Kevin Sehn
April 2024
Kevin Sehn is an Artist from Edmonton, Alberta. His work is mostly figurative and industrial sculpture in bronze, steel, found objects and wood. He has been working on a series of life-sized magpies in various iterations for the last several years, including a public sculpture called “The Magpie’s nests” in Rossdale linear park (with collaborator Chai Duncan). Kevin is looking forward to developing some new work examining reflections of the self and the relationships of scarcity to environmental crisis, human folly and perhaps class-struggle as well as continuing a photographic series called “Event Horizon”. This series takes a dive into painting, history, tiny forgotten spaces and things, while playing with perception, time, transformation and enigmatic spaces. It includes hundreds of exciting photos of boring things to be printed on primed wood panels that have never been shown anywhere before.
Debra Sloan
May 2024
Debra engaged in a self-directed apprenticeship 1973 - 1979, attended the Vancouver School of Art 1979- 1982, and later attained her BFA from ECUAD in 2005. Maker, teacher, adjudicator, presenter, parent, volunteer, and currently president of the North-West Ceramics Foundation. Her work is exhibited, regionally, nationally, and internationally. She has attended international residencies in Hungary, Rome, Japan, and the UK.
Debra is very interested in the inherent narrative capacity of clay and in 2005 she started to write (non-fiction) about BC ceramic history, the clay artists, and their social, aesthetic, and historic contributions. For this residency she will be working on several biographies, and hopefully engaging with locally found materials - Eastend and region is famous for its clays - and she is also interested in the Indigenous use of local clays in Saskatchewan, in contrast to BC, where only wood was mastered for function and as a means of expression. She is also looking forward to experiencing the prairies! Please check out Debra’s website here : www.debrasloan.com
Elinor Florence
June 2024
Elinor Florence grew up on a farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan and worked as a journalist for the next thirty years, at newspapers including the Western Producer in Saskatoon, the Red Deer Advocate, the Winnipeg Sun, and the Vancouver Province. In 1996 she moved with her young family to the mountain resort of Invermere, B.C., where she spent the next eight years as a regular writer for Reader’s Digest Canada before publishing her own community newspaper, the Columbia Valley Pioneer. After leaving journalism, Elinor turned to historical fiction. Her first novel Bird’s Eye View, about a Saskatchewan farm girl who joins the air force in the Second World War and becomes an interpreter of aerial photographs, was published by Dundurn Press in 2014 and became a Globe & Mail bestseller. She appears regularly at public events where she speaks about the inspiration behind her work. She has also written a monthly blog for the past ten years, Letters From Windermere. Elinor is now working on her third novel, about women homesteaders in Western Canada. You may sign up for her blog and read more about her books at www.elinorflorence.com.
Chris Meigh-Andrews
Chris Meigh-Andrews is a pioneering video artist, art historian and writer. His installations often incorporate renewable energy technology in tandem with moving image and sound. He has exhibited his work internationally for many years and written and lectured extensively on artists’ video. He is currently working on a novel based on the extended period his grandfather spent living in Canada in the early 1920’s, which began in Eastend, Saskatchewan. Please find more information about Chris at www.meigh-andrews.com or here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Meigh-Andrews
Ellen Andreassen
Born in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba I grew up and spent most of my life in the Stony Plain, Alberta area. I trained as a Graphic Designer and worked in that field for a few years before finding my passion as a fine artist, and art educator. I teach art classes for children, youth and adults. I also facilitate art programs for adults living with dementia and their support person.
In my own art practice I make paintings and drawings of the landscape. I find inspiration everywhere; a clump of grass, a few ordinary trees by the side of the road or branches by a lake. Seeking to reflect my love of the natural world, I want to convey my impressions of the landscape in a particular moment in time. I work mainly in oils but also use charcoal and watercolors.
My paintings have been displayed at the McMullen Gallery, the Naess Gallery and the Walterdale Theatre in Edmonton and have are in private and public collections. I'm a juried member of the Alberta Society of Artists.
Francine Cunningham
Francine Cunningham is an award-winning writer, artist and educator who spends her summer days writing on the prairie’s and her winter months teaching in the north. Francine is a member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta but grew up in Calgary, Edmonton, and 100 Mile House, BC. Francine is also Metis, and has settler family roots stretching from as far away as Ireland and Belgium. She currently resides in Alberta but previously spent over a decade calling Vancouver her home.
Her debut book of poems On/Me (Caitlin Press) was nominated for The BC and Yukon Book Prize, The Indigenous Voices Award, and The Vancouver Book Award. Her debut book of short stories God Isn’t Here Today (Invisible Publishing) is out now and is a book of speculative fiction and horror and was longlisted for The inaugural Carol Shield’s Prize for Fiction, was a finalist for the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award, and won the 2023 ReLit award for short fiction. Her first children’s book What if bedtime didn’t exist (Annick Press) will be out in 2024. Francine also writes for television with credits including the teen reality show THAT’S AWSM!
among others and was a recipient of a Telus StoryHive grant to make a web-series. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have also appeared in The Best Canadian Short Stories, The Best Canadian Non-Fiction, in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, and on the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize longlist among others. She is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at The University of Calgary. You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca
Keith Liggett
Keith Liggett is a ski bum. Chronologically—Aspen, Vail, Breckenridge, a RJ (Real Job) back East, Breckenridge, Hood River and Fernie since 2006. As he wandered chasing snow, his ski journalism appeared in over 100 newspapers and all the major journals. For 15 winters, he wrote a weekly ski column carried by 50 to 75 papers and provided stringer coverage of North American World Cup events for Reuters and occasionally AP. He passed his Level 3 PSIA-Rocky Mountain in 1987, which gave him a technical excuse to continue his skiing. When he’s bored, he telemarks.
On the literary side, at sixteen Keith published two poems in the Northwestern University’s literary magazine. Since then he has published short stories and poems in a wide variety of literary magazines. He has published six books. Most recently, in 2010, Whitecap Books published Island Lake Lodge: the cookbook (Vancouver, 2010) which won a Gourmand Award and became a Canadian Bestseller. like socks in the dryer, his second poetry collection appeared in 2013. The Fernie Originals, a collection of essays on living in Fernie and profiles of Fernie businesses came out in 2015. Keith is a past Board member, Vice President and President of the Federation of BC Writers. Currently, Keith is a reader and editor for the Whitefish Review. Occasionally, with no real schedule, Keith blogs on his website, www.keithliggett.ca
Rusti Lehay
December 2024
Rusti L Lehay, as a global editor, book, and writing coach, created over 60 guides for authors. Rusti’s clients generate consistent content; many become published authors. Her writers retain artistic control and learn self-editing techniques. Under Rusti’s empathic, heart-centred approach, authors and novice writers build confidence to craft and tweak writing projects independently.
All writers have a unique voice to connect with their audience – the real boss, not the author or the editor. Rusti seeks to inspire, while making writing fun and easy. Ask about her online writing events for new and seasoned writers. Her book Letters to Women Everywhere: Seven Cautionary Tales is due out in the spring of 2024. In December 2024, she will be working on her Tiny Box Tales: Renovating a Rail Car into a Four-Room Tiny Home In My 60s at the Eastend, Saskatchewan Wallace Stegner House as a writer-in-residence. Check out Rusty’s webpage at www.rustilehay.info
Cori Brewster
March 2024
Cori’s music career spans over thirty-four years. She has released five CDs, performed across Canada, Germany, and New Zealand, taught songwriting workshops, and co-wrote songs with some masterful songwriters. Her lyrics appear in a poetry anthology, Vistas of the West: Poems and Visuals of Nature, and John Riley’s book, Bad Judgement. In 2009, the Canada Council awarded her a grant to produce a CD called Buffalo Street: Historic Characters of the Canadian Rockies. Her music knits together folk, roots, and storytelling with a strong Canadiana flavour, covering a range of subjects from the personal to the historical and from the genealogical to geographical, which evoke a time, a sense of place, a character, and a range of emotions. Since the release of Four Horses in 2016, Cori has been writing personal essays. She attended classes offered by the Alexander Writers Guild and Writers Guild of Alberta to learn the craft and is putting the finishing touches on a new project called 55 ~ 5 Songs 5 Stories. Cori is a mother, daughter, sister, aunt, friend, and a devoted Buddhist practitioner and traveler. She lives happily in Canmore, with her wife, Lori.
https://www.coribrewster.com/
Amanda Chesney
February 2024
Amanda Chesney is a printmaker, visual artist and instructor as well as a biologist. She makes works on paper in small editions and as unique originals using traditional and modern sustainable printmaking techniques. Amanda regularly teaches various printmaking classes at the Arts Council of Princeton and Artworks Trenton in addition to being a guest instructor elsewhere.
Amanda’s prints capture the fleeting and sometimes unexpected beauty of the natural world to appeal across cultures and times. She uses found and reclaimed materials and upcycled papers to reflect the locations and seasons where she makes her work. Amanda currently resides in New Jersey and continues to work on both sides of the Canada / USA border, bringing her mix of scientific and artistic skills to capturing an image onto paper. Check out Amanda’s web page here.