Author Reading: David Carpenter and Robert Currie
Join Art Gallery of Swift Current and Thistledown Press for an evening of readings featuring David Carpenter, author of I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn't Like: A Memoir, and former Saskatchewan Poet Laureate Robert Currie, author of Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems.
The free event is taking place at the Art Gallery of Swift Current on Wednesday, October 26 at 7:00 PM.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
David Carpenter’s collection of essays explores a city boy’s love of the wild, a passion that has enriched his life from boyhood. At 80, this irrepressible Saskatchewan raconteur examines his intense fascination with predators large and small, and his awe in the face of the variety of creatures that may be out to get us—or who are out to get one another. The stories that fuel the essays in this entertaining memoir are as diverse as the animals—and insects!—at the heart of Carpenter’s inquiry.
Robert Currie’s Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems uses the vernacular of ordinary working people to tell stories and sing songs of small-town prairie life. These poems “work like small exquisite time machines . . .” writes poet Lorna Crozier in her introduction to this extensive collection of work dating from the 1970s to the present day. Currie’s poems powerfully evoke the reality of prairie life, with a frequent focus on the hard exteriors men and boys are expected to present to the world, despite the swarm of doubt and conflict roiling inside them. The characters who populate these poems are subject to difficult weather, internal and external, but their lives are sometimes illuminated by “a sudden radiance”: a deeper understanding of self, a breathtaking expanse of sky, the generosity of a friend or lover.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
David Carpenter is the author of 14 books, mostly fiction and nonfiction, including his work with Augie Merasty in The Education of Augie Merasty, for which he won several awards. He has won several Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year for his critique of modern hunting practices, A Hunter’s Confession. He won the Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence in 2015 and was presented with an honorary doctorate for his work from the University of Saskatchewan in 2018. Since boyhood he has spent many summers in the bush, canoeing, fishing, hiking and camping, a nature-obsessed lover of wild animals and wilderness habitats.
Poet and fiction writer Robert Currie is a founding board member of the Saskatchewan Festival of Words, a former chairman of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, a recipient of the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, and a former Saskatchewan Poet Laureate. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and more than sixty anthologies. He is the author of twelve books, including poetry, short story collections, and a novel. He lives in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where he taught for thirty years at Central Collegiate, winning the Joseph Duffy Memorial Award for excellence in teaching language arts. His new book, Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems, presents selections from a lifetime of writing.