$25.00
98 in stock
When: Saturday, August 8, 10:30 am
Stories of adoption raise questions about identity, belonging, and the nature of support. Brittany Penner’s memoir Children Like Us tells from the inside the story of a Métis child adopted into a Mennonite home in the 1980s; and Sharon Bala’s much anticipated novel Good Guys about the charity sector and the flurry of celebrity child adoptions in the 21st century make for a fascinating conversation. Our host is Michelle Porter, who is a poet, memoirist, and writer of the novel A Grandmother Begins the Story. Michelle teaches creative writing at Memorial University.
SHARON BALA is the author of the bestselling The Boat People, which won the 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award and the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. It was a finalist for Canada Reads 2018, the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her short fiction has won three Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards and has been published in leading literary magazines including The Journey Prize 29 and Riddle Fence. Sharon earned the 2017 CBC Emerging Artist Award. She is a member of The Port Authority, a St. John’s writing group. Sharon holds a BA (Honours) in Psychology and History from Queen’s University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto. She lives on the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), which is the unceded, traditional territory of the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq, with her husband, Tom Baird. Visit her online at: sharonbala.com.
BRITTANY PENNER is an author, practicing family physician and lecturer with the University of Manitoba Max Rady College of Medicine, and has been a keynote speaker at the University of Manitoba. She is currently completing a Master’s of Liberal Arts at Harvard University. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, Huffington Post Canada, This Magazine and Canadian Family Physician, and typically revolve around the complex nature of identity and family dynamics. She lives in Manitoba.
MICHELLE PORTER writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She is the descendent of a long line of Métis storytellers (the Goulet family) originally from the Red River area. Her first novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story (2023), won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She’s the author of two nonfiction books, Approaching Fire and Scratching River, and one book of poetry, Inquiries. Her next novel A Glacier’s Guide to Dying is due to be published in the fall of 2026.
