Famous Canadian Authors from Alberta

 http://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

Alberta

Henrietta Louise Muir was born in Montreal on December 18, 1849, into a middle class family. When she was twenty-six-years old she and her sister founded a Working Girls’ Association to provide meals, reading rooms, and study class for young women. It became one of the first Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCA) in Canada. Henrietta and her sister also published a periodical titled The Working Women of Canada. It highlighted the terrible working conditions of women in Montreal. The two young women financed these two projects from money they earned as artists.

     Henrietta married Dr. Oliver C. Edwards in 1876 and in 1883 they and their three children moved to Indian Head, Northwest Territories, now the province of Saskatchewan. She continued to advocate for women’s rights and when Dr. Edwards became ill in 1890, they moved to Ottawa, Ontario. There, Henrietta took up the cause of female prisoners. In 1893, she worked with the wife of the Governor General of Canada, Lady Aberdeen, to establish the National Council of Women of Canada. They also founded the Victoria Order of Nurses (VON) in 1897.

     Dr. Edwards was posted as the medical officer to the Blood Tribe in 1904 and they moved to Fort Macleod, Northwest Territories, now Alberta. She wrote Legal Status of Canadian Women (1908) about the legal problems she was trying to overcome for women. Near the end of the First World War, 1914-1918, when supplies and moral were low, the Government of Canada selected Henrietta Muir Edwards, as the only woman to be on an advisory committee on how to bring in stricter conservation measures. This was the first time that a woman had been appointed to review public policy with the government.

     Henrietta joined four other women’s rights activists, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, and Emily Murphy, to lobby the Alberta government for dower and matrimonial property rights for women. They became known as The Famous Five. Henrietta wrote and had her second book published, Legal Status of Women in Alberta in 1921.

     The Famous Five joined together again to fight the Persons Case in the late 1920s. Until then, women did not have the same rights as men to hold positions of political power. The case, officially known as Edwards v. A. G. of Canada, fought for the right of women to be appointed to the Senate. In 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not considered ‘persons’ according to the British North America Act and therefore could not be appointed to the Senate. The women took their appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, England. The council reversed the Court’s decision in 1929 and this opened the Senate to women, enabling them to work in both the House of Commons and the Upper House.

     Henrietta died on November 10, 1931 and was buried in Mount Pleasant Municipal Cemetery, Edmonton. For some reason the memorial erected in her honour lists her death as Nov 9.

William Patrick "W. P." Kinsella was born on May 25, 1935, in Edmonton, Alberta. His first ten years were spent on a homestead west of the city where he was homeschooled. His family moved into Edmonton when he was ten and he started school in the fifth grade. His first story won a YMCA contest when he was fourteen. After high school he worked at various jobs in Edmonton, then moved to Victoria in 1967 where he drove taxi and ran a pizza restaurant. Three years later he enrolled in writing courses at the University of Victoria and received his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1974. He moved to Iowa and earned his Master of Fine Arts in English from the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978.

     Kinsella’s two favourite subjects for his stories were Indigenous peoples and baseball. While in Iowa, Dance Me Outside, a collection of stories as told by a young Cree boy, was published in 1977. It describes life on a native reserve in Alberta. W.P. returned to Alberta and taught English at the University of Calgary until his writing career took off. In the mid-1980’s, he moved to White Rock, B.C.

     Kinsella won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award for his most famous baseball novel, Shoeless Joe (1982). It was also made into a movie titled, Field of Dreams in 1989 starring Kevin Costner. Another collection of Indigenous short stories, The Fencepost Chronicles, (1986) earned W.P. the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1987.

     Box Socials (1991) combines baseball and life in rural Alberta in the 1940s. That same year Kinsella received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria. In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on reserves were the basis for the 1994 movie Dance Me Outside and the CBC television series The Rez, which aired on CBC Television from 1996 to 1998.

     In 1997, W.P. Kinsella was struck by a car and suffered a head injury. He lost his ability to concentrate as well as his sense of taste and smell. Unable to write his own stories he did keep in the writing community by writing book reviews. He was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 2005 and was presented with the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

     In March 2010, Kinsella’s unpublished manuscript, Butterfly Winter, won Winnipeg publisher, Enfield and Wizenty’, Colophon award. They published the novel in September, 2011, fourteen years after his accident.

     Kinsella spent the last years of his life in Yale, a small village along the Fraser River northeast of Vancouver. He had suffered from diabetes since the 1980s and in failing health he opted for the assisted dying provisions of Bill C-14. He passed away on Friday 16, 2016 at 12:05pm.