Niko Stratis and Friends (Dad) Rock Out at the Fredericton Public Library

Cover Photo Credit: Alex Prong.

On January 23, 2026, Yukon-born writer Niko Stratis read excerpts from her memoir-in-essays The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman interwoven with accompanying live songs by local musicians Steven Lambke and Vin Cacchione. The event took place at the Fredericton Public Library and was part of Shivering Songs, the annual winter festival taking place in downtown Fredericton and celebrating songwriting and storytelling. 

Once the approximately thirty audience members take their seats in the library’s alcove, Steve and Vin kick the event off with the same song that kicks off Niko’s book: “Fisherman’s Blues” by The Waterboys. The soft, celebratory shout that begins the song sets the tone for the evening: a celebration of aliveness, despite fear. Later in the reading, while talking about how it felt to transition in her thirties, Niko says, “I was panicking, but I was alive enough to panic.” 

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

The library alcove is decorated with care. Three handmade vintage-inspired lamps crafted by a local artisan sit on the stage; they light the room vibrantly in green, blue, and orange. The windows behind the stage are decorated with white window writers and covered in drawings of snowflakes, trees, and miniature libraries and bookstores. This is Fredericton at its best: small-ish town charm, but with enough pull as the province’s capital to entice artists like Niko, Steve, and Vin to perform. 

It is bitingly cold outside, so audience members stay bundled in scarves and toques; someone is knitting in the back row. As Steve and Vin play their Waterboys cover, people softly sway or tap their toes. When the song ends, Niko takes the microphone and jumps in to read from her book. She begins, “There was a mythical mixtape that we lost…” 

She is wearing a writer’s uniform in all black: black jeans with a flowy black top patterned with golden appliques. The room hushes to take in her words. But after a couple sentences, she stumbles on her words and takes a step back. She laughs and says,”I was gonna be all cool about this… that lasted literally thirty-four seconds.” The room erupts into laughter, and thus begins an evening of Niko Stratis emphatically charming the audience, over and over again. 

As the reading progresses, Niko provides context for the book. She mentions that her connection between dad rock and queerness comes from the way dad rock is a loose genre with loose definition. Listeners might all get something different from the same song, similar to how a queer understanding of gender allows for difference within the same gender. Niko also mentions conspiratorially that despite “dad” being in the title of her book, her dad still has yet to read it. Eliciting more laughter from the audience, Niko raises an eyebrow and says, “He’s a slow reader.” 

Between excerpts of Niko’s writing and her witty editorializing (including an ode to the everlasting hotness of Jennifer Love Hewitt, warnings about the wrath of the K.I.S.S Army, and a minor brag about showering twice in one day), Steve and Vin continue to play the hits that structure the chapters of Niko’s book. They play covers of “Man on the Moon” by R.E.M., and “Androgenous” by The Replacements. 

Don’t let the humour and soft rock fool you into thinking there is nothing serious going on here, though. Niko’s book tackles deep emotion and difficult topics, like the transphobia and homophobia of Niko’s glazier ex-coworkers. Working in a trade in the Yukon and Alberta exposed Niko to men who claimed they wanted to “kill any sign of queerness in the world.” Niko writes about how difficult it was to accept her own queerness in this environment. She writes about being afraid of water and death, and yet being drawn to both. She writes about failure, about moving all over Canada, and then back home to Whitehorse, and then leaving again. She writes about drinking and dancing, which leads us into the last song of the night: “Dancing in the Dark” by Bruce Springsteen. 

Her chapter on this song is called “Want to change my clothes, my hair, my face,” and describes the trans meaning she found in this classic Americana tune. Relating the story of how Bruce Springsteen’s producer asked him to write another song for the album Born in the U.S.A. after he’d already written over sixty, Niko says that like Bruce, she knows what it means to be “just mad enough to make something beautiful.” 

When Niko begins to wrap up her reading, she mentions there is one thing she wants readers of her book to take away. She describes how when she first came out to her ex, her ex responded with, “What do you need?” Niko says this was exactly what she needed to hear, and encourages readers to be that person for any loved ones in their lives that come out to them in one way or another. Be the person who asks, “What do you need?”

After the reading, I asked a local poet and PhD student in Gender and Sexuality in Literature at UNB, Jamie Kitts, what she thought of the event. She said, “I had a great time. This was such a lovely evening, and these were such beautiful stories. I can’t wait to read the book in full. The musical accompaniment was exactly what each piece needed in order to make it a performance, and that’s what it felt like. A lot of readings don’t often get to feel like performances. This was absolutely worth being a ticketed event.”

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis is available for sale wherever you buy books. It is published by the University of Texas Press, which Niko notes is especially important given the political state of trans rights currently in Texas. Niko also runs Girl Dad Press, an independent trans-run literary imprint that released the anthology 2 Trans 2 Furious, a collection of Fast & Furious content made by trans artists and authors. 

After the event, Jamie and I went up to thank Niko for her reading. Niko mentioned it was her first time in Fredericton, and that Fredericton reminded her of living up North in Whitehorse. Referring to Niko’s earlier comment about wanting to “be all cool” at the start of her show, Jamie said, “Well there’s one thing you should know about Fredericton—no one gets to be cool here.”

Laughing and bundled up against the cold, Jamie and I exited the venue, thankful for Niko Stratis lighting up Fredericton’s dark, cold January.