Under the Roof
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/
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.
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
Articles of Interest
Joseph Naytowhow
In my travels as a young man searching for meaning in my life I’d often go to ceremonies where I would sit with Elders, offering to help them with their work in exchange for knowledge. They would be happy to see me. In those days not many people wanted to learn. All the elders I’d meet would light a braid of what looked like common grass. I loved the sweet smell of the smoke and found comfort in it. In my language, nehiyowîwin, or Cree, I was told this was called wîhkask.
Diana Charbos
I remain fascinated with the visual elements of southwest Saskatchewan and explore energy in its physical, psychic and spiritual forms as a means to understand my interdependent relationship with the land. (Image cropped.)
There's a house party about to happen at Wallace Stegner House in Eastend, SK. Well… sort of. It’s a virtual house party complete with friends dropping in for some reading and tunes. And it happens to be Wallace Stegner’s 112th birthday.
Bill Hankins
While in residency at Stegner House, Bill Hankins created a photojournal inspired by quotes from Stegner’s prose and the landscapes surrounding Eastend, SK. Bill says “I searched for those photographic images that music have been similar to those that imprinted (Stegner’s) young life and resulted in some of his most beautiful and profound words.”
Lynn Stegner
The following was delivered, by invitation, to a symposium of conservation biologists from around the world who were assembling for one week at UC Berkeley in order to come up with a practical plan to conserve species and the ecosystems that support them.
From a beach on the Northumberland Strait to a seawall on Vancouver Island; a winter storm in a small prairie town or paddling a blue northern lake, Jack Walton’s musical tales are a reflection of the vast and diverse Canadian landscape, both real and imagined. For over five decades Jack Walton has combined his work in culture and the arts with that of being a volunteer advocate for their development and sustainability. He is a writer and performer of music and literature, consultant in Board Development and Governance in the non-profit sector, a festival designer/producer and a documentary filmmaker.
Writer Candace Savage has drawn inspiration from the stories and history of the prairies. This documentary looks at her relationship with the town of Eastend and the Eastend Arts Council who look to expand upon the environmental and creative legacy of Pulitzer Prize winning author Wallace Stegner.
I originally set out to make this film as a homage to Wallace Stegner and the enduring words he wrote in his famous 'Wilderness Letter' to Congress in 1960. His poetic appeal for robust and comprehensive conservation efforts of America’s wild lands gave me pause. In this current political climate his words began to take on new meaning. His plea for what wilderness can do for us is more relevant now than ever. Watch the film and take action.
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste . . .
We caught up with Sharon Butala to see what she has been up to lately and to look back on what she was thinking 30 years ago when she worked with the community of Eastend to establish Wallace Stegner House.
Inspired by The Geography of Hope we've asked younger and older family members about their personal reflections on the meaning of land.
On the first day of each month, a small group of Calgarians gathers in the parking lot of Stanley Park to embark on the Elbow River Bird Survey. The meeting time varies with the season, as this walk usually starts an hour after sunrise.
Depicted is a pair of one of the Canadian Grasslands most iconic birds of prey, the Burrowing Owl. Due to habitat loss and other factors, this species is currently on the decline in Canada.
A child walks away from the kitchen door, through weeds trampled grey to the edge of the garden where the wind and grass waits. Beyond the rhubarb and into the endless sage-pocked green, the sound of his father’s cursing fades and is gone. He enters easily into a solitude held together by meadowlark song. There are gophers and small, bobbing owls that live in their burrows and now and then a badger looking back at him.
An Historic Writers/Artists Residency
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and leading environmentalist. In 1989 his boyhood home in Eastend, Saskatchewan, was restored by Eastend Arts Council as a residence for visiting artists and writers. Since then, it has hosted more than 250 writers from around the world.
Wallace Stegner House stands on Treaty 4 territory and the homeland of the Metis Nation. We acknowledge this land as the traditional territory of the Nehiyaw (Cree), Nakoda, Saulteaux, Kainai (Blood), Siksika (Blackfoot) and Lakota, among other nations. As members of the Eastend Arts Council, we honour and respect the Treaties, acknowledge the harms and mistakes of past and present, and dedicate ourselves to moving forward in a spirit of reconciliation and respect.
The Geography of Hope is a term Wallace Stegner coined, and is a rally cry to value, protect, and celebrate regions like the grasslands, and the Cypress Hills which make Eastend the special place it is.
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and works of nonfiction. Stegner lived most of his life in the United States, but the genesis of his inspiration as a writer can be traced to southwest Saskatchewan.
Before his death in 1993 a few people had a dream. They envisioned Stegner’s childhood home in the town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, could become a special place of inspiration.
Throughout his illustrious career, Wallace Stegner shone a light into dark corners of western history. But when it came to the suffering and displacement of Indigenous people in the Cypress Hills and beyond, he was blinded… read the full bio.
Residency Program
Wallace Stegner House is an artist retreat that is operated by Eastend Arts Council Inc., a not for profit charitable corporation run by a volunteer board.
Artists and writers from around the world are invited to create and explore the land from Wallace Stegner’s historic childhood home as part of a one month residency program. For details please see here.
Eastend Arts Council
Eastend Arts Council is a volunteer-run, registered not for profit that owns and operates the Wallace Stegner House. The Eastend Arts Council enriches the community through supporting writers, artists, culture and heritage.
Our mission is to connect local and global communities to Eastend’s inspiring landscapes, its heritage and the arts, fostering a culture of creativity.