Sandra Louise Birdsell, CM (née Bartlette) (born 22 April 1942)^[1] is a Canadian novelist and short story writer of Métis and Mennonite heritage from Morris, Manitoba.

Life and career

Born in Hamiota, Manitoba, Birdsell was the fifth of eleven children. She lived most of her early life in Morris, Manitoba, where the family moved after her father joined the army in 1943. Her father was a French-speaking Cree Métis born in Canada and her mother was a Low-German speaking Mennonite who was born in Russia.^[2] When Birdsell was six and a half, her sister died from leukemia, which left a four-year gap between her and her next older sister. Her loneliness led her to ponder by herself to the nearby parks and rivers allowing her imagination to go wild.^[3]

Her hometown of Morris experienced a major flood in 1950. Her first three stories in Night Travellers are based on that flood. Birdsell left home at the age of fifteen, where she studied at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba, where she studied under Robert Kroetsch. In 1996, she moved to Regina, Saskatchewan, and currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario.

At the age of thirty-five, she enrolled in Creative Writing at the University of Winnipeg. Five years later, Turnstone Press published her first book, Night Travellers.

In January 2007, Birdsell began a four-month term as the Carol Shields writer in residence at the University of Winnipeg.^[4] In 2010, Birdsell was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada and in 2012 she was invested with Saskatchewan Order of Merit (SOM).^[5]

She is a mother to three children and a grandmother to four children.

Publications

Short stories

Night Travellers

Birdsell's first book, a collections of interconnected short stories, Night Travellers(1982), is set in the imaginary Manitoba town of Agassiz, and concerns the large Lafreniere family: the teenaged sisters Betty, Lureen and Truda, their Mennonite mother Mika and their Métis father Maurice and the girls’ maternal grandparents, Oma and Opa Thiessen. Agassiz is based on the flood-prone town of Morris, on the banks of the Red River. where Birdsell spent her childhood.^[6] The source for the name Agassiz is Lake Agassiz, an enormous glacial lake that around 13,000 years ago covered much of what are now Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, northern Minnesota, eastern North Dakota, and Saskatchewan.^[7] Lake Agassiz is a controlling metaphor for the stories ... representing memory and ancestry". While the devastating flood that happened in Morris in 1950 "is a related image that reverberates throughout the text".^[8]

1984 Night Travellers received the Gerald Lampert Award from League of Canadian Poets. Usually this its awarded for a first book of poetry.

Ladies of the House

Birdsell's second collection, from 1984, is a sequel collection to Night Travellers that the focuses on the Laftenierre family women from Agassiz and their women friends, though most of the stories ae set in Winnipeg. In 1987 it was republished with Night Travellers, in one volume called Agassiz Stories. An American edition, titled Agassiz: A Novel in Stories, appeared in 1991 (Minneapolis: Milkweed).

Children's literature

The Town That Floated Away (1997) was influenced by Birdsell's experience as a child of the 1950 flood in Morris, and narrates the adventures of young Virginia Potts after she is left behind when her town floats away. Birdsell also wrote A Prairie Boy’s Winter, a one act play for children, which was co-written and produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, in 1986.

Novels

The Missing Child

Birdsell's first novel, published in 1989, is "an evocative magic realist portrait of the fictional town of Agassiz", which won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award.^[9]

Chrome Suite

Birdsell's second novel was published in 1992, and covers four decades of script-writer Amy Barber's life: from an extraordinarily hot summer in a small Manitoba town in 1950; "to the 1960s and the 1970s, when Amy marries, goes to live in the city, and begins to have reason to fear for her young son"; to the present, with Amy traveling from Toronto to Winnipeg with her young Polish, film-maker lover.^[10]

The Russländer

Published in 2001, this is Birdsell's third novel, and it explores Birdsell's own family history. The word Russländer means "Russians" in German and her mother and maternal grandparents were Mennonite emigrants from Russia. It was published as Katya in the US.

It is the story of Katherine (Katya) Vogt, and her Mennonite family's life in Russia from the end of 1910,^[11] until she, her husband, two sisters, and grandparents emigrated to Canada in 1923. Katya was born in 1902.^[12]

The story begins with the family living on the prosperous Mennonite estate of Abram Suddermann in the Ukraine, where Katya's father is the overseer. They are under the protection of the Tsar whose wife is German. This is part of the Chortitza Colony, land granted to German-speaking Mennonites for colonization. Chortitza was founded in 1789 by Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite settlers from West Prussia, and consisted of many villages. It was the first of many Mennonite settlements in the Russian Empire.

Life then becomes much harder when World War I begins and there is suspicion as to the loyalty of the Mennonites because they speak German. Life then eases when where the area is occupied by Austrian and German soldiers. However, Russia falls into chaos when they leave in 1917, with the February and October Revolutions. The Russian workers on the estate take the bloody revenge on the Mennonites. Katya's parents and her siblings, but for two sisters are brutally murdered. After years of poverty and near-starvation. Katya, her husband, sisters, and grandparents eventually emigrate to Canada in 1923, to settle in Manitoba: "Between 1923 and 1930, nearly 25,000 Mennonites fled violence that erupted in the Soviet Union".^[13]

Recognition

Prizes and honours

• 1984 Gerald Lampert Award from League of Canadian Poets, 1984, for Night Travellers
• 1990 Books in Canada First Novel Award (for The Missing Child)
• 1992 Shortlist, Governor General's Award for English-language fiction (for The Chrome Suite)
• 1993 Marian Engel Award
• 1997 Shortlist, Governor General's Award for Fiction (for The Two-Headed Calf)
• 1997 Shortlist, Silver Birch Award; Saskatchewan Children's Literature Award, for The Town That Floated Away
• 2001 Shortlist, Giller Prize (for The Russländer)
• 2001 Saskatchewan Book of the Year, Best Saskatchewan Fiction and City of Regina (for The Russländer)
• 2007 Longlist, International Dublin Literary Award (for Children of the Day)
• 2007 Saskatchewan Best Fiction Award (for Children of the Day)
• 2010 Shortlist, Governor General's Award for English fiction (Waiting for Joe)^[14]
• Juno Award nomination for radio play, The Town That Floated Away"^[15]

Awards

• Marion Engel Award for meritorious achievements of a woman writer in mid-career.^[16]
• The Joseph S. Stauffer Prize, The Canadian Council 1992, for meritorious achievements in the arts.^[17]
• Juno Award nomination for radio play, The Town that Floated Away.^[16]
• National Magazine Award and nomination for short fiction.^[16]
• 45 Below Award, by The Canadian Book Information Center. Chosen as one of ten most promising below the age of 45.^[16]
• Awarded writing grant from The Manitoba Arts Council, The Canadian Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.^[16]
• Nominee for 2010 Saskatchewan Book Award Shortlists: Fiction Award. Waiting for Joe (Random House Canada).^[18]