Rudy Weibe at Carleton University - Events - Resources

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Rudy Weibe at Carleton University

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Start Date & Time February 28, 2008 7:30 PM GMT -5 End Date & Time February 28, 2008 10:00 PM GMT -5 Location Kalish Mital (former Alumni Hall), Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Event Cost Free RSVP Info Name: Nicole Allison E-mail: ottawa@clc.takingitglobal.org Categories Media Culture Education Tags literature, lecture, canadiana, identity, language You must be logged in to add tags.

About

Rudy Wiebe is the author of over twenty books, including nine novels, four short story collections, and three essay collections on distinctly Canadian subjects ranging from First Nations people to Mennonite settlers. His most recent book, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, is a moving account of Wiebe's years growing up in an isolated farming community in Saskatchewan. Of This Earth was awarded the 2007 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Wiebe is also the recipient of two Governor General's Awards for fiction (for The Temptations of Big Bear, 1973, and A Discovery of Strangers, 1994). Stolen Life: The Journey of A Cree Woman, co-authored with Yvonne Johnson, was published in 1998 to wide acclaim.

Rudy Wiebe was born on October 4, 1934, in a rugged but lovely region near Fairholme, Saskatchewan. His parents had escaped Soviet Russia with five children in 1930, part of the last generation of homesteaders to arrive in the Canadian West, and part of a Mennonite history of displacement and emigration through Europe and Asia to North and South America since the seventeenth century.

Wiebe has been called the first major Mennonite writer to place his community's experience in a broader framework. As a prairie writer, he has often concerned himself with Native stories, feeling place of birth to be more important than blood ancestry. "Those Mennonite villages in Russia are my heritage, but not my world. The world I feel and sense in my bones is the bush of northern, of prairie Canada." Native spirituality, with its vital links to the physical world, has
always attracted him, but his fiction transcends nationality and locale. His books and stories have been translated into nine European languages, as well as Mandarin, Bengali, and Japanese. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and lives in Edmonton.

Wiebe's lecture is entitled "Where The Truth Lies" and will explore the overwhelming dominance of language in our lives. The double meaning of the title of the lecture-truth as a form of emplacement and a form of falsehood-will be the starting point for Wiebe's discussion of the nature of fact and fiction in our lives, and in the stories we tell to retain those facts, those fictions.