Events & Gatherings
Artful Readings: 20.12m by Arnolda Dufour Bowes
Join Program Guide Danica Lorer and author Arnolda Dufour Bowes for a conversation about her award-winning book 20.12m.
20.12m is a short story collection about the humble living conditions of Métis Road Allowance families. It exemplifies these families’ grit and tenacity to survive and succeed in the face of hardships. 20.12m refers to the narrow width of many of the road allowances throughout the prairies. In this coming-of-age book, Arnolda Dufour Bowes honours the true-life experiences of her father, Arnold Charles Dufour, a resident of the Punnichy, SK Road Allowance community. Learning these stories through oral tradition, Dufour Bowes combines creativity with true elements for five engaging stories that share a lived experience little-known to most Canadians. Dufour Bowes and her sister Andrea Haughian, who illustrated the stories, honour road allowance life in this passionate book.
20.12m is available in Remai Modern Art & Design Store.
Artful Readings are free for members, $10 for non-members.
Member discount codes are sent via email – if you didn’t receive your code, contact membership@remaimodern.org.
Event/Exhibition meta autogenerated block.
When
November 23, 2023 at 7:00PM
About the Author
Arnolda Dufour Bowes is Métis woman originally from Saskatoon, with family roots from Ile a la Crosse and George Gordon First Nation. Her first book, 20.12m, is a compelling and acclaimed coming-of-age collection of stories based on her father’s childhood among the marginalized Métis Road Allowance community at Punnichy, Saskatchewan, during the late 1940s.
The book received several major awards in 2022: Danuta Gleed Literary Award, a $10,000 grand prize from The Writers Union of Canada, and the international High Plains Award for Best Indigenous Writer. It was among SaskBooks’ best-selling titles of 2021 and won the Saskatchewan Books Indigenous Publishing Award.
Dufour Bowes’ first novel for young readers, Maggie-Lou, Firefox, will be released by Groundwood Books in October 2023.
She is proud to announce that her feature film script “215 & Counting” was chosen to be a live table read at the Vancouver International Women’s Film Festival in March 2023, a project still in the works.
Currently, she is a Playwright Resident of the Gordon Tootoosis Nīkānīwin Theatre in Saskatoon, where — under the tutorage of Daniel Macdonald — she is creating a play adaptation of Apples & Traintracks from the book 20.12m. Her sensory art installation and short film, Apples & Traintracks, will be displayed at the Wanuskewin Gallery from May to June 2024.