Please join us for the launch of Apocalypse Child, with special guest Tara Teng!

Carly Butler was a lively, imaginative child being raised by her strong and independent mom, DJ, in 1990s Montana. They were a dynamic duo, working on housing projects and bringing music to the local church. Then, a whisper of a threatened future began to grow louder: Y2K was coming.

Believing every conspiracy theory and Evangelical Christian prediction they encountered to be true, DJ and a young, impressionable Carly set out on a lonely path. Taught to prepare for the worst and to fear her girlhood dreams as warnings from God, Carly and her mother flee to the Canadian wilderness, leaving behind Barbies and Nintendo for chopping wood and shooting empty bottles for target practice. They connected with other Evangelical Christians preparing for doomsday, but were often stranded alone, without electricity, for weeks at a time as the winter—and the apocalypse—approached.  

But what happens when the world doesn’t end, after all?

Apocalypse Child is a startling memoir about growing up in a tumultuous home, coming of age in isolation, and trying to figure out how to connect as an adult when your education has consisted of conspiracy theories, survivalist measures, and religious doctrine. From doomsday preparation and ideologies of purity and paranoia to motherhood and explorations of a burgeoning queer, Mexican-Indigenous identity, Carly Butler takes us on a gripping journey of resilience, self-discovery, and searching for community.

Doors at 6:30 pm. Free to attend.

Carly Butler is a bisexual Indigenous woman with ancestral roots in Mexico. She spent the first ten years of her life in the US, and was brought to Canada illegally in 1998. She has been a babysitter, a house cleaner, a barista and a birth doula, and now she is a stay-at-home-disability-mom and author. Her writing has appeared in Loose Lips Magazine. She lives with her husband and two children in Langley, BC. Apocalypse Child is her first book.

Tara Teng (she/her) is an Embodiment Coach and is the author of Your Body Is a Revolution. Beyond her work, Tara is a TEDx Speaker, a former Miss Canada and was named Canada’s “Woman of the Year” in 2011. She is one of the Globe and Mail’s “Top 25 Most Transformational Canadians”, received an International Heroes award from the Joy Smith Foundation, as well as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal in recognition of her vast human rights work.