake the vocabulary that the religion had used against me into something queer and filled with possibility.

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Hotline, by Dimitri Nasrallah

In Hotline, a single mother immigrates to Quebec from Beirut in the 1980s and takes care of her son in the depths of a Montreal winter. It was striking for me to read this novel while I was writing my book, since it maps out—in incredibly felt detail—the streets where I did some of my growing up, although later than when the novel is set. It’s a geographical exploration of the west part of downtown Montreal, and it illuminated the city in a completely new way for me.

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Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley

In a memoir-in-essays, the discrete pieces have an inner logic yet also work together as a unified narrative. Run Towards the Danger was helpful in showing me how to aim for that balance. Polley writes about the traumas of working on set as a child actor while dealing with irresponsible and abusive adults and about the process of coping with a brain injury. With these disparate forms of vulnerability, she gives us the tools we need as readers to piece together the bigger picture.

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Learn more about I Felt the End Before it Came:

Daniel Allen Cox grew up with firm lines around what his religion considered unacceptable: celebrating birthdays and holidays; voting in elections, pursuing higher education, and other forays into independent thought. Their opposition to blood transfusions would have consequences for his mother, just as their stance on homosexuality would for him.

But even years after whispers of his sexual orientation reached his congregation’s presiding elder, catalyzing his disassociation, the distinction between “in” and “out” isn’t always clear. Still in the midst of a lifelong disentanglement, Cox grapples with the group’s cultish tactics—from gaslighting to shunning—and their resulting harms—from simmering anger to substance abuse—all while redefining its concepts through a queer lens. Can Paradise be a bathhouse, a concert hall, or a room full of books?

With great candour and disarming self-awareness, Cox takes readers on a journey from his early days as a solicitous door-to-door preacher in Montreal to a stint in New York City, where he’s swept up in a scene of photographers and hustlers blurring the line between art and pornography. The culmination of years spent both processing and avoiding a complicated past, I Felt the End Before It Came reckons with memory and language just as it provides a blueprint to surviving a litany of Armageddons.