Butala, Chamberlin consider spirit in landscape at May Convergence weekend in Silverton
By Contributor
Registration is now open for the 3rd Convergence Writers’ Weekend in Silverton, B.C., May 13-14.
Featured will be best-selling environmental memoirist and fiction writer Sharon Butala, and non-fiction author and native land claims expert J. Edward Chamberlin.
The event, at Silverton Memorial Hall, will feature talks and writers’ workshops conducted by the two featured authors, plus a panel discussion. Cost for the weekend is $35. More information is available at www.heartsrest.com/convergence/convergence-writers-retreat; to register email: [email protected]
The theme of this year’s weekend, “The Spirit in the Landscape,” looks at the deep connection with nature that many Kootenay residents report experiencing.
Butala, from Calgary, is best known for her memoir The Perfection of the Morning about her time on a ranch in southern Saskatchewan. Her most recent novel is Wild Rose (2015).
Chamberlin, from Halfmoon Bay, B.C., has been on faculty at the University of Toronto since 1970. His books include If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground (2003), which explores how stories and songs locate people in a landscape, and A Covenant in Wonder with the World: The Power of Stories and Songs (2012).
Butala and Chamberlin will speak Friday night, May 13, followed by a Q & A.
Their talk is open to the public for a $5 admission, as well as to conference registrants. On Saturday, May 14, Butala will conduct a three-hour writers’ workshop in the morning, and Chamberlin will conduct a similar workshop in the afternoon.
A Saturday evening panel discussion will feature the two guest authors plus New Denverites Therese DesCamp, a United Church Minister and co-founder of the Heart’s Rest Retreat Centre and the Slocan Lake Stewardship Society, and Sean Arthur Joyce, a journalist, poet and social historian, whose most recent books include Laying the Children’s Ghosts to Rest: Canada’s Home Children in the West (2014).
Previous Convergence Writers’ Weekends were held in New Denver in 2012 and 2013.
