Fall Events 2008

Join the Owl's Nest staff in congratulating Calgary author Marion Douglas on the publication of her fourth novel.  Marion's short fiction has been published in The Journey Prize Anthology, Prism, Grain, and the The Capilano Review among other journals and literary reviews. 

Set in 1970, Dance Hall Road examines adolescence and adulthood, friendship and family within the ricochet of events through small-town life.  When the death of another high school student pushes the Town into collective despair, harsh gossip and casually dropped pellets of blame take seed.  Currents of anger and frustration are, in turn, meted out in the scapegoating of those who are decidedly different. 

With a keen sense of the human experience, Marion Douglas portrays her characters with unflinching empathy.  Evocative and multi-layered, Dance Hall Road invokes the contradictions of connection within the tenuous balance of regret and hope. 

Stop by the Owl's Nest for your chance to chat with Canadian mystery author Gail Bowen. 

Bowen has received widespread acclaim for her detective series featuring Joanne Kilbourn, a fictional character who has much in common with her creator. Both are teachers at Saskatchewan universities, sometime TV panelists, and both have several children and a one-time politically connected husband. The nine books in the series offer challenging puzzles and motives with a fair sprinkling of clues. But it is the added elements of the books with which her readers empathize: complex family interactions alongside every-day domestic details, prairie urban life and work, the ever-present prairie weather, and the realistic and dimensional portrayal of contemporary Indigenous people.