Mainstage: Real Life

Tonight’s writers find inspiration in actual experiences, expressed in memoir, history, or fiction.

In Sister Language, Martha Baillie collaborates with her sister Christina Baillie, a writer and artist with schizophrenia, to break out and connect with the larger world. Taras Grescoe’s timely Possess the Air: Fascism, Freedom, and the Fate of Mussolini’s Rome, tells of resistance, risk, and sacrifice by people who opposed the rising tide of populism and xenophobia.

Candace Savage’s Strangers in the House excavates the history of her house in Saskatoon to reveal the bigotry that underlay the settlement of English Canada. Inspired by real-life events, Joan Thomas’s Five Wives tells the story of the women left behind when their missionary husbands are killed in the Ecuadoran rainforests. Jenny Heijun Wills, born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada, writes about her reconnection to her past in the memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.