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Luna SHARON BUTALA © Copyright 2001 by HarperCollinsPublishersLtd All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior per- mission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. For information address HarperCollinsPublishersLtd, Suite 2900, Hazelton Lanes, 55 Avenue Road, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5R 3L2. This author guide has been written by Samarra Hyde. perennialcanada AUTHOR GUIDES ·SHARON BUTALA Contents ·2 BIBLIOGRAPHY A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR Fever I began to write, after an abortive start at nine, when I was 0-00-647143-9; $14.95 tpb, October 1990 about thirty-eight and had come here to the ranch to live. I dis- HarperPerennial paperback edition covered that I couldn’t paint anymore, and I needed to fill my time and writing presented itself. I discovered pretty quickly Fourth Archangel that I could write, and wanting to get better and believing I 0-00-647404-7; $16.00 tpb, March 1993 could, I set out to do that. At first I wrote out of excitement and HarperPerennial paperback edition curiosity and then I began to write out of the desire to develop my craft enough to be able to say the things I wanted to say. Gates of the Sun And then to say them more and more compellingly—which 0-00-647535-3; $16.00 tpb, December 1994 continues to be my quest. HarperPerennial paperback edition My first book was published when I was forty-four, pretty late The Perfection of the Morning in the game. And for a long time I was angry about the twen- 0-00-638026-3; $16.95, January 1995 ty years I felt I’d wasted while others were learning to write, PerennialCanada paperback edition, A Phyllis Bruce Book until one day I realized that while others were struggling with craft, I was living my life. Now I had a wealth of experience. Upstream As a mature woman, I found that basic craft was not so hard 0-00-648113-2; $16.00 tpb, July 1996 to learn. HarperPerennial paperback edition I understood that a writer needs her own writerly world and I Coyote’s Morning Cry: Meditations and Dreams found very quickly that mine would be the agricultural people from a Life in Nature of southwest Saskatchewan where I had come to live at thirty- 0-00-638595-8; $12.00, June 1996 six and which was entirely new to me. Only Wallace Stegner PerennialCanada paperback edition, A Phyllis Bruce Book had written about this place and the people and he had stopped in 1952, having written about it in its infancy, and at that, Country of the Heart from a male point of view. That left the way open for me to 0-00-648158-2; $16.00 tpb, January 1999 reinterpret what I saw, and to do so from a woman’s point of PerennialCanada paperback edition, A Phyllis Bruce Book view. We had rather different opinions about this place, it turned out, although I doubt he knew it. I’m pretty sure he Luna never read one of my books. (He died at eighty-four in 1993.) 0-00-648540-5; $18.95, November 1999 The irony is that now we are occasionally reviewed together. PerennialCanada paperback edition, A Phyllis Bruce Book My book The Perfection of the Morning came as a complete Wild Stone Heart: An Apprentice in the Fields surprise to me. I had never planned to write non-fiction, and 0-00-255397-X; $28.00 hardcover, July 2000 to write about nature was never in my plans, either. That it HarperFlamingoCanada hardcover edition, A Phyllis should be (so far) the most successful of my books astonishes me. Bruce Book All I ever wanted to be was a novelist. I began writing short stories because I didn’t know how to write a novel, and once I The Garden of Eden knew how, I tried, not successfully, to give up writing short sto- 0-00-648503-0; $18.95, September 2000 ries. Now I find myself back at it again, working on my third PerennialCanada paperback edition, A Phyllis Bruce Book collection. As I write this, I have published eleven books. Not bad for a painter! perennialcanada AUTHOR GUIDES ·SHARON BUTALA Introduction ·3 Although one of my novels, The Gates of the Sun, is written lage we were surrounded by our French family for the only from the male point of view, I am most interested in women time in our lives. I still have a ‘French’ family and an and their lives, which I find to be most often constricted and ‘English’ family—though there isn’t a drop of English blood warped in the traditional world by male expectations and by in our veins.” the “don’t rock the boat” attitude of the dominant society. It’s clear to me, anyway, that women suffer greatly in this tradi- Her mother passed on her love of books to her children: tional life and that much of that suffering is unnecessary and cruel. Hence, I write about women struggling to make sense of My love of books and my sense of “good” books as their own lives in the face of incomprehension, whether willful opposed to “trash” was developed in me by my moth- or not, of both the society and their families. I prefer to write er, who loved books herself and knew all the chil- about so-called ordinary women, not those with unusual gifts, dren’s classics of her era and insisted we read them. or luck, or both, and who thus rise to the top in places usually So I started out reading good books and remember run by men. My women would tend to turn away from such a one year when we were terribly poor (I hadn’t start- prospect, in favor of a self-defined way. When they do find ed school yet), when my older sister and I got for themselves, they are mavericks, I think. Iris, in The Garden of Christmas together, one copy of R.L. Stevenson’s A Eden, is the best example of this so far. Child’s Garden of Verse. So even though I had a somewhat conflicted relationship with my mother, I I am very interested also in the spiritual world and in the owe my literary life to her, I believe… human craving for some unexplained and undefined thing, which turns out to be a need to connect with Spirit. I write After spending the first four years of her life in the bush, about this, also. One of the ways to Spirit is through solitude, Sharon Butala’s family lived in a series of small prairie towns: and alienation from the surrounding society tends to lead to solitude. Having spent a lot of my life as an outsider, I like to We were poor—that has affected me all my life in think—at sixty I’ve given up trying to belong—that I have a ways I don’t think I can ever measure—and good vantage point to view the culture in which I live. though it was unpleasant, heartbreaking some- times, I am not sorry. It has given me a perspective I don’t intend to forget. ABOUT THE AUTHOR In 1947, two of her sisters were stricken with polio in an epidemic. One was severely handicapped at the time, while Sharon Butala was born in 1940, in an outpost hospital, “an the other sister developed post-polio syndrome in middle old house that I think was run by the Red Cross where age. In 1953, when Butala was thirteen, she moved with her Mom would come down to have her babies,” in Nipawan, family to Saskatoon, where her father had a job as a northern Saskatchewan. She is the second oldest in a fami- mechanic. She worked and paid her own way through uni- ly of five daughters. At the time, her father had a sawmill versity, obtaining a B.A. in Art and a B. Ed. with a major in located roughly west of where Squaw Rapids is today. English from the University of Saskatchewan. Between her third and fourth year, she met and married her first hus- Growing up with a Catholic French Canadian, French- band. Their son, Sean Hoy, is an actor who currently lives speaking father and an Anglican Irish-Scots, English-speak- in Saskatoon. From 1969 to 1972 she was a Special ing mother left Sharon Butala with a life-long sense of Educator at Princess Alexandra School in Saskatoon. From alienation and with the feeling of not quite belonging to there she returned to university where she completed work either culture. Raised as a Catholic, Sharon Butala began for a post-graduate diploma in the Education of school in a “forbidding, extremely old-fashioned convent in Exceptional Children and became a faculty member of the St. Louis, Saskatchewan. Everybody in town except our College of Education. family spoke French at home and when we lived in that vil- perennialcanada AUTHOR GUIDES ·SHARON BUTALA Introduction ·4 After the failure of her first fourteen-year marriage, and I wrote about fifty pages of the novel that everybody after beginning a career teaching at the University of is writing these days, about urban life, single moth- Saskatchewan, she remarried and has lived for the past ers… I realized that I had no idea how a novelist twenty-five years on a remote ranch near the Montana- puts a novel together… I had to learn to write.