Author Readings and Workshops – Rural Arts
Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival
& Okanagan Regional Library present
AUTHOR READING AND WORKSHOP
C.E. GATCHALIAN
Award-Winning Playwright and Author
Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival
Friday, September 19, 2025
Summerland Library (9533 Main Street, Summerland B.C.)
AUTHOR READING AND Q&A | 3PM
In this intimate reading, acclaimed writer CE Gatchalian shares excerpts from his memoir Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man—a lyrical and provocative exploration of race, desire, and artistic identity. Blending cultural criticism with personal reflection, the memoir traces the formation of a brown queer sensibility through encounters with literature, film, and family history. This reading will offer a glimpse into a richly textured inner world shaped by both beauty and marginalization.
C.E. Gatchalian (Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival 2025) | Photo: Ricardo Fernandez
Workshop: Writing the Unraveling Self | 4 PM
What if your writing didn’t have to “make sense”? What if you could let it stutter, fragment, contradict, or fall apart? In this hour-long workshop, participants will explore what it means to write from a place of emotional rawness and formal disruption. Through short, guided prompts and group reflection, we’ll challenge the idea that good writing must be polished or coherent—and embrace the mess, confusion, and vulnerability that often lead us closer to truth.
GALLERY
C.E. Gatchalian (Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival 2025) | Photo: Ricardo Fernandez
About C.E. Gatchalian
Born and raised on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh peoples (colonially known as “Vancouver”), now based in Tkaronto (“Toronto”), C.E. Gatchalian (he/him/his) is a Filipinx queer neurodivergent author, editor, playwright, dramaturge, teacher and consultant. A graduate of the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing, he is the author of six books and co-editor of two anthologies. He was the 2013 recipient of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize and is a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist. His plays have been produced nationally and internationally, as well as on radio and television. His memoir, Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty and the Making of a Brown Queer Man, was published in 2019 by Arsenal Pulp Press, and he recently co-edited Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing (Cormorant Books). In 2022 he was a recipient of the one-time only British Columbia Lieutenant Governor’s Arts & Music Awards for his contributions to the arts in BC.
ABOUT SUMMERLAND’S RYGA ART FESTIVAL
Summerland is a rural municipality on the west side of the Okanagan Lake in Interior BC.
Every year since 2015, Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival reimagines our small town to be a vibrant meeting place of the arts and community. For a full week, presentations, performances, new creations, concerts, readings & symposiums on contemporary social issues take place in parks, street fronts, local shops, galleries, etc. All within walking distance from each other.
We aim to bridge barriers that may prevent anyone from participating in our communities and the arts, be these ability, cultural, economic, historic, physical, regional or otherwise. We will find a role for you.
Land Acknowledgment
The Ryga Arts Festival acknowledges with respect that this event takes place on the ancestral and unceeded lands of the Sylix peoples, who have cared for these lands since time immemorial. We are grateful for their ongoing stewardship & hold ourselves responsible for listening, learning, and building right relations through the work we do.
For more information on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada click here. www.nctr.ca
SPECIAL THANK YOU TO:
