Join us for the launch of The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman by Niko Stratis! In conversation with Elamin Abdelmahmoud.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.
When Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as “dad rock,” Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad’s glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock’s emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.
In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe’s allusions to queer longing, Radiohead’s embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen’s very trans desire to “change my clothes my hair my face”—and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis’s own who embody the tenderness at the genre’s heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Niko Stratis is a culture writer based in Toronto, Ontario by way of the Yukon where she spent close to two decades working as a journeyman glazier before coming out as a trans woman in her late 30s and being forced to abandon her previous line of work.
Now in her 40s, Niko provides a unique voice in cultural spaces seeking to work through lifelong traumas and emotional highs and lows through her work.
She has won a Digital Publishing Award for Best Personal Essay, and her work regularly appears in outlets like Spin magazine, Xtra, Paste Magazine and more. Her column in Catapult, Everyone Is Gay, was a widely read series that explored gender and sexuality in 90s music and music criticism, and its impact on her as a closeted queer and trans woman in her teen years. Her newsletter, Anxiety Shark, is a self-published weekly essay collection using music to explore her relationship to themes like gender and sobriety.
She lives in Toronto with her fiancé, their dog Bowie and two cats Winona and Ramona. She is a former smoker and a cancer.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Elamin Abdelmahmoud is the host of CBC Radio’s daily arts, pop culture and entertainment show Commotion and a former writer for BuzzFeed News. His work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, Rolling Stone and others. Elamin is the author of Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces.
