| There’s a bridge that ties Alberta, home of Edmonton writer Myrna Kostash, to Eastern Europe, source of Ukrainian immigrants, political rebels and martyred saints.
You can’t see this bridge through your car window. It’s a bridge of words, built by Kostash’s passion, curiosity and drive to tell stories. It appears as you read the pages of Kostash’s writing over the last 30 years, from All of Baba’s Children through Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe and The Doomed Bridegroom.
Kostash is now adding a new span to this bridge, with her work-in-progress entitled Memoirs of Byzantium, about Kostash’s spiritual relationship with the Byzantine martyr St. Demetrius – an army commander who refused his emperor’s order to slaughter all the Christians in Salonica, back in the third century.
Kostash reads from the last three decades of her work in a reading entitled "From Two Hills to Byzantium: A Journey in Creative Non-fiction." It is being presented courtesy of an exchange between the University of Calgary’s Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program and the University of Alberta English department, where Kostash is the current writer-in-residence. The event takes place on Thursday, March 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the U of C’s Nickle Arts Museum. For more information, call 220-8177 or see www.markinflanagan.com.
After a quarter-century of writing in Western Canada, freelance writer Dave Greber, the child of Holocaust survivors, died four years ago at the age of 50. Now, an award has been created to honour his memory and to support freelancers aiming to do the kind of work he prized: carefully researched, well-crafted independent journalism. If you’re working on a magazine or book-length piece, the $1,000 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award can help support you in your work. And if you’re a fellow supporter of such writing, you can make a tax-deductible donation to the award fund.
The application deadline for the inaugural award is May 30 and the presentation will happen this fall at Word on the Street on Sept. 26. A jury will select the recipient and applicants must be Calgary residents working at least 70 per cent of their time on journalism, with a contract for publication. For complete application (or donation) details, call the Jewish Community Foundation of Calgary at 640-2273 or e-mail jcfc@cjcc.ca.
An alliance of alliances takes place at McNally Robinson Booksellers this month: the Alliance Française de Calgary and its counterpart in Edmonton come together to offer a poetry reading that will be recorded for CBC Radio Canada. The reading (in French, naturellement) is on Thursday, March 11 at 7 p.m. and is free and open to all. For more info. see www.afcalgary.ca or call 245-5662. |
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