Reading Series events are listed in order of occurance to the right in the section “Upcoming Events”.

Below are updates presented in order of release.

Monday, October 20, 2008 @ 7:30pm
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave
7:30pm
Free. Limited seating.
Reading and Interview with Christopher Moore.

Compulsively readable, this first social history of the opening up of the Canadian West is a triumph of historical detective work and gives us Siggins at the top of her game.

While researching the biography of Louis Riel, Maggie Siggins became aware of a figure lurking in the background who had had a profound influence on the great Canadian reformer. This was his grand-mother Marie-Anne Lagimodière, née Gaboury. As Siggins’ research progressed, she came to regard Marie-Anne as the most exceptional Canadian woman of the nineteenth century. The perils of Laura Secord and Susanna Moodie paled in comparison, yet she remains largely unknown.

Beautiful and rebellious, Marie-Anne was still unmarried at twenty-five — unheard of in 1800s Quebec habitant society. Furthermore, once she did marry Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière, she insisted on accompanying her fur trapper husband to the uncharted wilderness of western Canada. The year was 1807, and no European woman had yet ventured west of the Great Lakes region. For the next thirty years, she would live among the native people or at fur-trading forts from Pembina to Edmonton House, leading an undoubtedly difficult life but one with freedoms unknown to women in western societies of her time.

Drawing from primary sources, Siggins paints a vivid portrait of life in the West, from survival on the plains and bison hunts to the tribal warfare triggered by the fur-trade economy. Through it all, Marie-Anne survived and thrived, living to ninety-six, the matriarch of a large and diverse family whose descendants still live in Manitoba.

Maggie Siggins is the author of ten books, including Riel: A Life of Revolution; Revenge of the Land: A Century of Greed, Tragedy, and Murder on a Saskatchewan Farm, winner of the Governor General’s Award; and A Canadian Tragedy: The Story of Joann and Colin Thatcher, on which the well-known miniseries Love and Hate was based. Author photo by Gerald Sperling.

Christopher Moore has been described as Canada’s most versatile writer of history. A winner of the Governor General’s Award and other literary prizes, he writes widely about Canadian history for adults and children. He has also developed historical materials for historic sites, museums, radio, and television, and he speaks frequently to a wide variety of audiences. He writes a long-running column on history and historians for The Beaver: Canada’s History Magazine. Christopher is also a past chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

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Wednesday, December 3 2008
Hart House (Great Hall), 7 Hart House Circle
7:30pm
Tickets $12. Limited seating.
For tickets call: (416) 640-5836 or visit the Refund’s desk at 214 College St.

A lecture.

In this startlingly original vision of Canada, thinker John Ralston Saul unveils 3 founding myths. Saul argues that the famous “peace, order, and good government” that supposedly defines Canada is a distortion of the country’s true nature. Every single document before the BNA Act, he points out, used the phrase “peace, welfare, and good government,” demonstrating that the well-being of its citizenry was paramount. He also argues that Canada is a Métis nation, heavily influenced and shaped by aboriginal ideas: egalitarianism, a proper balance between individual and group, and a penchant for negotiation over violence are all aboriginal values that Canada absorbed. Another obstacle to progress, Saul argues, is that Canada has an increasingly ineffective elite, a colonial non-intellectual business elite that doesn’t believe in Canada. It is critical that we recognize these aspects of the country in order to rethink its future.

John Ralston Saul’s philosophical trilogy— Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion and The Unconscious Civilization—has had a growing impact on political thought in many countries. The conclusion to this trilogy, On Equilibrium—an exploration of the six qualities of the new humanism—is a persuasive and groundbreaking exploration of the human struggle for personal and social balance.

Mr. Saul has written five novels, including The Birds of Prey and The Field Trilogy. These works deal with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. Like his non-fiction, his novels have been translated into many languages.

He has received many national and international awards for his work. The Unconscious Civilization won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, as well as the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Book on Social Issues. His reinterpretation of the nature of Canada, Reflections of a Siamese Twin, also won a Montador Award and was chosen by Maclean’s magazine as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. His novel The Paradise Eater won the Premio Lettarario Internazionale in Italy. Most recently he received the Pablo Neruda Medal in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Neruda’s birth.

Mr. Saul was born in Ottawa and studied at McGill University and the University of London, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1972.

Author photo by Ned Pratt.