Coteau Book Launch Features Saskatchewan’s Grand Lady of Letters
Sharon Butala is an iconic Saskatchewan writer and a member of the Order of Canada. Her best-selling books run the gamut from poetry to personal memoir, from non-fiction crime investigations to fictional crime thrillers. The Festival of Words hosted the Coteau Book Launch of her 19th book, titled Zara’s Dead. There are resonances of her personal life throughout even Butala’s works of fiction. Her investigative book The Girl in Saskatoon tells the story of the murder of one of her high school friends. “In 1961, a country singer named Johnny Cash chose a beautiful young woman named Alexandra Wiwcharuk to be his ‘Girl in Saskatoon’, and sang to her in front of a hometown crowd. A few months later, Alex was found brutally murdered on the banks of the Saskatchewan River.”
Butala decided, 40 years later, to reconstruct the murder, to try to understand Alexandra’s life and family, and to speculate on possible police suspects. She conjures up a lyrical portrait of a world where life appeared so much simpler, and young girls dreamed their dreams of love and marriage as life stretched before them. The murder has remained unsolved.
Butala was followed by the Saskatoon Police. She received both helpful and threatening phone calls. She knew she was being kept from answers. She wondered whether the authorities had been involved or were just part of a cover up. Zara’s Dead follows up with a fictional portrayal. The heroine in this thriller is a 70-yearold woman whose husband has just died (like Butala). The condo she lives in is also like Butala’s.
The book tries, again, to get at the nature of good and evil. It begins with a message left under her door - a name and phone number. An understanding that it has something to do with “How the mighty have fallen; how the impotent have risen”. While Butala acknowledges that she has no more answers about the real life killing when she began the investigation than at the end, Zara’s Dead allows her to revisit a situation that clearly continues to haunt her.