Celluloid City

When Tom Mellersch, a budding screenwriter, takes a working holiday in Toontown, he finds his creative aspirations being batted about by a sleazy producer, his assigned collaborator, an academic director, and his celebrated helpmate. A pair of overbearing actors also hijack the project, eager to have a prequel to their hit, Carlotta's Reprisal. Tom soon finds that his scripting attempts are peopled by the city dwellers around him, as much as his dreams, leading him to improve on his fragments, and create an artistic short, an AI space romance, a silent surrealist film, a jewelry heist caper, and even a Movie of the Week. To shake loose the film industry, Tom flees to the palatial home of a former opera diva, only to fall in with activist malcontents who drag him into one of his own plotlines. Will Tom escape the celluloid city he's created, and does he want to? AUTHOR: Garry Thomas Morse has published several collections of poetry, notably Discovery Passages, about the history of his Kwakwaka'wakw Indigenous ancestors, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, and Prairie Harbour, also shortlisted for a Governor General's Award. His novels have gained critical attention for pushing the aesthetic envelope. He is the author of a speculative fiction series called The Chaos! Quincunx, and two of its three books have been nominated for the ReLit Award. Morse is the recipient of the 2008 City of Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for Emerging Artist. He has also served as the 2018 Jack McClelland Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto, and the 2019 Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg.