Jacob Wren | Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

Jacob Wren
Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART
Toronto, Canada: Book*hug, 2018
304 pp., 8×5.25 inches., trade paper
Edition size unknown

On Wednesday, April 25th, from 7 to 9pm, TYPE Books will host the book launch for Jacob Wren's new title Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. The event will feature readings from the book by Wren, Shannon Cochrane, Alexandra Rockingham Gill and Simone Moir.

"Written, among other things, to celebrate PME-ART’s twentieth anniversary, the book begins when Jacob Wren meets Sylvie Lachance and Richard Ducharme, moves from Toronto to Montreal to make just one project, but instead ends up spending the next twenty years creating an eccentric, often bilingual, art. It is a book about being unable to learn French yet nonetheless remaining co-artistic director of a French-speaking performance group, about the Spinal Tap-like adventures of being continuously on tour, about the rewards and difficulties of intensive collaborations, about making performances that break the mold and confronting the repercussions of doing so. A book that aims to change the rules for how interdisciplinary performance can be written about today.

Jacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, and Polyamorous Love Song (a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the 2016 ReLit Award for Fiction, and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of 2014). His most recent novel Rich and Poor, was a finalist for the 2016 Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, Individualism Was a Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art. Connect with him on his blog (www.radicalcut.blogspot.com) or on Twitter @everySongIveEve."

- publisher's blurb

TYPE Books is located at 883 Queen St. West, in Toronto.