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“Canada Reads” Event in Neepawa

Details

Published on Friday, March 9, 2018

Jessica Morton
Neepawa Banner & Press

The well known CBC’s “Canada Reads event”, which has been ongoing for 17 years, begins on March 26-29 and Neepawa will be hosting a local version of this event at the Margaret Lawrence ˮ����Ƶ. Margaret “Peggy” Laurence is an internationally known author, who was born in Neepawa on July 18, 1926. She lived in the house now known as the Margaret Laurence ˮ����Ƶ from the age of nine until she left to attend college in Winnipeg.

The evening is going to be held on Thursday, March 22 at 7 p.m. and will be full of reading, musical entertainment and refreshments. Five local readers will be participating in this year’s event and they are Iris Lagria, Lenora Buffi, Kim Chapman, Don Walmsley and Susan Phillips. They will each be reading a book that they feel is the “one book to open your eyes” in 2018. The five books being read this year offers a wide variety of plots and perspective. The first one is Sharon Bala’s “The Boat People” which is based on a true story about a group of refugees who came to Canada, only to face the threat of deportation and accusations of terrorism. The second book of the evening is “American War” by Omar El Akkad details one family’s story in the year 2074 when a second American Civil War starts after the passage of a bill that bans the use of fossil fuels anywhere in the United States of America. Craig Davidson’s “Precious Cargo” is a memoir about one year spent driving a bus full of children with special needs, is the third book being read for the evening. The fourth book is “Forgivness” by Mark Sakamoto who writes about the understanding and empathy that helped his family overcome some painful obstacles. The final book of the night is by Cherie Dimaline titled “ The Marrow Thieves” which imagines a world that has been ravaged by global warming that has killed millions of people and the ones who survived underwent a trauma that has led to their inability to dream, with the exception of North America’s Indigenous peoples, who carry dreams in webs woven into their bone marrow. The Margaret Lawrence ˮ����Ƶ has hosted this event for 4 years. There will be a $10 admission fee which includes all of the refreshments during the night. “This is a great event to come to and it is so much fun, the readers are so expressive and it’s really neat to be able to do a local version of this event,” said Rrain Prior, a member of the Margaret Lawrence ˮ����Ƶ committee. Copies of the books that are being read will be available for purchase at the event.