Ivan is good old-fashioned kitchen table stories. Imagine you are drinking black tea with canned milk, and it is snowing outside. The kitchen smells like homemade soup, and you don't have to work tomorrow so you can sit up all night talking and smoking cigarettes. Or maybe it is a warm night in the middle of July, and you are sitting on a wool blanket in the sand, resting your back against a big-beached log. The lake is smooth as glass and there is plenty of wood for the campfire. Someone is talking, telling you a story…

Ivan Coyote was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. An award-winning author of five collections of short stories, one novel, two CD’s, four short films and a renowned performer, Ivan’s first love is live storytelling, and over the last thirteen years she has become an audience favourite at music, poetry, spoken word and writer's festivals from Anchorage to Amsterdam.

Ivan’s column, Loose End has appeared monthly in Xtra West magazine since 2001. Her first novel, Bow Grip, was released in the fall of 2006, and was awarded the ReLit award for best fiction and named by the American Library Association as a Stonewall honour book in literature. Her fifth collection of stories, The Slow Fix, was released in 2008, and was nominated for a Lambda award. Ivan recently completed an eight-month writer in residence at Carleton University in Ottawa, and is hard at work on her second novel.