SATA
ENTRY TYPE:
WORK TITLE: ALWAYS BEGINNING
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Saskatoon
STATE:
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
LAST VOLUME: SATA 355
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 2, 1949, in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada; daughter of Harry G. (a school administrator) and Edna Elizabeth (a teacher) Sherk; married Arthur D. Savage, August 22, 1970 (died, 1981); partner of Keith Bell (a historian), since 1992; children: (from marriage) Diana C.
EDUCATION:University of Alberta, B.A. (with first-class honors) 1971; attended University of Saskatchewan, 1975-77.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and educator. Sun Color Press, news editor; Co-operative Consumer, editorial assistant; Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College, curriculum development officer and audio-visual producer, 1975; freelance writer, editor, and consultant, 1975-84; Government of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, public affairs officer for culture and communications, 1984-86; Science Institute of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife, coordinator of information and education, 1986-89. Saskatoon Public Library, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, writer-in-residence, 1990-91; instructor at St Peter’s College, Muenster, Saskatchewan, Canada, 2009-13; conductor of workshops and speaker at schools and libraries. Saskatoon Partnership for the Arts, steering committee member, 1997-99; Wild about Saskatoon, chair; NatureCity Festival, chair; Northeast Swale Watchers, co-chair; CPAWS Saskatchewan and Meewasin Valley Authority, member of advisor boards.
AVOCATIONS:Riding, pets, gardening, hiking, photography, singing.
MEMBER:Writers Union of Canada (national council member), Nature Conservancy of Canada (Saskatchewan board member), Saskatoon Fiddle Orchestra (accordionist), le Choeur des Plaines.
AWARDS:Recipient of Rutherford Gold Medal in English and Governor-General’s Medal for Scholarship; Honour Book Award, Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada, 1991, for Trash Attack!; Our Choice designation, Canadian Children’s Book Centre (CCBC), 1991, for Trash Attack!, and 1992, for Get Growing!; Honour Roll inductee, Rachel Carson Institute, 1994; Nonfiction Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards, 1996, and Notable Book for Young Adults, American Library Association, 1997, both for Cowgirls; Saskatoon Book Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards, 2001, and Our Choice selection, CCBC, 2002, both for Born to Be a Cowgirl; Children’s Literature Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards, 2003, for Wizards; Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, 2012, for Geography of Blood; Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence, 2022; Matt Cohen Award in Celebration of a Writing Life, 2022; fellow of Royal Society of Canada and Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
WRITINGS
Columnist and contributor to Canadian Geographic, 1999-2003. Editor of online anthology This Singing Land/Kanikamot askiy.
Wizards has been published in Germany and France.
SIDELIGHTS
Candace Savage writes to inform both young audiences and older readers about the beauty of the natural world and the lore of the West. In titles such as Grizzly Bears, Aurora: The Mysterious Northern Lights, and Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays she focuses on the many animals that can be seen by naturalists young and old on excursions into the Western wilderness. Budding environmentalists have gained insights from Savage’s contributions to the “Earthcare” series, while the author’s love affair with Western culture and life on horseback is related in both her adult title Cowgirls and its companion for young readers, Born to Be a Cowgirl: A Spirited Ride through the Old West.
Born in 1949 in the western province of Alberta, Canada, Savage moved around a great deal while growing up, living in small towns in the northwestern region near the Peace River, as well as in Edmonton, Vermilion, and Pincher Creek. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her love for reading and writing, while her explorations out of doors inspired her with a love of nature. [open new]About her adoptive homeland in Saskatchewan, Savage told Shannon Boklaschuk of Quill & Quire: “In the course of my own life, I have learned that where you are conditions your thoughts and it determines what you can understand. It’s very important to me to be rooted in this place. … I have a very strong sense of myself as a prairie person and I have never been able to persuade myself to go anywhere else.”[suspend new]
Savage’s first book, A Harvest Yet to Reap: A History of Prairie Women, was published in 1976. With Wild Mammals of Western Canada —published in the United States as Wild Mammals of Northwest America —which she wrote with her husband, Savage hit her stride as a nature writer, and began what has become a successful career in that field.
In 1985 Savage had two books published in succession: Pelicans and The Wonder of Canadian Birds, the latter published in the United States as Wings of the North. With these books Savage began her writing career in earnest. Savage has published several other books on birds, among them Eagles of North America, Peregrine Falcons, and Bird Brains. She is equally at home writing about those whose paws are firmly planted on terra firma. In titles such as Wolves, Grizzly Bears, and Wild Cats: Lynx, Bobcats, Mountain Lions, she educates readers about the habits of the West’s most common predators, and attempts to show that man can peaceably coexist with such creatures.
Turning her hand to books more specifically geared to young readers, Savage deals with environmental concerns in three titles in the “Earthcare” series. Trash Attack! Garbage and What We Can Do about It presents an overview of the problem of what to do with what we do not want, and includes activities young readers can do themselves to help become part of the solution as a certified “Trash Attacker.” Recycling and composting are also discussed, and kids are taught to be savvy shoppers by steering clear of over-packaged products. In Eat Up! Healthy Food for a Heathy Earth, Savage sends “a clear message that junk food is ‘out’ and natural food is ‘in,’” observed Quill and Quire reviewer Hickman. Get Growing! How the Earth Feeds Us expands on the topic of food by introducing young readers to the world of farming. David C. Allison, reviewing the “Earthcare” books for Science Books and Films, wrote that Savage’s “effort to inform children at an early age that planet earth has been and is being abused is laudable.”
Savage relives her childhood fascination with all things western in two books: Cowgirls, published in 1996, and the junior version, which she published in 2001 under the title Born to Be a Cowgirl. As a young girl, she was caught up in the Wild-West craze, but never had the chance to ride the range except in her imagination. In Cowgirls she brings to life the rough-and-tumble lives of some actual cowgirls—Belle Starr, Annie Oakley, and Calamity Jane, along with Hollywood cowgirls Dale Evans and Barbara Stanwyck, and several less-well-known but equally vivacious ranchers and drovers. Praising Savage for her committed research and enthusiastic, “peppery commentary,” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman added that Cowgirls is “enlightening and enjoyable from start to finish.”
Born to Be a Cowgirl recasts Cowgirls in a child-friendly light, simplifying the history of cowgirls and ranching for younger readers. Heavily illustrated with photographs and containing diaries, interviews, and fascinating tales of life in the Old West, Savage describes women who became everything from ranchers and horsebreakers to rodeo stars. Booklist contributor Linda Perkins called the book an “enticing slice of western and women’s history,” while Joan Marshall, writing in Resource Links, dubbed Born to Be a Cowgirl an “amazing book about the exciting life of cowgirls on the western plains of North America.”
While Born to Be a Cowgirl presents readers with inspirational stories about people pursuing their dreams, Wizards: An Amazing Journey through the Last Great Age of Magic takes readers farther back in time, to a period when going outside the norm often landed one in serious trouble. Using Sir Isaac Newton as an example, in Wizards, Savage shows that the early quest for medical and scientific knowledge often led one to be branded a witch or, as in Newton’s case, a wizard. In Booklist, Ilene Cooper found Wizards to be an “interesting brew” of history and storytelling that illustrates for younger readers how many dabblers, conjurers, witches, and wizards were, perhaps, in fact some of the greatest physicians and scientists of their age.
While wizards were perceived as relatively benign, not so with their female counterpart, as Savage shows in Witch: The Wild Ride from Wicked to Wicca. A book that January online contributor Linda Richards praised for providing “aesthetic delight along with intellectual stimulation.” Witch follows the history of witchcraft from the middle ages—when as many as 100,000 supposed witches were murdered, often by burning at the stake—to the New Age phenomenon known as Wicca. Praising Savage’s writing in Witch as a “gentle-yet-authoritative style,” Richards added that the book benefits from its author’s obviously “exhaustive” research.
Savage entered the picture-book genre with Hello, Crow!, which was inspired by the true story of a girl and her unusual friendship with a special bird. Illustrated by Chelsea O’Byrne, the work introduces Franny, a messy, imaginative daydreamer whose father describes her as a “featherhead.” While eating outdoors, Franny spills some crumbs that attract the attention of a curious crow. In the days that come, Franny begins purposely leaving crumbs for the crow, which responds by leaving small gifts for its new human companion. “At its core, Hello, Crow! is a picture book about possibility, crafted with a reverence for nature,” Shannon Boklaschuk observed in Quill & Quire, and School Library Journal reviewer Katie Callahan described Savage’s work as “a verdant and engaging read-aloud, perfect for budding naturalists.”
[resume new]Savage shifts focus from familiar ground to deep space and planetary origins with Always Beginning: The Big Bang, the Universe, and You, illustrated by Rachel Wada. Putting the Big Bang in the palm of a child’s hands, the narrative sweeps through the ensuing eons with aplomb, imagining the formation of stars and planets, the primordial soup that fostered earthly life, and the evolution of plants, insects, animals, and humans. With emphatic use of the second person “you,” the universe’s whole history is framed as leading up to the existence of the child reading the book. Praising the “alliterative poetic sentiments that curve across the pages,” a Publishers Weekly writer summed Always Beginning up as “a brief history of the universe rhat emphasizes interconnection.” Likewise enjoying the “lyrical commentary,” a Kirkus Reviews writer opined that children “may be carried away by the imaginative flight”—or perhaps the “ego bolstering”—of a work that “deserves points for ambition.”
Returning to a favorite avian friend, Savage wrote How to Know a Crow: The Biography of a Brainy Bird, with illustrations by Rachel Hudson. The book follows a fictional female crow named Oki—“Hello” in the Niitsitapi language—as she matures and becomes a mother, offering myriad facts along the way. Explained are seasonal travels, family communities, communication, playtime, nest construction, parenting, tool use, and more. A Kirkus Reviews writer affirmed that Savage manifests “a fulsome appreciation of these intelligent, social, nearly ubiquitous corvids” in what proves “an absorbing study–certainly ‘caws’ for further investigation.”[close new]
Asked if she had any advice for aspiring writers, Savage told Briarpatch interviewer Yutaka Dirks, “The wonderful thing about working with words is that they are inexhaustible and free. No matter how many sentences you write and delete and rewrite and arrange, you will never have to go shopping. So let yourself know what you want to say and then feel free to play. Be bold, be brilliant, and illuminate your subject in your own special way.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Reference Books Annual, Volume 17, 1986, Syd Schoenwetter, review of Wings of the North: A Gallery of Favorite Birds, pp. 597-98.
Backpacker, April, 1995, Jeff Rennicke, review of Aurora: The Mysterious Northern Lights, p. 143.
Bloomsbury Review, March, 1991, John Murray, review of Grizzly Bears, p. 24.
Booklist, December 1, 1990, Ray Olson, review of Grizzly Bears, p. 701; November 1, 1992, Ray Olson, review of Peregrine Falcons, p. 475; November 1, 1993, Mary Carroll, review of Wild Cats: Lynx, Bobcats, Mountain Lions, p. 491; February 1, 1996, Bonnie Smothers, review of Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays, p. 905; September 1, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of Cowgirls, p. 59; December 1, 1996, Mary Carroll, review of The World of the Wolf, p. 632A; September 15, 1997, Mary Carroll, review of Mother Nature: Animal Parents and Their Young, p. 189; May 15, 2001, Linda Perkins, review of Born to Be a Cowgirl: A Spirited Ride through the Old West, p. 1742; June 1, 2003, Ilene Cooper, review of Wizards: an Amazing Journey through the Last Great Age of Magic, p. 1770; October 15, 2007, Nancy Bent, review of Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World, p. 12.
Books in Canada, December, 1985, John Oughton, review of The Wonder of Canadian Birds, p. 19; December, 1987, Paul Stuewe, review of Eagles of North America, pp. 15-16; March, 1993, Janet McNaughton, review of Eat Up! Healthy Food for a Healthy Earth, p. 39; December, 1993, Lawrence Scanlan, review of Wild Cats, pp. 15-16.
Briarpatch, November-December, 2015, Yutaka Dirks, “The Art of the Possible: An Interview with John K. Samson and Candace Savage,” p. 24.
California Bookwatch, September 1, 2006, review of Curious by Nature: One Woman’s Exploration of the Natural World; January 1, 2007, review of Crows.
Canadian Book Review Annual, 1997, Janet Arnett, review of The Nature of Wolves: An Intimate Portrait, pp. 425-426; 1998, Janet Arnett, review of Mother Nature, p. 431.
Canadian Geographic, February, 1986, Monty Brigham, review of The Wonder of Canadian Birds, p. 77; March-April, 1995, review of Aurora, pp. 82, 84.
Emergency Librarian, May, 1991, Joan McGrath, review of Trash Attack! Garbage and What We Can Do about It, p. 57; March, 1993, Adele Ashby, review of Eat Up!, p. 60; May, 1993, Adele Ashby, review of Get Growing! How the Earth Feeds Us, p. 61.
Horn Book, July, 2001, review of Born to Be a Cowgirl, p. 476.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2019, review of Hello, Crow!; April 1, 2024, review of Always Beginning: The Big Bang, the Universe, and You; August 1, 2024, review of How to Know a Crow: The Biography of a Brainy Bird.
Kliatt, September, 1997, Edna M. Boardman, review of Bird Brains, p. 43.
Library Journal, January, 1986, Laurie Bartolini, review of Wings of the North, p. 93; October 15, 1994, Gary Williams, review of Aurora, p. 85; July, 1996, Daniel D. Liestman, review of Cowgirls, p. 134; October 1, 2005, review of Crows, p. 106.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 29, 1987, David M. Graber, review of Eagles of North America, p. 10.
Petersen’s Photographic, March, 1994, review of Wild Cats, pp. 12-13.
Publishers Weekly, November 20, 2000, review of Witch: The Wild Ride from Wicked to Wicca, p. 61; May 7, 2001, review of Born to Be a Cowgirl, p. 248; July 22, 2019, review of Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging, p. 199; February 19, 2024, review of Always Beginning: The Big Bang, the Universe, and You, p. 58.
Quarterly Review of Biology, September, 1997, Louis Lefebvre, review of Bird Brains, pp. 354-55.
Quill & Quire, December, 1985, Richard Perry, review of The Wonder of Canadian Birds, p. 33; November, 1990, Pamela Hickman, review of Trash Attack!, p. 11; October, 1992, Ted Mumford, review of Peregrine Falcons, pp. 29-30; November, 1992, Pamela Hickman, review of Eat Up!, p. 34; April, 2001, review of Born to Be a Cowgirl, p. 35; September, 2019, Shannon Boklaschuk, profile of Savage.
Resource Links, October, 1996, review of Trash Attack!, p. 38; June, 2001, Joan Marshall, review of Born to Be a Cowgirl, p. 30.
School Library Journal, July, 1993, review of Peregrine Falcons, p. 114; March, 1997, review of The World of the Wolf, p. 218; June, 2001, Nancy Collins-Warner, review of Born to Be a Cowgirl, p. 180; September, 2019, Katie, Callahan, review of Hello, Crow!, p. 105.
Science Books and Films, April, 1992, David C. Allison, review of Get Growing!, p. 85.
SciTech Book News, December 1, 2005, review of Crows; December 1, 2005, review of Curious by Nature.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), December 6, 1987, Peter Gorner, review of Eagles of North America, p. 8.
Voice of Youth Advocates, April, 1991, Gladys Hardcastle, review of Wolves, p. 63.
West Coast Review of Books, Volume 16, number 1, 1991, review of Grizzly Bears, p. 68.
Whole Earth Review, summer, 1995, J. Baldwin, review of Aurora, pp. 28-29.
Wild West, August, 1997, review of Cowgirls, pp. 94-95.
ONLINE
Candace Savage website, https://candacesavage.ca (September 6, 2024).
Greystone Books website, https://greystonebooks.com/ (September 11, 2019), interview with Savage.
Quill & Quire, https://quillandquire.com/ (September 1, 2019), Shannon Boklaschuk, “Candace Savage Discovered a Shameful Period in Canadian History Following Clues in Her Own Home.”
Writers’ Trust of Canada website, https://www.writerstrust.com/ (September 6, 2024), author profile.
Writers’ Union of Canada website, https://writersunion.ca/ (September 6, 2024), author profile.
Candace Savage was born in the Peace River Country of northern Alberta and educated at the University of Alberta. She is the award-winning author of more than two dozen books including A Geography of Blood, which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and Prairie: a Natural History, winner of the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, she was inducted into the Honor Roll of the Rachel Carson Institute, Chatham College, in Pittsburgh in 1994. In 2022, she received both the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence and the Matt Cohen Award in Celebration of a Writing Life. In addition to her work as a writer, she plays accordion in the Saskatoon Fiddle Orchestra, serves as chair of Wild about Saskatoon and co-chair of the Northeast Swale Watchers, and sits on the national council of The Writers Union of Canada. She also edits an online anthology entitled This Singing Land kanikamot askiy. She shares her time between Saskatoon and Eastend, Saskatchewan.
Candace Savage
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Author Profiles
Candace Savage discovered a shameful period in Canadian history following clues in her own home
Candace Savage had to look no further than her own backyard – or, more accurately, her own kitchen – to find inspiration for her new book, Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging.
Savage was renovating part of her 1920s-era home, built in one of Saskatoon’s first neighbourhoods, when she noticed some interesting items fall out of a kitchen wall. Among a blizzard of wood-shaving insulation was a worn shirt collar, book pages, bits of school arithmetic assignments, a lid, and three photographic negatives. Why the seemingly random objects were in the wall remains a mystery to this day.
“Eventually, I looked at all this stuff,” says Savage. “I mean, it’s grotty and horrible and very dirty and, in a moment of weakness, I threw away two of the negatives – but I still had one. It took me a long time to realize that on at least one of these items was the name Ralph Blondin.”
The surname Blondin struck a chord. Prior to the renovation, Savage’s daughter had visited the Saskatoon Public Library’s local history room for a school project. While there, she carefully wrote on a small scrap of paper the names of all of the people who had lived in her family’s home over the decades. Savage, a self-described pack rat, had saved this information.
“The very first name on the list always caught our attention, because it said N.S. Blondin or Napoléon S. Blondin,” says Savage. “Here in Saskatoon, we know the geography of our city; we know that, at least originally, people who were marked as ‘ethnic’ mostly lived on the other side of the [South Saskatchewan] River in the Riversdale neighbourhood, which had been created as a working-class neighbourhood. So it was just immediately interesting that out of all of these names that sounded quite Anglo, suddenly there’s this very French name.”
Savage decided to learn more about the history associated with her house by conducting genealogical research and by consulting city and provincial archives as well as published histories of Saskatoon. She soon came across the name Napoléon Blondin again: on a list of Métis people in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley who were petitioning the governor general and the political powers in Ottawa for recognition of their land rights in the late 1800s.
“And so I start to wonder if this house could possibly be a door – like, you know, a magic portal – into the history of Western Canada,” says Savage. “What are all these associations with this name that are clustering around this house?”
A sense of place figures prominently in Savage’s storytelling: she draws inspiration from her Western Canadian roots. Savage has been a prairie girl since birth. In 1949, she almost came into the world in a pickup truck – her pregnant mother was a bit late getting to the hospital – somewhere in northern Alberta. It’s a fitting story for a quintessential Western Canadian writer with a strong connection to the land and a deep respect for the natural world around her.
“In the course of my own life, I have learned that where you are conditions your thoughts and it determines what you can understand,” Savage says. “It’s very important to me to be rooted in this place. I came to Saskatoon first in 1970. … I left and came back again in about 1990. I came back planning to stay. Even though both of my grandmothers were born in the U.S. and both of my grandfathers were born in Ontario, I have a very strong sense of myself as a prairie person and I have never been able to persuade myself to go anywhere else.”
Savage’s father worked as a school administrator, so she moved many times throughout her childhood, mainly in Alberta, before receiving her bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She is the author of more than two dozen titles, including Prairie: A Natural History, originally published in 2004. The comprehensive book, a bestselling guide to the biology and ecology of the prairies, showcases Savage’s prowess as a nature writer.
In 2012, Savage’s A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape was awarded the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Inspired by her house in the small town of Eastend, A Geography of Blood paints a portrait of the beautiful Cypress Hills landscape in southern Saskatchewan and offers a new look at plains history and what happened to the Indigenous people of the area.
Now Savage’s Saskatoon home, and its intriguing family history, is helping her reveal the truth about the bigotry connected to the English settlement of Canada. Strangers in the House (Greystone Books) considers a time during which French speakers like Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin were discriminated against by those wielding power in an unjust environment tainted by the Orange Order, which originally formed in Ireland as an anti-Catholic organization.
“It was shockingly powerful in Canada,” Savage says.
The Ku Klux Klan also influenced the Canadian cultural landscape. The white-supremacist group flourished in the 1920s in the middle and northern parts of the U.S. before coming into Ontario and then making its way into Saskatchewan.
Savage’s book examines how animosities were culturally perpetuated and how one family struggled to survive in Saskatchewan at a time when “foreignness” was seen as a disadvantage. As she conducted her research, Savage learned Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin, who, in the 1920s, had indeed built the Saskatoon home that now belonged to Savage’s family, was not Métis but French Canadian. Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin was also Ralph Blondin’s father.
“Because of genealogy – and belonging is so important in Quebec – it’s very easy to trace these connections back to the beginning of time,” says Savage. “So it turns out that they are French Canadian, though they do have unacknowledged Métis relatives – some of whom are around the prairie.”
While the historic 1885 Métis resistance in Saskatchewan is included in Savage’s book, Strangers in the House centres on “the basis of English-Canadian society and English-Canadian dominated settlement in Western Canada,” she says. “It turned out to be a story that was very consequential in the history of our country as a whole, but that none of us know – or very few of us know.”
By using her house at a starting point, Savage builds on a technique she began to experiment with in A Geography of Blood; she situates herself in the story as a first-person narrator and character, transforming the work into a hybrid of history and memoir.
Acclaimed Western Canadian historian and author Bill Waiser read an early copy of Strangers in the House; the book made him feel as if he was getting to know the past inhabitants of Savage’s home by gathering with them and sharing stories.
“I felt [like] I’m sitting together with them at the kitchen table; you know, they’re speaking to me from the heart, baring their soul, and it’s a really gripping tale,” says Waiser, a member of the Order of Canada who served as a professor in the University of Saskatchewan’s department of history for more than 30 years. His book, A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905, won the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.
In the Saskatchewan of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “there was a really angry atmosphere” concerning immigrants in the province, Waiser notes.
“We pride ourselves in Saskatchewan today on being a multicultural society, but that’s really a post–Second World War event,” he says. “Up until the 1930s, we didn’t like diversity in this province; it didn’t define us. The blueprint for this province was English, Anglo-Canadian, and Protestant. And so what Candace talks about is another uglier side to the province’s history – when it was anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic – and that’s part of the story.”
The heavy content of Strangers in the House contrasts with the relatively lighter fare of Savage’s other new book, Hello, Crow!, which will also be released on Sept. 24 as one of the first titles on Greystone Books’s new kids’ imprint. Written by Savage and illustrated by Vancouver artist Chelsea O’Byrne, Hello, Crow! is a picture book about an outdoorsy little girl named Franny who befriends a crow, much to the disbelief of her distracted father.
Hello, Crow! is inspired by the true story of an eight-year-old girl in Seattle who fed crows in her garden and received gifts from the birds in return. The story interested Savage, a bird lover and environmental activist whose previous works include Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays (1995) and Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World (2005).
At its core, Hello, Crow! is a picture book about possibility, crafted with a reverence for nature. “The meaning of the story is it’s wonderful out there,” says Savage. “Who knows what will happen if you go outside?”
When asked about the difference between writing for children and for adults, Savage points out that she doesn’t “really think of them as being separate activities.” Ultimately, she says, a writer needs to tell a story “with enough silences” that there’s room for readers to feel and to understand in their own ways.
“If you’re telling the reader how to feel or how to think about things, then nothing really happens,” she says. “The meaning only really exists when it’s created in the mind of the reader – and I think that’s true for an adult or a child.”
Photography by Dave Stobbe
Candace
Savage
Candace Savage is the author of more than two dozen books including A Geography of Blood, which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and Prairie: a Natural History, which won the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 1994 was inducted into the Honor Roll of the Rachel Carson Institute, Chatham College, in Pittsburgh. A fiddler, chorister, and chair of the NatureCity Festival, Savage shares her time between Eastend and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Award History
2022 Winner
Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life
Selection Committee Citation
“Born in the Peace River Country of northern Alberta, Candace Savage is the author of more than 20 books that define and extol the Prairie experience. Her seminal works of nonfiction include A Harvest to Reap: A History of Prairie Women (1976), Prairie, A Natural History (2011), and Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging (2019). Her subjects range from individual studies of crows, ravens, grizzly bears, and bees to the disconnecting impact of cultural migration. Savage has been lauded for her works of nonfiction and for her children’s writing, and she was described by The Globe and Mail as ‘an essential Canadian voice.’”
2012 Winner
Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
for A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape
Jury Citation
“One day in late September of 2000, Candace Savage travels from her home in Saskatoon to Eastend, a village of 600 people on the eastern edge of the Cypress Hills. A two week vacation evolves into a decade-long fascination with the region and the writing of A Geography of Blood, a part-memoir, part history, part geological survey, part lament, part condemnation of the accepted myth of the settlement of the Western Plains, and above all, a haunting meditation on time and place.” – 2012 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (James Bartleman, Charlotte Gill, and Marni Jackson)
Juror History
2013
Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
Program History
2023 Selector
Rising Stars
Selection
Erica Violet Lee
Candace Savage
BIO
Candace Savage was born in the Peace River Country of northern Alberta and earned an Honours BA in English Literature from the University of Alberta. For the more than half a lifetime, however, she has lived and worked in Saskatchewan, with a home base in Saskatoon and a home-away-from-home in Eastend. Over the course of a long and remarkable career, she has honed her craft as a creative researcher, an exacting wordsmith and a storyteller.
Candace’s contributions to Saskatchewan literature include more than two dozen books for adults and children, including Strangers in the House: a prairie story of bigotry and belonging, A Geography of Blood: unearthing memory from a prairie landscape, and Prairie: a Natural History. She currently has two books in press, Always Beginning, a picture book that tells the story of life on Earth in 111 especially well-chosen words, and Crow Confidential, a “middle reader” for which she has received a literary arts grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. She is also the curator of This Singing Land kanikamot askiy, an online anthology of Saskatchewan writing inspired by the prairie.
A frequent finalist at the Saskatchewan Books Awards, she has twice received with the Book of the Year prize and has been recognized for her writing for both children and adults. Nationally, the excellence of her work earned her one of Canada’s largest and most prestigious literary prizes, the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. In 2022, she received both the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence and the Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life.
Candace has served as Writer- in-Residence at the Saskatoon Public Library, creative writing instructor at St. Peter’s College and sessional instructor and mentor with the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, she was also inducted into the Honor Roll of the Rachel Carson Institute, Chatham College, Pittsburgh.
In addition to her work as a writer, Candace plays accordion in the Saskatoon Fiddle Orchestra, chairs Wild about Saskatoon, serves on advisory boards for CPAWS Saskatchewan and the Meewasin Valley Authority and is a member of the National Council of The Writers Union of Canada. As a person of European heritage, she is deeply honoured to have been invited to participate in Cree and Coffee, an opportunity to learn a Cree in a culturally appropriate atmosphere.
ADDRESSCity: Saskatoon, Province/Territory: Saskatchewan
EMAILcandace.savage@sasktel.net
GENRENon-fiction, including children's literature
LANGUAGESEnglish
PUBLICATIONS
AWARDS
Name
Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life
Publication
career achievement
Year
2022
LINKS
Candace Savage - Author
PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS AND WORKSHOPS
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Candace Savage
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Candace Sherk Savage FRSC (born December 2, 1949) is a Canadian non-fiction writer.
Early life
Candace Sherk was born in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada on December 2, 1949.[1] Both of her grandmothers were born in the United States and married Canadian men. As her father was a school administrator, she moved throughout Alberta during her childhood.[2]
Career
Savage began her journalism career as a news editor of Sun Color Press and later became an editorial assistant for Co-Operative Consumer.[3] In the 1970s, Savage became a free-lance book editor with The Western Producer in Saskatoon, which piqued her interest in authoring books.[4] In the 1970s, Savage moved to Saskatoon with her husband Arthur Savage.[1] In 1977, she began to construct a biography on Nellie McClung.[5] After her husband died, Savage moved to Edmonton and Yellowknife before returning to Saskatoon with her daughter.[1] From 1984 until 1986, she was the coordinator of information and education at the Science Institute of the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.[3]
In the 1990s, she received the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award for her book "Bird Brains," and the Science in Society Book Award from the Canadian Science Writers’ Association for her book "Aurora and Bird Brains."[1] In 2002, her book "Wizards" won the 2002 Saskatchewan Book Award.[6]
In 2010, Savage was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.[7] Two years later, Savage wrote a A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape, which she called a personal memoir of her growing interest in the natural and human history of southwestern Saskatchewan. The book won the 2012 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.[8] In 2019, while renovating her 1920s-era bungalow in Saskatoon, she discovered paraphernalia belonging to Ralph Blondin. This led her to research how Blondin's family, a Métis French-speaking family, dealt with White Supremacy and assimilated to survive. She eventually published her discoveries in a book titled "Strangers in the House."[9]
In 2022, she was awarded the Matt Cohen Award by the Writers' Trust of Canada.[10]
Selected works
Our Nell (1979)
Wild Mammals of Western Canada (1981) (with Arthur Savage)
Wonder of Canadian Birds (1985)
Pelicans (1986)
Eagles of North America (1987)
Wolves (1988)
Grizzly Bears (1990)
Trash Attack! (1990)
Get Growing! (1991)
Peregrine Falcons (1992)
Eat Up! (1992)
Wild Cats (1993)
Aurora: The Mysterious Northern Lights (1994)
Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays (1995)
Cowgirls (1996)
The Nature of Wolves: An Intimate Portrait (1996)
Mother Nature: Animal Parents and their Young (1997)
Beauty Queens: A Playful History (1998)
Witch: The Wild Ride from Wicked to Wicca (2000)
Prairie: A Natural History (2004)
Curious by Nature (2005)
Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World (2005)
Bees: Nature's little wonders (2008)
A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape (2012)
Strangers in the House: a Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging (2019)
Savage, Candace HOW TO KNOW A CROW Greystone Kids (Children's None) $21.95 10, 15 ISBN: 9781771649162
A fulsome appreciation of these intelligent, social, nearly ubiquitous corvids.
Centering attention on the American crow, Savage takes a fictive female she names Oki ("Hello" in Niitsitapi) from hatchling to new mom. Along the way, she dishes out heaping helpings of research-based facts and observations about crow species and behaviors worldwide. Indignantly rejecting "murder" as a collective noun ("That's so mean!"), she maps out seasonal rounds in extended families loosely organized in larger flocks--explaining how crows play, communicate, construct nests, nurture and train their young, use and even make tools, and generally display every sign of being "alight with awareness." Poignantly, she notes that while mosquito-borne West Nile virus occasionally makes humans and other sorts of birds ill, for crows it carries a nearly 100% mortality rate. "American Crows," she writes, leading up to the close, "often lead complex lives, full of drama and intimacy"--"acaws for amazement," as she puts it elsewhere, and fledgling naturalists will agree. Hudson's close-up illustrations and spot portraits, appearing on nearly every page, ably support the claim. Human figures rarely appear but seem to show some diversity.
An absorbing study--certainly "caws" for further investigation. (author's note, glossary, resource lists, index)(Nonfiction. 10-13)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Savage, Candace: HOW TO KNOW A CROW." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865267/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5562240b. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.
Savage, Candace ALWAYS BEGINNING Greystone Kids (Children's None) $18.95 4, 23 ISBN: 9781771648431
A history of the universe, told multiple ways.
In Wada's dramatically lit illustrations, an awed child of indeterminate ancestry holds a small, sparkling ball that bursts into starry, spread-filling swirls. The view then narrows from galaxies to a certain small planet's violent beginnings. In time, early life appears, explodes into extravagant spiral rivers of more developed forms, and gives way at last to a final close-up of stars in the dazzled child's eyes. Savage accompanies these images in swirling lines of equally lyrical commentary that focus less on specifics than the continuing and continual "strangeness & wonder" of it all, with "everything / everything / always beginning." Then she retells the tale twice--once in an illustrated timeline with matter-of-fact annotations that begins with the Big Bang and ends with the appearance of modern humans about 300,000 years ago, and again in a straight prose account that connects the entire story to readers: "Everything that has happened," she writes, "has led to YOU. The story of the universe is your story." Despite the different emphases, the parts don't really make up a whole; rather than build toward something, the sections seem largely repetitive. Still, some children may be carried away by the imaginative flight, and others will enjoy the info dump or the ego bolstering.
The parts are better than the whole, but the work deserves points for ambition. (Informational picture book. 6-9)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Savage, Candace: ALWAYS BEGINNING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788097121/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9eea9a29. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.
Always Beginning: The Big Bang, the Universe, and You
Candace Savage, illus. by Rachel Wada. Greystone, $18.95 (44p) ISBN 978-1-77164-843-1
With alliterative poetic sentiments that curve across the pages, Savage offers a brief history of the universe rhat emphasizes interconnection. From an initial seed ("Crick, crack, the shell split,/ the seed shattered: strangeness & wonder burst forth"), stars, galaxies, and planets emerge. Water arrives on Earth from "icy messengers," and "plantesimals spiced the briny soup, soon simmering with life!" As evolution takes place ("Life, sluggish/ & slimy" to "life, gnashing & gnarled" and beyond), slow change leads to the image of a starry-eyed human youth. Dreamy artwotk has the feel of black velvet paintings from the 1970s and seems to glow against textured backdrops of splotchy nightscapes. Sea creatures, dragonflies, dinosaurs, and animal-skin-clad hominids that populate the swirling surrealist scenes rely on traditional tropes of early life, while a connecting end note moves with the conclusion: "Everything that has happened, from the Big Bang to this very moment, has led to YOU. The story of the universe is your story." A timeline concludes. Ages 4-8. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Always Beginning: The Big Bang, the Universe, and You." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 7, 19 Feb. 2024, p. 58. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A785161758/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a2aabdcb. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.
Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging
Candace Savage. Greystone, $26.95 (248p) ISBN 978-1-77164-204-0
Nature writer Savage (A Geography of Blood: U nearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape) blends memoir, reportage, and history in this entertaining profile of the old house "with a view... of downtown Saskatoon" that she acquired in 1990. A deed search establishes her as the eighth owner of the home built in 1928 by Napoleon Blondin; a kitchen renovation reveals "bits of flotsam" abandoned by the Blondin family. When a pair of 21sr-century Blondin sisters emerges during her research, the author meets the family, including Napoleon's son Chuck, who greets Savage "like a long-lost cousin" and provides much of the family history the book recounts. Savage narrates how the introduction of rail travel in Canada in the late 1800s drew 400,000 Quebecois west with the promise of a better life, and charts the tension between the Protestant Orange Order and Catholic French speakers that brought in the KKK, who burned crosses on Catholics' lawns. Despite the anti-Catholic sentiment, Napoleon's fortunes rose in the early 20th century, but following crop failure caused by a severe drought in 1919, he was forced to move his family farther west. The book's charm lies in its first-person narrative, which poignantly conjures the Blondin family's challenges along with the author's reactions to historical events. Owners of older homes will appreciate the curiosity that spurred the author to embark on this project. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 29, 22 July 2019, p. 199. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A595252259/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=14a82ab3. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.