If you love meeting talented writers and hearing them read from their published work, or just want to soak up a unique cultural experience, don’t miss the opportunity to attend the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series.
The series gives attendees an opportunity to get up close and personal with an eclectic group of 11 authors while having the unique opportunity to engage with them in a dialogue about their work.
Canadian Writers in Person is a for-credit course for students. It is also a free-admission event for members of the public. All readings take place at 7 p.m. on select Tuesday evenings via Zoom. Links for each reading can be found here: https://cltr.huma.laps.yorku.ca/canwrite/.
This year’s lineup consists of a unique selection of emerging and established Canadian writers, whose writing explores a broad range of topics and geographical and cultural landscapes. Featuring seasoned and emerging poets and fiction writers, the series highlights Canada’s ever-growing literary talent.
The series will continue on Dec. 8 with a reading of Season of Fury and Wonder (Coteau Books) by Sharon Butala.
Butala is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, numerous essays and articles, some poetry and five produced plays. She published her first novel in 1984, Country of the Heart, which was nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, followed closely by a collection of short stories, Queen of the Headaches (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award). She was born in Nipawin, Saskatchewan. After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan, she taught English in Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Nova Scotia. She eventually returned to Saskatoon, before moving near Eastend, Saskatchewan, to live on her husband Peter Butala’s ranch. Since her husband’s death in 2007 and after 33 years on the land, Butala now lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta.
In the last few years her interest has turned to the lives of aging people, and to the condition of being old in this society, and inevitably, to the issue of ageism and how it blights the lives of those advanced in years, but still very much alive and capable, and also, how society is greatly diminished by its unwillingness to accept aging and the aged.
Season of Fury and Wonder is a collection of short stories in which each protagonist is an old woman, each aged between seventy to one hundred. A theme is how the past infiltrates and informs the present whether wanted or not; another is how unconscious ageism blights the lives the old, and a third is what becomes of the dreams and desires of youth and how such longings transform and provide insight, even wisdom, in old age. Each story is a response to a great short story or literary work of the 19th to 20th century, from that of Hemingway, Munro, Carver, Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Edna O’Brien, Chekhov, Poe and others.
Other presentations scheduled in this series are:
- Jan. 19: Carol Rose GoldenEagle, Bone Black (Nightwood Editions)
- Feb. 2: S.D. Chrostowska, The Eyelid (Coach House Books)
- Feb. 23: Kaie Kellough, Dominoes at the Crossroads (Vehicule Press)
- March 9: Terry Watada, Mysterious Dreams of the Dead (Anvil Press)
- March 23: Cecily Nicholson, Wayside Sang (Talonbooks)
Canadian Writers in Person (AP/CLTR 1953 6.0A) is a course offered in the Culture & Expression program in the Department of Humanities in York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. For more information on the series, visit yorku.ca/laps/canwrite, or email Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca or Professor Leslie Sanders at leslie@yorku.ca.