Amal El-Mohtar, Charles de Lint with Kate Heartfield ~ The Magic Among Us

Award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Charles de Lint invite us into worlds where the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary begin to blur. Through her luminous, genre-defying storytelling, El-Mohtar explores the intersections of myth, love, memory and time. Fresh from her win of the Hugo Award for Best Novella for The River Has Roots, Amal brings this celebrated new work, and her remarkable imagination, to the conversation. De Lint, an acclaimed pioneer of contemporary urban fantasy, draws on folklore, music and the magic woven into everyday life to create stories in which the extraordinary feels tantalizingly close at hand. He will share from his newest book, Dog Sisters, bringing another captivating story from his richly imagined world to the festival.

In conversation with Kate Heartfield, they will explore:

~ How myth, folklore and music continue to shape the stories we tell—and the ways we understand ourselves.

~ Where magic lives in the everyday, and what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to see the world differently.

~ The ways stories can cross boundaries between past and present, the ordinary and the fantastical, the personal and the universal.

~ Why we turn to stories to make sense of our lives, connect with one another and imagine worlds beyond the one we know.

~ The transformative power of imagination—and how the stories we create can, in turn, transform us.

A captivating conversation between two extraordinary imaginative minds about myth, music, storytelling and the magic that surrounds us—sometimes hidden in plain sight.