LitFest opens Oct. 14 with Trina Moyles discussing Black Bear in Edmonton
Cover of Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival by Trina Moyles. The author will discuss her memoir with Conor Kerr at LitFest's October 14 opening night in Edmonton.
Photo credit: Book cover — Knopf Canada
LitFest will open its 2026 festival in Edmonton on Wednesday, October 14, with Alberta-raised author Trina Moyles in conversation with writer Conor Kerr about her memoir Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival. The conversation begins at 7 p.m. in the Rice Theatre at the Citadel Theatre, and the festival continues through October 18.
Published by Knopf Canada in January, Black Bear draws on Moyles’s childhood in the Peace River area and the black bears she observed over four of her seven seasons as a fire lookout in northern Alberta. Her encounters with bears near her tower run alongside the story of her older brother, Brendan, and the changes in their relationship as adults.
Moyles first encountered a black bear when she was five. Her father, a wildlife biologist, brought an orphaned cub home for a night before it was sent to the Calgary Zoo. Years later, she was posted to a tower in a wildlife corridor, where bears regularly appeared beyond the electrified fence around her station. She began to recognize individual animals, following their habits and movements over successive summers.
The memoir also traces the siblings’ different experiences of northern Alberta’s resource economy. Moyles returned to the region after working with human rights organizations, while Brendan worked in the oil sands and, as she recounts, struggled with substance addiction. She writes about his loss alongside her changing understanding of bears, the effects of resource extraction and the difficulties of coexistence between people and wildlife.
Black Bear is a finalist for the 2026 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and in the Environmental Literature category of the 2026 Banff Mountain Book Competition. Moyles, who now lives in Whitehorse, previously wrote Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism, and the Fight to Feed the World and Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest. Lookout won a National Outdoor Book Award and the 2022 Alberta Memoir Award.
Kerr, who will moderate the conversation, is an Edmonton-based author and member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. His novels include Avenue of Champions and Prairie Edge. LitFest’s opening-night program also includes a reception with light refreshments, music by Mikayla Bortscher and Rabbits Three Cultural Connections, and a spoken-word performance by Some-Sum (Ryan Summers).
Doors open at 6 p.m., with the program scheduled from 7 to 9 p.m. LitFest lists admission at $25, or $10 for students and low-income attendees. Ticketing is handled through the Citadel Theatre.
