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Here’s a nice review for Stolen Child in CM Online.

Here’s a quote:

     Although discovering Nadia’s true identity is at the core of Stolen Child, Skrypuch seamlessly integrates that story element into Nadia’s responses to the challenges of responding to everyday life in a new country.

      Stolen Child is a most worthy addition to the body of juvenile literature about the Second World War, and it is a novel that definitely breaks new ground in terms of its subject matter.

Highly Recommended.

Dave Jenkinson, CM‘s editor, lives in Winnipeg, MB.

Just finished a whirlwind week at Humber School for Writers. I was blessed with an outstanding group of students yet again. Yay!! And I was thrilled and surprised to be the recipient of The Calliope Award Outstanding Achievement in Writing and Mentoring, 2010.

Past recipients have been Wayson Choy, Richard Scrimger, Isabel Huggan and Kim Moritsugu.

Here is Calliope:

And here she is with her sister, the Woman of Distinction Award:

I don’t have a fancy tread desk like Art Slade or Gillian Chan or Helene Boudreau. Mine isn’t even as fancy as Sylvia McNicoll‘s.

Alas, my treadmill is armless so I had to be a bit creative. My son gave me the idea of giving my treadmill duct tape suspenders and using firm cardboard because it is so lightweight and I can cut it to size myself. I write on this for about 90 minutes a day. It’s not exercise, but it does add variety to my writing positions, meaning that my back is less sore at the end of a writing day.

I was at the most amazing conference this past weekend. Several of my books focus on the unjust internment of Ukrainians in WWI by the Canadian government. After many years of many governments making excuses and shoving the incident under the carpet, the Harper government did the right thing and acknowledged the injustice. An endowment was established to ensure that Canadians are never again imprisoned because of their ethnicity.

This symposium brought together researchers and archivists, librarians, professors, creative artists and descendants of internees. The one thing we all had in common is the issue of WWI internment. Not all internees were Ukrainian, and so there were people from other affected groups — Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, German, Turkish. The synergy was amazing.

I especially savoured meeting the other artists who have been creating works about the internment.

To read more about the issue and the conference, go here.

The photo is by Sandra Semchuk.

This afternoon, I was honoured to be one of five Canadian women awarded the Woman of Distinction Award by the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations. We were each given a beautiful bronze and marble sculpture by Oleh Lesiuk.

The five women to be honoured are:

 

1. Senator Raynell Andreychuk – for her dedication and commitment in promoting freedom, democracy and human rights throughout the world. Special recognition is to be given Senator Andreychuk for the work done in Ukraine during the presidential elections to assure that the elections were democratic, free of corruption and adhered to the Constitution of Ukraine.
   

2. Olga Swyntuch-Zawerucha – for her dedication and commitment in establishing the Credit Union Movement in Ukraine. Mrs. Zawerucha used her extensive knowledge, skills and expertise to train young women and men to take on leadership roles and establish Credit Unions in their towns, cities and villages. At this moment there are over 700 successful Credit Unions in Ukraine.
   

3. Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch – for her perseverance and dedication in writing stories for Canadian students and educating them about the horrors of war.  Through her novels she exposes young readers to issues such as, the internment of Ukrainian-Canadians by the Canadian Government during the First World War, Famine Genocide Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and Ukrainian Immigration to Canada. Through her books Mrs. Skrypuch provides a vehicle for children to deal with issues with which they might not be familiar or are afraid to discuss.

4. Myroslava Tataryn. – The Saskatchewan – raised activist is being honoured for her work with the disabled peoples’ organizations in Canada, Ghana, Ukraine, South Africa and Uganda. Ms. Tataryn has been active in promoting the inclusion of people with disabilities in worldwide AIDS advocacy efforts. Myroslava speaks publicly about building alliances between the AIDS and disability rights movements as well as integrating a disability rights perspective into international development work. She has worked as an adviser on disability and AIDS for Stephen Lewis’s advocacy organizations,  AIDS – Free World.

5. Zenia Kushpeta – is being honoured for her work with developmentally challenged in Ukraine. Ms. Kushpeta established, Dzherelo, a rehabilitation centre for disabled children in Lviv. To assist the disabled and their families, Ms.Kushpeta started the Faith and Light Groups, in Lviv and six other centres. In her work with developmentally and physically challenged children she found that these children were often excluded from activities or completely ignored. It is, Ms. Kushpeta’s hope and challenge to change peoples’ attitudes towards people with disabilities.

 

 

 

For the great review in the Star Phoenix for Stolen Child!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a quick ebook read on my Droid. A perfect sort of book to read on an airplane or waiting for a taxi. Mitchard has dramatically stripped down her style for this early YA compared to her adult fiction. I would have liked richer detail and character development, but with a writer as talented as Mitchard, the bare bones prose still works. Not as absorbing as her adult tales but entertaining nonetheless.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read the e-book edition on my Droid while on book tour and it was the perfect light read for the occasion. Not as moving as Talk Before Sleep but good in its own way. About a woman whose longtime husband leaves her and she has to re-invent herself. The story has been told many times and there isn’t much here that’s unpredictable but Berg has a pleasant storytelling voice so it goes down easily.

Here’s a photo of the children who were part of the audience for my presentation at the Vernon Elk’s Hall.