For Immediate Release:

The CBC Massey Lectures – 2022

Laughing with the Trickster:  On Sex, Death, and Accordions by Tomson Highway

Brilliant, jubilant insights into the glory and anguish of life from one of the world’s most treasured Indigenous creators.

Trickster is zany, ridiculous. The ultimate, over-the-top, madcap fool. Here to remind us that the reason for existence is to have a blast and to laugh ourselves silly.

Celebrated author and playwright Tomson Highway brings his signature irreverence to an exploration of five themes central to the human condition: language, creation, sex and gender, humour, and death. An invigorating comparison of Christian, classical, and Cree mythologies reveals their contributions to Western thought, life, and culture—and how North American Indigenous mythologies provide unique, timeless solutions to our modern problems. Highway also offers generous personal anecdotes, including accounts of his beloved accordion-playing, caribou-hunting father, and plentiful Trickster stories as curatives for the all-out unhappiness caused by today’s patriarchal, colonial systems.

Laugh with the legendary Tomson Highway as he illuminates a healing, hilarious way forward.

TOMSON HIGHWAY is a Cree author, playwright, and musician. His memoir, Permanent Astonishment, won the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He also wrote the plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and the bestselling novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. Tomson Highway is a member of the Barren Lands First Nation and lives in Gatineau, Quebec.

The CBC Massey Lectures is a partnership between CBC, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto, providing a forum where contemporary thinkers can explore important issues of our time. The 2022 CBC Massey Lectures are scheduled for five cities this year and will be broadcast on CBC Radio and CBC Listen in November. Visit cbc.ca/ideas or follow @cbcideas on Twitter for more information.

Wed. Sept 7- Fredericton (The Fredericton Playhouse)

Fri. Sept 9- St. John's (D.F. Cook Recital Hall, Memorial University)

Wed. Sept 14 - Saskatoon (Broadway Theatre)

Fri. Sept. 16 - Vancouver (York Theatre)

Fri. Sept 23 - Toronto (Koerner Hall)

Tickets to all lectures will be on sale through the theatre box office in the first week of August.

Media Contact: debby@anansi.ca

Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordions by Tomson Highway 

978-1-4870-1123-9/|224 pages/ Paperback/$22.99 CAD | $17.99 USD/Publication 27 September 22

 Author photo by Sean Howard.