Governor General’s and Scotiabank Giller Prize award winners headline outstanding winter reading and lecture series celebrating the first fifty years of Mennonite/s Writing in Canada
On Wednesday evening, January 11, internationally-renowned Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe will be in Waterloo to kick off a nine-week reading and lecture series sponsored by the Canada Council and the Institute of Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies at Conrad Grebel University College. Wiebe, who lives in Edmonton, has twice won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, for The Temptations of Big Bear and A Discovery of Strangers. In 2007 he won the Charles Taylor Prize for his memoir, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. He is known for his great stories of Canada’s aboriginal peoples, and about Mennonites in western Canada and around the world. Wiebe, who was born in Saskatchewan in 1934, will read from his work while reflecting on his 57 years as a writer.
The celebrated Canadian novelist David Bergen, who won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2005 for The Time in Between, will read from his fiction and talk about his remarkable career on the evening of Wednesday February 29. His novels – which have received much critical acclaim – deal with such matters as family and personal estrangement, guilt, and the quest for redemption. Bergen lives in Winnipeg.
A new arrival on the literary scene, Darcie Friesen Hossack, will read from and speak about her work on Wednesday March 7. Her collection of short stories, Mennonites Don't Dance, set among families living on the Canadian prairies, was nominated for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book – Canada and the Caribbean, and selected for the Globe and Mail’s 2011 Best First Fiction. She lives in British Columbia.
Three poets will also read and speak about their writing: David Waltner-Toews on January 18, Patrick Friesen on January 25, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf on February 15.
David Waltner-Toews, an internationally known epidemiologist and a poet and novelist will talk about how science and a Mennonite upbringing inform all his work – from his poetry to murder mysteries to popular science writing like his study of excrement called “Shit: A Biography,” soon to be published by ECW Press. Recently retired from the University of Guelph, he lives in Kitchener.
Patrick Friesen, well established as one of Canada’s best lyric poets and literary performers, has published over a dozen volumes of poems. He has also written stage and radio plays, including a stage adaptation of his long poem The Shunning, most recently reprised at Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange. Poet Di Brandt calls The Shunning “a startling ... exhilarating book, widely celebrated for its innovative form ... its gorgeous visceral poetry.” Friesen has collaborated with literary translaters and with choreographers, dancers, musicians, and composers. He lives on Vancouver Island.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the only American writer in the series. She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Poetry in America (2011). She is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches creative writing. Kasdorf will also deliver the 2012 Rodney and Lorna Sawatsky lecture, “Mightier than the Sword: Martyr’s Mirror in the New World,” on Friday, February 17, at 7.30pm in the chapel at Conrad Grebel.
On the remaining three Wednesday evenings, three Canadian literary scholars will continue the conversation by presenting lectures: Magdalene Redekop, on February 1, Rob Zacharias on February 8, and Paul Tiessen on March 14.
Redekop, Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto, will augment her lecture on laughter in Mennonite writing, “Here come the clowns,” with a clowning performance featuring “Sush Funk,” whom she identifies as a descendent of Paul Hiebert’s prairie songstress, Sarah Binks.
Zacharias, Associate Editor of the Journal of Mennonite Studies and a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, will examine the collapse of the Russian Mennonite Commonwealth as it has come to be understood in Canadian literature.
Tiessen, Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University, will speak about the work of Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, whose internationally popular novel, A Complicated Kindness, won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.
All events in this Wednesday evening series start at 7:00 pm in the chapel at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo. They are hosted by Hildi Froese Tiessen, a senior Canadian-Mennonite literary specialist now in her last year of full-time teaching at Conrad Grebel. Everyone is welcome. Admission is free.
Visit the celebrating Mennonite literature event page for more information.