Marjorie Doyle in Conversation with Winterset Award Finalists Sara Power and Ashleigh Matthews

Sara Power is a storyteller from Labrador and a former artillery officer in the Canadian Forces. She  completed a Master of Fine Arts in Creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her  writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Best Canadian  Stories 2024. She was a finalist for the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, and received a  National Magazine Award nomination in the fiction category. Sara’s fiction has won awards from  The Malahat Review and Riddle Fence, and has been a finalist at The Toronto Star, The New  Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Fiddlehead. Sara’s first book, Art of Camouflage, is a collection of  stories featuring a cast of girls and women caught in the military’s orbit. Originally from  Labrador, Sara now lives in Ottawa.

Ashleigh Matthews is a textile artist living in Conception Bay South, NL, skilled at sewing, and writing, but less skilled at internally identifying and removing cancer cells from her own body. Sharing the reality of having cancer at a young age with authenticity is the guiding principle of Ashleigh’s advocacy within the cancer community and while she wrote her memoir, otherwise grossly unremarkable, as a record of her own experience it also reflects the reality of so many cancer patients across all demographics. Her story is a bummer at times, but at least you know she survived before you read about it.