Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture

The award-winning Indigenous author of Monkey Beach shares tales from her family, her life, and her culture. In March 2010 the Canadian Literature Centre hosted award-winning novelist and storyteller Eden Robinson at the 4th annual Henry Kreisel Lecture. Robinson shared an intimate look into the intricacies of family, culture, and place through her talk, "The Sasquatch at Home." Robinson's disarming honesty and wry irony shine through her depictions of her and her mother's trip to Graceland, the Potlatch where she and her sister received their Indian names, how her parents first met in Bella Bella (Waglisla, British Columbia) and a wilderness outing where she and her father try to get a look at b'gwus, the Sasquatch.

Home, for me, was not a birthright, but an invention... It seems to me when we speak of home we are speaking of several things, often at once, muddled together into an uneasy stew. We say home and mean origins, we say home and mean belonging. These are two different things: where we come from, and where we are. Writing about belonging is not a simple task. Esi Edugyan chooses to intertwine fact and fiction, objective and subjective in an effort to find out if one can belong to more than one place, if home is just a place or if it can be an idea, a person, a memory, or a dream. How "home" changes, how it changes us, and how every farewell carries the promise of a return. Readers of Canadian literature, armchair travellers, and all citizens of the global village will enjoy her explorations and reflections, as we follow her from Ghana to Germany, from Toronto to Budapest, from Paris to New York.

"Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book." Last June, I received an astonishing email from a man in The Netherlands who began with "Dear Sir Lawrence Hill" but who went on to say that he did not accept the title The Book of Negroes and would therefore burn my novel in a public park in Amsterdam. The astonishing array of events that led him to live up to his promise-while Dutch TV cameras rolled-made me think more broadly about all the different ways that books have elicited paranoid and violent responses over the years. The 17th century Italian scientist Galileo was jailed for the rest of his life and saw his writings banned because he dared to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Perhaps it is tempting to assume that it was only in other lands and centuries that arguments were shut down, books banned, and authors imprisoned or executed for publishing their ideas. But the fear of ideas, and of the free expression of imagination and argument, continues to define modern approaches to literature. In recent years, I have seen Three Wishes by the award-winning Canadian author Deborah Ellis pulled from school shelves because it allowed Israeli and Palestinian children to speak about what it was like to live in a war zone, and the American writer Joyce Carol Oates' novel Foxfire yanked from study in an Ontario school because it contained profanities. Who is leading the charge to ban, censor, or control the distribution of books? Is it working? What price do we pay for these efforts? And where do we go from here?

"Speaking one language, I submit, is like living in a house with one window only..." From his legendary birth in a snow bank in northwestern Manitoba, through his metamorphosis to citizen-artist of the world, playwright, pianist, polyglot, storyteller, and irreverent disciple of the Trickster, Tomson Highway rides roughshod through the languages and communities that have shaped him. Cree, Dene, Latin, French, English, Spanish, and the universal language of music have opened windows and widened horizons in Highway's life. Readers who can hang on tight-Highway fans, culture mavens, cunning linguists, and fellow tricksters-will experience the profundity of Highway's humor, for as he says, "In Cree, you will laugh until you weep."