Winnipeg Arts Council

Jenny Heijun Wills Book Launch (Everything and Nothing At All: Essays)

Join Jenny Heijun Wills for the launch of Everything and Nothing At All: Essays (Knopf Canada). Co-presented by Plume Winnipeg (formerly the Winnipeg International Writers Festival) as part of THIN AIR 2024. Featuring a conversation hosted by Lindsay Wong, followed by a book signing. As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, who self-harms to cope with mental illness, her love language is to feed, but daily she wishes her body would disappear. These facets of Wills' being have served as the anchors she once clung to and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be. Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. And though the experiences of accumulating this knowledge have often been shot through with pain, Wills spins these threads into priceless gold—a radical, fearless vision of kinship and family. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in Southern Ontario, Canada, and currently lives in Winnipeg. She is the author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir, which received the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book. She is a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg. Host Lindsay Wong is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019, and the acclaimed collection of short stories Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality. She has also written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune. Wong holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.