Emily Strempler
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estrempler.bsky.social
Emily Strempler
@estrempler.bsky.social
650 followers 220 following 650 posts
🏳️‍🌈✊🧡 (She/Her) Lit and lit-genre crossover author, work in Agnes and True, Broken Pencil, the BK, and many more. Editor at the Baltimore Review. Managing Editor at Li Isprii.

Banff, AB, 🇨🇦 / Treaty 7 / Homeland of the Red River Metis

www.estrempler.com
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estrempler.bsky.social
Happy Hour tacos, a beer, and a good book ✨👌

#reading 📚💙
A plate of fish tacos, a pale, hazy beer, a plate of fries, and a book held open with a piece of cutlery, rest on a restaurant table. In the background, diners sit at a bar.
November 15, 2025 at 12:09 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Solo dinner and a book ✨👌

Ramen from Ramen Arashi. #currentlyreading Queers at the Table: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food, edited by Alex D Ketchum and Megan J Elias.

#books #reading 🌈📚💙
Foreground, in focus, a bowl of tantan ramen topped with greens, green onion, fried garlic, and two pieces of karaage chicken. In the background, a half-empty glass of water and an open book rest on a dark wood table.
October 10, 2025 at 12:41 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Bookish in the Banff area? Join me at Banff Pride's first ever book event! Bring a book to swap, sign up to share a personal favourite with the group, socialize, and enjoy a little something tasty from the cafe. All books, and book-lovers, welcome.

estrempler.com/banff-writer...
Grey text on a crinkly paper background reads "Spill the Tea, Oct 07, 6pm-8pm, Wild Flour Bakery." A grainy picture of a book sits open amind the text. Grey text on a crinkled paper background reads, "Hosted by local author, Emily Strempler, this event invites you to spill the tea by sharing your favourite read and enjoy delicious selections from Wild Flour Bakery."
October 4, 2025 at 9:27 PM
estrempler.bsky.social
Joined briefly by this confident little magpie, who strutted around the place picking up snacks like they owned the joint. 😆
September 24, 2025 at 1:55 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Spent a lovely afternoon/evening reading Palm Meridian by Grace Flavie in a local Banff restaurant with walls open to the warm autumn breeze. Good beer, a good book, delicious snacks. What more can you ask for? ✨

#reading #booksky 🌈📚💙
On a restaurant table in the foreground, a hand rests on an open book next to a hazy golden beer. Through the open wall, patio tables can be seen, and beyond them a mountain view.
September 24, 2025 at 1:55 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
“The threat of games is not in telling us who we are, but in telling us how the systems around us operate, revealing their hypocrisies, our own complicities, and how we are in fact produced through that system.”
- Of Floating Isles by Kawika Guillermo (p156)

#booksky 🌎📚💙🌈📚💡
A hand holds a paperback book. The cover fills most of the frame. The image shows stylized video game worlds as floating islands against a blue sky filled with soft clouds. Black text reads, “Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games.”
September 16, 2025 at 8:53 PM
estrempler.bsky.social
I originally wrote "Godsend" for CLOVES Literary, an online-only arm of Reservoir Road. Their niche was fiction and CNF under 500 words dealing with trauma, nostalgia, and difficult memories.

"Godsend" handles church misconduct and abuse through the blinkered perspective of a teenage victim.
A plate of sugary donuts on a plate are drawn with a chalk-like brush on a black background. Above them, in block white text is the title "GODSEND."
September 9, 2025 at 4:54 PM
estrempler.bsky.social
A little bit of outdoor chaos fluttering through a crowded coffee shop, perching on chairs and tables, feels like an oddly fitting intrusion into the final chapters of “All the Little Monsters,” @davidarobertson.bsky.social’s excellent memoir of mental health.

🌎💙📚
In the foreground a blurry copy of “All the Little Monsters” by David A Robertson rests on a light wood cafe table. In focus in the background, a tiny brown sparrow meanders between the legs of occupied tables.
September 4, 2025 at 11:03 PM
estrempler.bsky.social
A delightfully unexpected book haul from @arsenalpulp.bsky.social, including three early pre-orders! 🥳 They’re shooting right up to the top of my TBR. 😁

#reading #bookhaul 🏳️‍🌈📚💙
Four books lying on a wooden table. Clockwise from top left: “Beaver Hills Forever” by Conor Kerr, “A Safe Girl to Love” by Casey Plett, “Of Floating Islands” by Kawika Guillermo, and “Queers at the Table” by Alex F Ketchum and Megan J Elias
August 25, 2025 at 8:49 PM
estrempler.bsky.social
Today’s quiet reading spot in Banff. A book, a beer, a bit of lovely sunshine, overflowing flower boxes in the window. What more can you ask for? ✨

Today’s reading: The revised edition of Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delaney

🌎📚💙🏳️‍🌈 #reading #books
A beer, a menu in a menu stand, and an open book sit on a sunny wooden restaurant table. Through a large window there’s a view of businesses on Banff Avenue over colourful flower-boxes.
August 19, 2025 at 12:07 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
#AlwaysReading 😜

Just grabbing a bite to eat in town between errands. Never a bad time to read.

#books #reading 📚💙
Photo of a plate of fish and chips sitting on a wooden restaurant table beside a book, a tall can of PBR, and a glass of water.
August 9, 2025 at 1:46 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
“but when the British East India Company forces
all 105 carats of it into the centre of the coronation crown
Queen Elizabeth calls it merely heavy”

Delving into health, disability, mental health, and trauma with “a fate worse than death” by Nisha Patel.

#poetry ✒️📚
Portion of a page from the poetry book “a fate worse than death” by Nisha Patel. The poem reads: “the curse of the Kohinoor diamond tells us that all empires who covet it will fall but when the British East India Company forces all 105 carats of it into the centre of the coronation crown Queen Elizabeth calls it merely heavy the way the intergenerational epigenetics of colonial famine are heavy the way the shortened lifespans of my grandfather and grandmother and grandmother and mother-in-law and father-in-law and father and aunt and aunt and uncle and uncle are heavy.”
August 4, 2025 at 2:07 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
One of a million similar stories, but this account of the clearance of the entire island of Rum, off the north coast of Scotland struck me as a compelling example of the brutality that too often arrives with notions of "private property."

Quote from "Love of Country" by Madeleine Bunting, p.142

📚💙
Photo of a large portion of a page in a book. The text reads: "The long history of human habitation on Rum came to a dramatic conclusion in the early nineteenth century. Rum's clan chief in 1815 was the respected Alexander Maclean, but he made a disastrous investment in kelp by buying the small island of Muck at precisely the moment the kelp boom collapsed when cheaper imports of Spanish barilla were resumed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Bankrupted, he was forced to let the island of Rum to a tenant, Dr Lachlan Maclean, who planned to make Rum profitable by farming sheep. The islanders were not needed; in the infamous contemporary phrase they were a 'redundant population. In 1825 every islander was given a year's notice to leave. In 1826, three hundred men, women and children were herded onto two ships. An Edinburgh lawyer, Alexander Hunter, supervised the operation, and he admitted to a government committee in 1827 that some islanders 'were not very willing to leave the land of their ancestors'. A Rum shepherd, John McMaister, provided a rather more vivid picture: 'The wild outcries of the men and the heart-breaking wails of the women and their children filled all the air between the mountainous shores of the bay.'"
July 28, 2025 at 2:25 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Not a bad place to do a bit of evening editing ✨

#writing
A laptop, pot of colourful flowers, and a gin and tonic, sit on a small round tabletop. A sunny courtyard crisscrossed with hanging lights can be seen in the background. A rim of mountaintops are just visible over the top of the far wall.
July 8, 2025 at 2:48 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Currently reading “Truth and Conviction” by L Jane McMillan. It’s a useful overview of Donald Marshall Jr’s life, the important court cases he fought, and the broader issue of justice and sovereignty that affect Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia. Well researched and surprisingly intimate.

💙📚💬📚💡
Cover of “Truth and Conviction: Donald Marshall Jr. and the Mi’kmaw Quest for Justice” by L. Jane McMillan. The cover features a pale, blue-tone image of a man fishing in a quiet body of water.
June 28, 2025 at 4:24 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Banff’s National Indigenous People’s Day event moved indoors due to rain, but folks showed up anyway. Caught a performance by hoop dancer Lakota Tootoosis and bought a few of Métis potter Corry Pepper’s pieces (proceeds from the pin go to the Downie & Wenjack Fund). Great way to spend an afternoon!
A crowd watches hoop dancer Lakota Tootoosis perform inside a municipal rec centre. Behind him, is a large, brightly coloured tipi. The image captures Tootoosis in a complex pose with hoops framing his arms and legs, and hoop spheres held aloft in his hands. The crowd is visibly applauding. A small red, blue, and gold glazed bowl and a heart shaped orange stoneware pin pressed with a flower pattern across one half rest on a light wood table.
June 21, 2025 at 10:46 PM
estrempler.bsky.social
Grateful for rain drenching dry pines, for quiet corners, and cafés that continue to serve coffee after 6pm. Time to review some submissions.

#writingcommunity
A scuffed MacBook with headphones plugged in, a black paper coffee cup, and a glass of water and ice sit on a dark wood table. In the background you can see empty hotel café tables.
June 21, 2025 at 1:51 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Spotted an excellent beaver on our evening walk! 😊
June 11, 2025 at 2:51 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Another lovely, quiet evening out in Banff with a book ☕️🌺✨

#reading #books ✒️📚💙
A book, cup of mint tea, large plate of chips with onion dip, and a flowering potted plant sit on a small circular table in the open courtyard of a hotel. A pool and strings of unlit hanging lights can be seen in the background. The sky is still blue and bright despite it being late in the day (it gets dark very late here in the summer).
June 9, 2025 at 2:11 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
A beautiful evening view, a pint of good beer, and a good book ✨

#books #reading 📚💙
View from a second floor restaurant patio overlooking Banff Avenue. A book rests on the wooden tabletop beside a glass of water and a pint of dark beer. Flower-filled planters line the railing.
June 6, 2025 at 3:53 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
“…the trees fell away, and the prairie opened up. Grain silos bobbed, buoys on the horizon. Windbreaks like the anchored masts of distant ships dotted the land...one moment you were in the bush, and the next the land convinced you there was no such thing as bush.”

- Hold Your Tongue

✒️📚💙🌎📚
Hand holding a copy of the novel “Hold your Tongue” by Matthew Tétreault, the cover features a bison standing in a circle of blue sky on a peach-coloured backdrop.
May 27, 2025 at 9:42 PM
estrempler.bsky.social
A fantastic first slam poetry night at ArtsPlace in Canmore. Heard from some wonderful, brand new, local poets, and crowned a writer of gorgeous verses about life, love, and Palestine our first ever winner!

#poetry #slam #poets #writingcommunity
A crowd of poets and attendees listens to hosts Tim Murphy and Nikki Tate at the opening of Canmore’s first poetry slam. The dark room is laid out with tables and chairs, cabaret-style, with a low stage at the front.
May 23, 2025 at 3:49 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Fabulous to hear from local artists Sol Chiniquay and Nic Latulippe as part of the Decolonizing the Narrative series at the Banff Centre this evening! They’re doing some cool stuff, including facilitating a film photography program together in Bow Valley high schools.
Photo of a small auditorium. On stage Sol Chiniquay and Nic Latulippe present from arm chairs. A slide show of photos plays behind them on a large projector screen.
May 15, 2025 at 3:23 AM
estrempler.bsky.social
Rainy day, quiet patio, cake, coffee, and a good book. What more can you ask for?

#writingcommunity #poetry
✒️📚💙☕️
View of an empty patio in Banff, Canada, with chairs flipped up due to rain, a slice of coconut cake, a coffee, and a book rest on a dry table.
May 12, 2025 at 11:47 PM
estrempler.bsky.social
"His father is a pastor, he says.. a truly great teacher. So are both his grandfathers. Something she wouldn’t know anything about."

Today in @rfpress.bsky.social, “The Boy From the ‘Good’ Family,” a story about faith, legacy, and the limits of grace.

Link: www.roifaineantpress.com/post/the-boy...
Silhouette of a young man against a paper-white background. A title, "The Boy From the 'Good' Family," floats above his head.
April 27, 2025 at 9:16 PM