Prairie Scene:Intersections: Cultural Collisions and Cultural Affinities

In Person Fiction Poetry

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12:03am

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Ottawa Art Gallery

2 Daly Avenue • Ottawa

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Prairie Scene:Intersections: Cultural Collisions and Cultural Affinities

Birdsell's stories resonate with the unsparing power of memory mediated only by art.

Publishers Weekly

Don’t miss Warren Cariou, author of the award-winning memoir Lake of the Prairies, as he expertly guides a discussion on the intersection of prairie cultures. Sandra Birdsell’s 2010 novel, Waiting for Joe, takes a deep look into relationships as they crumble, while Louise Bernice Halfe, also known as Sky Dancer (The Crooked Good), former Saskatchewan Poet Laureate and author of three books of poetry, will touch your soul with her powerful and poignant perspective on everything from residential schools to the arrival of spring.

Contemporary Cree-Métis storyteller Duncan Mercredi (Duke of Windsor/wolf sings the blues) is the author of four books of poetry, while Margaret Sweatman is an accomplished musician and the author of four novels. Her Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction prize-winning book When Alice Lay Down with Peter is particularly pertinent to this discussion.

The Authors

Duncan Mercredi

Contemporary Cree-Métis storyteller Duncan Mercredi (Duke of Windsor/wolf sings the blues) is the author of four books of poetry.

Louise Halfe

Louise Halfe has three book publications to her credit. Bear Bones & Feathers was published by Coteau Books in 1994. It received the Canadian Peoples Poet Award, and was a finalist for the Spirit of Saskatchewan Award in that year. Blue Marrow was originally published by McLelland & Stewart in 1998; its revised edition was released by Coteau Books in September 2004. It was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Pat Lowther Award, and for the 1998 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award and the Saskatchewan Poetry Award. Her most recent work, The Crooked Good, was published in 2007.Louise Bernice Halfe's Cree name is Sky Dancer. She was born on the Saddle Lake Reserve in Two Hills, Alberta in 1953. At the age of seven, she was sent to the Blue Quills Residential School in St. Paul, Alberta. She left residential school of her own accord when she was sixteen, breaking ties with her family and completing her studies at St. Paul's regional high school. It was at this time that she began writing a journal about her life experiences. Halfe made her debut as a poet in Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada, the acclaimed anthology of life-writings by Native women. In 1993 she was awarded third prize in the League of Canadian Poets' national poetry contest and was Saskatchewan’s Poet Laureate for 2005-2006.She has a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Regina and currently gives workshops on drug and addiction counselling. Halfe lives in Saskatoon with her husband. She has two adult children.

Margaret Sweatman

Margaret Sweatman is a novelist, playwright, poet, and performer. Her work has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Margaret Laurence Book Award, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Night Birds is her seventh novel. She lives in Winnipeg.

Sandra Birdsell

Sandra Birdsell was born in 1942 in Winnipeg, the fifth of eleven children, to a Dutch-Mennonite mother and a French-speaking Métis father – but that’s where the similarities to the Vandal family end, she insists. Children of the Day was inspired by the childhood memory of a census taker who came to the door and reduced her family’s rich and varied heritage to a simple fill-in-the-blank “French.” Her father would later assure the young Bartlette children that they were in fact “true Canadians”–a little bit of this and little bit of that. Birdsell began writing when she was a girl, but it wasn’t until after she had three children (and a variety of jobs, including seamstress, cocktail waitress and Avon lady) that she started to earn a living as a writer. Since then she has written eight books – short story collections and novels – to critical acclaim, and has received numerous literary prizes and nominations, including a Giller Prize nomination in 2001 for The Russländer and Governor General’s Award nominations for The Two-Headed Calf (1997) and The Chrome Suite (1992). In 1993 Sandra Birdsell was awarded the Marion Engel Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes, given to a woman writer in mid-career.In 1996, Birdsell moved from Winnipeg to Saskatchewan, where she is at work on her next book and her garden, which in Saskatchewan proves to be, as she says, “an exercise in faith and infernal optimism.” Waiting for Joe is her latest book.

Warren Cariou

Warren Cariou taught Aboriginal literature at the University of British Columbia and is a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan. His first book, The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs: Two Novellas (Coteau, 1999), garnered rave reviews. He currently lives in Winnipeg. Lake of the Prairies is his latest book.