PANELS &
PROGRAMMiNG
TriCon offers a diverse slate of lectures, workshops and panels, booked continuously from 1pm-5pm on Friday, 8am-5pm on Saturday, and 8am-1pm on Sunday. All attendees will be given the opportunity to participate as presenters, panelists, or students in programming according to their interests and expertise.
SYMPOSIUMS
Collective Power in Self Publishing
Symposium, Friday May 15th
@4pm, NSCAD Port Campus 2nd Floor Loggia
Towards a movement for collective action within self publishing.
Theories on Canadian Artistic Identity
Symposium, Saturday May 16th
@3:30pm, NSCAD Port Campus 2nd Floor Loggia
Towards a manifesto for Canadian authors of speculative fiction.
BOOK LAUNCHES & READINGS
Featured Book Launches
*Coffee and snacks will be available at all books launches, and the books will be for sale!
Friday May 15th, @5:30pm
The Legend of Damndrake by N.E. White Book Launch
Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Atrium, 1113 Marginal Rd
Saturday May 16th, @11am
Breath and Bone by K.V. Johansen Book Launch
Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Atrium, 1113 Marginal Rd
Saturday May 16th, @5pm
Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots Book Launch
Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Atrium, 1113 Marginal Rd
Sunday May 17th, @11am
Learning to Bleed by Cat Rector Book Launch
Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Atrium, 1113 Marginal Rd
TriCon Reading Series
@ Trident Booksellers and Cafe on Hollis Street
Multiple readers on one stage, in a cozy cafe setting. Have a drink and join us!
There will be time after the readings for questions and book signings.
Friday, May 15th @ 5:30pm
Featuring: Rich Larson, Hayden Trenholm, Tao Wong, Mark Rayner, Yves Meynard
Saturday, May 16th @ 9:30am
Featuring: Kari Maaren, Terese Mason Pierre, Susan Forest, Deanna Foster, Elliot Sonder, Lindsay Harrington
Saturday, May 16th @ 5pm
Featuring: Phoebe Barton, Madona Skaff-Koren, Joe Mahoney, Eric Choi, Joanne Merriam
Saturday, May 16th @ 6:30pm
Featuring: Jennifer Giesbrecht, Shannon Fay, Elaine Chen, Toril Orlesky, Aidan Redwing, Aysha U. Farah
Sunday, May 17th @ 11am
Featuring: Nicole Northwood, Andrew Leon Hudson, Robert Dawson, Rebecca Simkin, C.J. Lavigne
SPECIAL EVENTS
Friday May 15th, @6:30pm
TriCon Opening Ceremonies
2nd Floor Crit Space, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Welcome to the first-ever TriCon Halifax! Executive Director Charlotte Ashley will give a brief address to kick off all things TriCon! Come to meet the movers and shakers behind TriCon, and stay for some ice-breaking!
Friday May 15th, @4pm
Elbows WAY UP: The History of Canada in Space
Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Atrium
Jeremy Hansen’s voyage to the Moon on the Artemis II mission is just the latest chapter in the story of the Canadian space program that goes back more than six decades. Join writer and aerospace engineer (and almost astronaut) Eric Choi as he looks back at the history of Canada in the final frontier, from the first Canadian satellite Alouette 1 to the iconic Canadarms to the return to the Moon… and then looks ahead at a sneak preview of what might come next.
Friday May 15th, @7pm
Dead Dove, Do Eat: 18+ Readings
Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Come read your weirdest, raunchiest writing in front of an audience of like-minded degenerates! Keep it short, but don’t keep it clean. If you write vanilla, missionary-position sex between old married lesbians, you are welcome; if you write xenophilic alien fluid exchange through arcane circuitous plant-like genitals, you are welcome; if you write anthropic sex priests who practise mystical BDSM with sacred inflation spells, you are welcome; if you write about beefy guys beating the crap out of each other and then exchanging heated frottage that they will never talk about, we’ve got you. Assume content warnings!
Friday May 15th, @8:30pm
Halifax Ghost Walk With Dusty Keleher
Old Town Clock on Citadel Hill
A 1 hour and 40 minute walk through Halifax’s historic city streets with tales of ghosts, spirits, forerunners and devils with maybe a hanging or two thrown in for good measure. Stories collected from the folklore of Nova Scotia, with a good dose of local history to give context to the ghost stories themselves. Admission $25 payable on-site. More details will be emailed to attendees who have registered in advance!
Saturday May 16th, @9:30am
Imaro Book Club
Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Atrium
We will meet to discuss Charles R. Saunders’ best-known work, Imaro! Led by Saunders’ biographer, Jon Tattrie, this session will go whatever direction the readers go. Bring your questions, comments, and thoughts as we find new life in this work!
Saturday May 16th, @11am
New Critical Conversations in Speculative Fiction
The Maritime Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
This panel presentation seeks to bring a new generation of local scholars into conversation with the broader community of speculative fiction authors. The three presenters on this panel are at the cutting edge of speculative fiction studies, working with themes of Indigeneity, (auto)mobility, and (post)apocalypse. In this panel, moderated by Dalhousie University’s Dr. Jason Haslam, a distinguished speculative fiction scholar and the editor of The Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction, each presenter will spend ten to fifteen minutes discussing their chosen field of research before opening the floor to conversation with the audience.
Saturday May 16th, @2pm
Amal El-Mohtar in Conversation
Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Atrium
Guest of Honour Amal El-Mohtar will talk writing and creative life, answer your questions, and read from her new short story collection, Seasons of Glass and Iron! This will be your opportunity to buy books and get them signed.
Saturday May 16th, @6:30pm
Editorial Idol!
Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
with Carl Engle-Laird, Andrew Leon Hudson and Rebecca Bennett
Your anonymous stories will be read out loud to a panel of judges—will they listen to the end? In this game show–style critique session, we’ll see what it takes for editors to get hooked and stay engaged with a story! The judges will give their thoughts out loud after each reading, breaking down why they did or didn’t want to keep “reading.” Submit your stories for critique, or just come to listen!
Saturday May 16th, @8pm
North Brewing Presents: the TriCon Starlight Dance Party!
2nd Floor Crit Space, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
We’re having a party! Join us at NSCAD Port Campus for a night of music, lights, and incredible craft brews (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) from our sponsor, North Brewing! Attendees must be 19+. TriCon attendees can bring non-attending guests with special registration—visit the registration desk for details. Drinks can be purchased from a cash bar. TriCon rules and policies apply.
Sunday May 17th, @11am
The Charles R. Saunders Lecture and Readings
The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Join us as we celebrate iconic sword and soul author Charles R. Saunders. Saunders’ biographer (To Leave a Warrior Behind) Jon Tattrie will deliver a lecture on Saunders, followed by readings from the first three winners of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Charles R. Saunders Prize: Theo Feehan-Peters, Nailah Moon, and Norman Ho.
Sunday May 17th, @12:30pm
TriCon Closing Ceremonies
2nd Floor Crit Space, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Thank you all for coming! Executive Director Charlotte Ashley will debrief on the weekend’s accomplishments and announce plans for TriCons to come!
PANELS
FRIDAY MAY 15th
Going Solo: Publishing Without an Agent
1pm in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
These days even a lot of smaller indie presses are refusing un-agented submissions, but getting an agent can feel next to impossible in the current market. What is it like building a career without an agent? Is it even possible in 2026 to be self-represented? And what can self-representation do for you and your creative vision?
Becoming a Better Reader
1pm in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Even the best writers struggle to find time to read in today’s attention economy, and good reading habits are about more than just building a voluminous TBR that you’ll never touch. This panel will explore how good reading leads to good writing and will discuss how to create fertile reading lists, expand our tastes, and read with an eye towards creative enrichment.
(At) Home in Speculative Fiction
2:30pm in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Many readers and writers find a home in speculative fiction that they may not be able to find elsewhere. Often, speculative worlds enable the expression of diverse intersections of identity and experience in ways that can feel more freeing than realism does. How does speculative fiction allow writers to redefine the idea of home? How do writers create (or subvert) a sense of home within unfamiliar settings?
Games, Comics and the Art of Adaptation
4pm in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
How is writing a script different from writing a prose story? How does the orientation of scriptwriting differ across mediums, and where is it similar? We’ve gathered a panel of multimedia experts to discuss the art of scriptwriting and how a prose writer can learn to develop their inner cinematographer and become their own writer, director, and producer.
North American Fantasy
4pm in Room 205, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
The default image of fantasy many people carry in their minds is of castles and knights and small principalities with tight borders, but North America has its own unique fantastical tradition based on its geological vastness and immigrant melting-pot culture. We’ll look at North America’s distinct speculative genres such as cyberpunk, Afrofuturism, superheroes, cosmic horror, Mexican gothic, and various threads of Indigenous futurism, and discuss how they are shaped by the dramatic colonial history of the continent.
Fanfic House Style: The Form and Culture of Fandom
5:30pm in Room 205, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
What exactly is “fanfic house style”? You know it when you see it—the presence of quips, of present tense, and something so distinctly itself. Fanfic has had an outsized influence on the current generation of speculative writers, the significance of which is still being metabolized in the public square. In this panel we will trace the history of the medium’s distinctive, autodidactic literary traditions, explore their multimedia origins, and discuss the social culture of fandom itself.
The Responsibility of Cultural Institutions
5:30pm in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
In a rapidly changing landscape where technology and global upheavals promise to change the literary landscape forever, more and more weight will fall upon our cultural and professional institutions to maintain continuity and imagine a new future. This panel seeks greater coordination and integration between federations, magazines, awards, etc., especially within the Canadian national context.
SATURDAY MAY 16th
Social Media Presence, Audience Building and Self Promotion
8am in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Building a brand is increasingly important in today’s literary landscape, especially in the growing independent market. This panel will discuss how to optimize your visibility, set boundaries with your curated audience, and what outsourcing looks like if this sounds overwhelming to you. Learn from a panel of authors on what they’ve done and what they wouldn’t do, and how to enjoy it while you do it.
Self Editing for Writers
8am in The Maritime Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Authors and editors in this panel will discuss methods, habits, and techniques for self-editing. They will also explore the differences between editing short and long fiction, as well as how to apply a critical, objective eye to your own work in order to untangle big problems.
Perspective and the Interior
8am in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Point of view is one of the most consequential technical decisions a writer makes, but it is often chosen instinctually or out of habit. This panel looks at how POV really functions as a tool, as well as the utility of each perspective. This panel will place a special focus on how POV shapes the reader’s access to a character’s interior world and what it means for your story if you go deep—and when you pull back.
Body Oddity Horror
9:30am in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Body horror has always been concerned with questions about whose body is socially constructed as “normal” and whose body is considered “strange,” but in the last decade the genre has been subject to radical reclamation and transformative reimagings. This panel will explore body horror’s intersection with disability politics, othered bodies, and the strangeness of technological intrusion on the body.
A Marxist Analysis of The Writing industry
9:30am in The Maritime Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Is a writer a worker? Is Amazon my friend? What does “lumpenprole petite bourgeoisie” even mean? Come learn the basics of class analysis and how understanding your class position within the creative economy can help you choose more effective routes of political action and organization.
How to Design a Realistic Planet
9:30am in Room 205, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Panelists will discuss recent astronomical findings and how to apply them to make your imaginary planet more realistic, with plausible land formations and terrain, orbital mechanics, climates, and more.
Newbie Writer Q&A
11am in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Unpublished and early career authors are invited to ask a panel of seasoned authors and industry professionals questions about how to get started with drafting, editing, and submitting work.
Fantasy Sports for Nerds
11am in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
This panel will explore the drama and romance of sports and how an understanding of sports can help you write better action and world-building. From jousting to Formula 1, sports have always been about rules, breakpoints, sweaty rivalries, and geopolitical subterfuge. Drawing from examples of real-life sports drama, we will also discuss how to use nonfiction research in fantastical settings, and what sports writing can teach about kinesthetic prose.
Sturm und Drang: the Emotional Obstacles of a Writing Career
12:30pm in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Artistic careers are full of dramatic ups and downs, and writing can be an especially lonely path with its long, long hours of invisible or isolated work. This panel will discuss strategies for the common emotional challenges that writers face, like how to handle rejection and imposter syndrome, how to be patient with writer’s block, how to stay creative when crushed under the stressors of piecemeal work, and how to build the confidence needed to become a good self-advocate.
How to Stop Worrying and Start Querying
12:30pm in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Agents and authors reveal the lost, forbidden secrets of the Perfect Pitch. We’ll discuss how to write a cracking query letter, how to make your synopsis engaging and informative, and give pointers on what to do—and what not to do—when pitching your novel.
Young Adults Q&A
2pm in The Maritime Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Do you write for young adults? Here’s your chance to do some market research! A panel of actual young adults will answer all of your questions: from what they read and how they find books to what Kids These Days are saying, thinking, and hoping for. Bring your (respectful) questions, and the youth will give their best answers!
Princes and Paupers: Class Hierarchy as a Driver of Conflict in Fantasy Settings
2pm in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
If your hero is a peasant who smart-talks to lords with no consequence, you might have a class problem. Until the 20th century, most societies were structured around strict hierarchies, which the entire culture was designed to enforce, from the heights of the spiritual realm down to street-level architecture. A poor grasp of class relations in a pseudo-historical setting can create an ineffable feeling of anachronism or make your protagonist seem like a power gamer detached from their world. This panel will analyze how class has functioned historically and discuss how to apply a working understanding of class relations to your story to enhance the tension and drama.
Genre is a Construct
3:30pm in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Are genres simply marketing categories, or are they defined historical constructs? How can genres feel so porous and so rigid at the same time? Why is it so easy to write a fantasy book with mystery elements but so hard to write a mystery with fantasy elements? This panel will explore what different genres have to learn from one another, how to find an audience for genre chimeras, and how to break the rules we can’t articulate.
(Un)Shittification of the Internet
5pm in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Creatives have been corralled out of formerly robust online social spaces by capitalist encirclement and rent-seeking platforms. The digital village was an important space for the development of nerdy artistic circles, and the Internet may still hold transformative purposes for the future of speculative art. Let’s discuss how we can begin reconnecting the tubes and expand our digital communities once again.
SUNDAY MAY 17th
The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty
8am in The Maritime Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
We delve into the world of speculative poetry as its own practice, separate from the use of diegetic poetry in prose novels, and tease out its nature as a true hybrid genre. We will discuss what makes a poem distinctively speculative and look at how to use form and diction to express fantastic elements like world-building, magic, and mythological meta-text.
Many Moving Parts: Hard Science Fiction Beyond the Technobabble
9:30am in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
You don’t need a STEM degree to write convincing technobabble, you only need to know which facts to fudge. But science doesn’t exist in a vacuum—hard science decisions have world-building reverberations: cultural, political, medical, and military. This panel will explore how to self-educate on scientific topics in a historically informed way so that your amazing fictional inventions ripple through every layer of your world.
Good Taste, Bad Taste, and the Cultural Underbelly
9:30am in The Lunenburg Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror all emerged from the “gutter” of lowbrow culture and continued to evolve there for decades. During that time, speculative fiction suffered beneath and benefited from “pulp” expectations and was able to be subversive, reactionary, revolutionary, pornographic, philosophical, and generally had a low bar of entry. This panel will celebrate spec-fic’s lowbrow origins while asking what SFF’s total capture of the mainstream culture in the 2010s means for its transformative potential. Can spec still be subversive? Can anything be subversive in a media-sphere where definitions of low and highbrow culture have collapsed?
BIPOC Identity in Canadian Speculative Fiction
9:30am in The Maritime Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
On Saturday, TriCon held a town hall symposium on Canadian speculative fiction, working towards a manifesto for Canadian spec-fic. But the Canadian experience is a mosaic, informed by wildly different perspectives and voices. Is there a uniquely Canadian BIPOC experience? How can our BIPOC creators best shape a national voice? Is the idea of a “nationalized” genre or voice inherently colonial? This panel will explore the concept of Canadian spec-fic from a range of BIPOC perspectives.
De-Industrialization of the Frontier: Proletariat Themes in Science Fiction
11am in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
The fate of the working class is tied to technological progress, with every epochal development offering tools of both oppression and freedom. In this sense, sci-fi has always been a genre concerned with resolving the class tensions of industrialization, from the transposed 19th-century conflict between the Morlocks and the Eloi in The Time Machine to The Expanse’s hardnosed evocation of the American Rust Belt. This panel will discuss the history of working-class themes in science fiction and find out what the genre can teach us about the changing class relations of the 21st century.
The ABCs of Franchise Writing
11am in The Maritime Room, The Westin Nova Scotian
Games, comics, tie-in novels, tabletop campaigns… the world of IP writing is a massive market rife with opportunity and exploitation. This panel will help you sort it out—exploring career paths, identifying your relevant skillsets, and actually finding good work. Some of the greats cut their teeth writing about characters and worlds that didn’t belong to them; we’ll dig into what writing in shared worlds can offer—and what it can cost.
Writing the Occult in the Digital Age
12:30pm in Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Witchcraft, magic, mages: what does writing the occult in the 21st century look like across the speculative genres? This panel will discuss past, present, and future possibilities of what it means to write supernatural and magic-system characters, along with the interaction of magic and technology, cyber spiritualism, and more in speculative literature.
What to Write When You’re Living in the Darkest Timeline
12:30pm in Room 205, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Grimdark, romantasy, alternative history, hopepunk, horror, cozy apocalypse—what should we be reading and writing in these difficult social and political times? A panel of authors and readers of diverse speculative fiction genres will share their thoughts. Through this panel, we will explore how the strengths of various genres can help heal our broken world.
WORKSHOPS
Friday May 15th, @1pm
Putting the Science in Science Fiction
Room 205, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Join researcher Gillian Clinton to identify and critically review a variety of science resources including online databases, accessing and using public and academic libraries, and identifying and reaching out to subject experts. Participants may wish to bring their own laptops to try searches during the session.
Friday May 15th, @2:30pm
Writing with Tarot: Symbols, Archetype and the Creative Journey
Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
From the Fool’s Journey to the Hero’s Journey, the 78 cards of the Tarot provide a multitude of archetypal symbols that can guide the creative process. These Tarot symbols are drawn from diverse sources ranging from Arthurian legend and astrology to early 20th century mysticism, providing an exciting framework for personal and creative exploration. In this generative workshop, Tiffany Morris will lead an exploration of the meaning of Tarot symbols, and we will write! Participants do not need previous experience with Tarot or their own Tarot deck to participate.
Saturday May 16th, @9:30am
Mapping Short Story Markets
Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Drawing on data from the Submission Grinder and Locus Magazine, this session with writer Jon Olfert explains today’s short speculative fiction ecosystem at all rates of pay. The session aims to equip early- and mid-career short story writers with a better sense of the scope of available opportunities and how the landscape is shifting.
Saturday May 16th, @12:30pm
Learning to Use TWINE
Room 205, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
This 90-minute session will be led by game designers Britt Newstead and Morgan Chin! They will introduce TWINE, an overview of what the engine can do and how to use it, and cover some basic how-tos on writing branching narrative. Then, participants will be given base code with which to fill out their own stories—either following along and growing the base prompts that we will give during the session or branching out on their own. Participants are encouraged to bring any world-building or character materials that they already have, and we will show them how to incorporate them into an interactive novel. Laptops highly encouraged.
Saturday May 16th, @2pm
Historical Sword Fighting
Room 204, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Sword combat in medieval Europe was part of a sophisticated culture of martial arts that included multiple systems for fighting in and out of armour (and with or without weapons). Join Craig Shackleton as he discusses some of the surviving historical sources about sword-fighting and how their contents differ from common modern beliefs about it. You will also practise a few basic techniques of dagger defence from these manuscripts using synthetic training daggers!
Saturday May 16th, @3:30pm
Let’s Play a Writing Game!
Room 205, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Join author Shannon Fay for a fun, laid-back hour of writing exercises. In Awake Amidst the Sleeping Stars, a sci-fi horror game, you are the only survivor on a space station gone mad. Craft a story using the journaling game as the framework: Shannon will read off prompts, and you’ll write something in response, building a story one fictional journal entry at a time! Can you solve the mystery of Space Station Potiphar and escape with your life? Probably not, but at least you’ll get some writing done.
Sunday May 17th, @9:30am
Inkarnate: Building a Map for Your Story World
Room 205, NSCAD Marginal Road Campus
Did you write a fantasy and need a custom map, but can’t afford to commission a cartographer? Are your drawing and mapping skills next to none? Cartographer N.E. White will go over how you can use the free version of Inkarnate to doodle a functional map. It might not be pretty, but it’ll represent your world. We’ll first go over some of the world-building elements you may want to consider before opening up the program, then we’ll show a quick example. If you want to follow along, bring your laptop! We’ll be sure to allow time for questions.
