Governor General Award-Winning Writer Karen Connelly, Celebrated Native Writer Tomson Highway Ask -- and Answer: How Do Authors Write About A Culture Or A Gender That Isn't Their Own? During Latest York U. Millennial Wisdom Symposium

TORONTO, December 21, 1999 -- How do authors write in the voice of another culture or gender without appropriating the right of these groups to tell their own story? Just ask Governor General award winner Karen Connelly and internationally-acclaimed Native writer Tomson Highway, whose own work successfully usurps the voices of others.

Connelly and Highway will open the second half of the York University Millennial Wisdom Symposium, which begins Tues., Jan. 11, 2000, 5 p.m. at the York University Bookstore, York Lanes. This event is the sixth of ten free public events, organized by York University's Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies in co-operation with the Royal Ontario Museum. The symposium, which revolves around the way we recreate the past in contemporary culture, is the inspiration of novelist, York prof. and Robarts Millennial Scholar Susan Swan.

"Novelists, archeologists and historians provide a rear view mirror of the past and a unique road map to the future," said Swan. "The literary imagination is still one of the best ways to dissolve ignorance and prejudice in the world today. That's why I asked two of Canada's best writers on the subject of difference to share with us the wisdom they've learned by doing their art."

Connelly will discuss The Lizard Man, a work in progress about a Burmese political prisoner kept in solitary confinement. Connelly, who has been most mindful of the dilemma of writing in the voice of other cultures without appropriating their right to tell their own stories, will describe the issues of integrity she grappled with when writing the harrowing story.

At 30, Connelly won the 1993 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction for her book Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, (Turnstone Press, 1992), an engaging and honest account of her time spent in Thailand as an exchange student. She has also written The Small Words in my Body, which won the 1990 Pat Lowther Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian Women. Connelly speaks five languages including Spanish, Greek, French, Thai and Burmese.

Tomson Highway, an award-winning Cree author and a member of the Order of Canada, will explain why women figure prominently in his plays and novels about native life on and off Canadian reserves, and the importance of women in native mythology. His debut novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen (Doubleday, 1998), is the story of two Cree brothers taken away from their northern Manitoba home to a residential school, where they are abused by priests. The best known of Highway's eight plays are The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, both of which won Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Best New Play and Floyd S. Chalmers Awards for Best Canadian Play. His plays have been staged internationally, including in New York and on the main stage at the Edinburgh International Festival.

The York University Millennial Wisdom Symposium series, which runs from October 1999 through to April 2000, features such luminaries as Anne Michaels, Alberto Manguel, Ronald Wright, Carol Christ, Rosalind Miles, and Dionne Brand. An anthology called Making Ourselves Up based on the speakers' texts from the symposium will be published by a major Canadian publisher after the symposium is over. For a complete agenda of events, please visit: http://www.robarts.yorku.ca or contact the people below.

-30-

For more information, please contact:

Prof. Susan Swan, Chair
Robarts Millennial Scholar
Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University
(416) 323-0870
sswan@yorku.ca

Sine MacKinnon
Senior Advisor/Director, Media Relations
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 22087
sinem@yorku.ca
YU/140/99