Margaret Macpherson in-conversation with David Carpenter (Hybrid Event)

Thursday Oct 27 2022 7:00 pm, Saskatoon, Travel Alcove & YouTube

Join Margaret Macpherson for the hybrid launch (in person + streaming) of Tracking the Caribou Queen: Memoir of a Settler Girlhood (NeWest Press). With in-conversation host David Carpenter.

The launch will be hosted live in the Travel Alcove of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Saskatoon and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream with live chat. The video will be available for viewing thereafter. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

In this challenging memoir about her formative years in Yellowknife in the ’60s and ’70s, author Margaret Macpherson lays bare her own white privilege, her multitude of unexamined microaggressions, and how her childhood was shaped by the colonialism and systemic racism that continues today. Macpherson’s father, first a principal and later a federal government administrator, oversaw education in the NWT, including the high school Margaret attended with its attached hostel: a residential facility mostly housing Indigenous children. Ringing with damning and painful truths, this bittersweet telling invites white readers to examine their own personal histories in order to begin to right relations with the Indigenous Peoples on whose land they live. Tracking the Caribou Queen is beautifully crafted to a purpose: poetic language and narrative threads dissect the trope that persisted through her girlhood, that of the Caribou Queen, a woman who seemed to embody extreme and contradictory stereotypes of Indigeneity. Here, Macpherson is not striving for a tidy ideal of “reconciliation”; what she is working towards is much messier, more complex and ambivalent and, ultimately, more equitable.

Raised in Yellowknife, now Denendeh, NWT, Margaret Macpherson has an English Literature degree from the University of New Brunswick and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from UBC, completing the program as a visiting grad student at Edmonton’s University of Alberta. She published a few contract non-fiction books as well as a biography of firebrand Nellie McClung, Voice for the Voiceless, in the early 2000s, but it was the publication of her short story collection Perilous Departures that launched her literary career. Her first novel, Released, was nominated for a Manitoba best book award in 2009, followed by a second novel, Body Trade, which won the De beers NorthWords Prize for Outstanding book in 2012.

Macpherson paints, travels, laughs long and often, and continues to explore and record the mystical communion of living things. She has recently moved to Deep River, in Northern Ontario, to begin her third act with her life partner.

David Carpenter is the author of 14 books, including The Gold and Welcome to Canada. He has received several Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year for his memoir A Hunter’s Confession. He is the winner of the Kloppenburg Literary Award, and in 2018, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan. He has hiked, fished, canoed and camped all of his life. He lives in Saskatoon.

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