An Evening with Sharon Butala

In conversation with Maurice Mierau and signing Where I Live Now: A Journey through Love and Loss to Healing and Hope (Simon & Schuster). Co-presented by the Winnipeg International Writers Festival as part of our collaborative Spring Literary Series.

When Sharon Butala’s husband, Peter, died unexpectedly, she found herself with no place to call home. Torn by grief and loss, she fled the ranchlands of southwest Saskatchewan and moved to the city, leaving almost everything behind. A lifetime of possessions was reduced to a few boxes of books, clothes, and keepsakes. But a lifetime of experience went with her, and a limitless well of memory—of personal failures, of a marriage that everybody said would not last but did, of the unbreakable bonds of family.

Reinventing herself in an urban landscape was painful, and facing her new life as a widow tested her very being. Yet out of this hard-won new existence comes a memoir that offers not only solace and hope but inspiration to those who endure profound loss.

Sharon Butala is an award-winning and bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her classic book The Perfection of the Morning was a #1 bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Her latest novel, Wild Rose, has been shortlisted for the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Butala is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and the 2012 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. In 2002 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada. She lives in Calgary.

Maurice Mierau is the author of Detachment: An Adoption Memoir, which won the 2016 Kobzar Literary Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. He has published three books of poems, including Autobiographical Fictions and ReLit Award winner Fear Not. He was born in Indiana and grew up in Nigeria, Manitoba, Jamaica, Kansas, and Saskatchewan. Maurice now lives in Winnipeg where he works as a writer and editor.

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