Reading at Acadia features Eden Robinson
The Authors@acadia series and new Books as Bridges initiative at Acadia University will welcome Haisla and Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson to campus for a March 12 reading and talk.
Robinson will be reading from her first novel, Monkey Beach, and her newly released novel Son of a Trickster, and talking about some of the connections between the two. Her reading is set for 3 p.m.
Robinson has become one of Canada’s first female Native writers to gain international attention. Winner of the 2016 Writers’ Trust Engel/findley Award she is a Haisla/heiltsuk author who grew up in Haisla territory near Kitamaat Village, B.C.
She says, “I was born on the same day as Edgar Allan Poe and Dolly Parton: January 19. I am absolutely certain that this affects my writing in some way.”
As a Native Canadian writer, she joins the ranks of novelists Thomas King, Tomson Highway, Richard Wagamese and Lee Maracle, non-fiction author and poet Gregory Scofield, and playwrights Daniel David Moses and Drew Hayden Taylor in describing Native traditions and modern realities with beautiful, honest language and biting black humour.
The jury citation for the 2016 Writers’ Trust Engel/findley Award states, Robinson is a master storyteller with an instantly recognizable style and a capacious sensibility that encompasses everything from traditional Haisla teachings to contemporary youth culture. Her vision is unflinching, her obsessions sometimes brutal, her observations visceral, yet at the same time all of her work is suffused with a deep empathy for her characters, and spiced by a tricksterish sense of humour that opens up new ways of understanding this land and its beautiful, damaged people.
In a world where the legacies of colonial violence are alive and present every day, Robinson’s work resonates with crucial political and ethical questions that everyone needs to consider. This is vital, engaged, and artful writing that sticks in the memory and makes us think again about who, and where, we are.
Set in her hometown, Monkey Beach, her first novel, was shortlisted for both The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2000. Quill & Quire reviewer Lorna Jackson notes the novel is told by Haisla teenager Lisamarie Hill, whose Olympic hopeful swimmer brother is missing off a seiner. Her waking dream world is haunted by premonitions and wise ghosts; her life is tortured by school and the deaths of loved ones; her alcohol and drug consumption is its own exhausting dance. Shipwrecked and just wrecked, Lisa enters the crow-ordered world of memory while watching and waiting for the sasquatch – and her brother – to show up on Monkey Beach.
Monkey Beach evinces a love of her culture – Robinson maintains that if you don’t grow up on Oolichan grease, you’re not going to learn to love it, never mind make it; and if you grow up on supermarket vegetables, you’ re not going to learn when and where to find salmonberry shoots. She has used her celebrity to draw attention in Time magazine to the Canadian government’s chipping away at Native health care, and to the lack of subsidized housing for urban Natives.
As Robinson recently explained on CBC radio’s Feb. 12 edition of Indigenous Reads on Unreserved, Son of a Trickster is the first book in a trilogy, and “the trickster is Weegit - the transforming Raven. He performs a lot of roles in Haisla mythology. His biggest role is to teach you about our protocols by breaking all the rules.” Son of a Trickster focuses on Jared, a teenage burnout who may or may not be who he seems. Although he smokes and drinks too much for a 16-year-old Jared is also compassionate and cares for people older than himself. Recently, ravens have begun speaking to him, even when he’s not high.