IN

Douglas
College

 

SIDE

Strategic Planning 2
Women’s Studies 4
Funny Pages 7
Calendar 10

Briefs 11

THE DOUGLAS COLLEGE NEWSLETTER & MARCH 1997

 

Writer-in-Residence: Sharon Butala
to share a unique sense of place

his morning

when I pulled

up the blind in
our bedroom and began to
turn away, I was stopped
by what I saw. I stood and
Stared at the view of the
hills across the river from
the house. It wasn’t fully
light yet, perfectly still, no
wind at all, and the sky was
rough-surfaced, low and a
deep purple. But below it,
all the fields and hills of
grass were frosted to a
pale, silvery cream. Frost
had even muted the harsher
angles of the hills, and
transformed this barren
landscape from its usual
early-morning hyper-real,
almost frightening clarity,
giving it the quality of a
distant, half-remembered,
lovely dream.

From Sharon Butala’s
Coyote’s Morning Cry:
Meditations & Dreams
from a Life in Nature,
HarperCollins, 1995.

The work of Saskatchewan writer
Sharon Butala is firmly rooted in place:
her fiction and non-fiction alike spill over
with the rich textures, colors and
character of prairie life.

OSMS|ER—R—RkRKE

 

But Butala’s finely worked portraits
also evoke a world as big as the prairie
sky — filled with the limitless range of
human emotion, thought and experience.

During a recent phone conversation
from the ranch she shares with husband
Peter, Butala explains: “I think what I
really do best is the communication
between two people when they’ re talking
about things that are important to me.”

And what Butala does best she does
very well — she was nominated for a
Governor General award for her 1985
short story collection, Queen of the
Headaches, and her 1994 memoir of rural
life, The Perfection of the Morning: An
Apprenticeship in Nature. She has also
won many provincial and national awards
for her work, and her two non-fiction
books enjoyed an extended stay on
Canadian best-seller lists.

In Perfection of the Morning, Butala
explored the nuances of not belonging,
viewed through the lens of an academic
who moved to the country for love. In
1976, she moved from Saskatoon to join
her husband on his ranch near Eastend,
where she has worked, walked, thought,
gardened and written ever since.

It’s clear from the pride in Butala’s
voice as well as her writing that over the
years she has developed a deep love and
respect for the land surrounding her.

She’s pleased to report to all of us here
in eco-conscious BC that she and Peter
have just completed a special agreement
with the federal government and the
Nature Conservancy of Canada.

continued on page 2