Program Schedule

Opening remarks

Host: Sheena Rossiter, journalist, producer and professor, MacEwan University

Deric Olsen, Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts & Communications, MacEwan University

Anthony Goertz, Lindisfarne Productions

Screening of Myrna Kostash: Here

In Conversation with Myrna Kostash

Reflecting on five decades of writing, memory, place and community.

50 Years of AOBC: The Book and the Community

Moderator: Larysa Hayduk

George Melnyk 

Jars Balan

Peter Melnycky

How do you account for AOBC’s durability as a text that has never gone out of print and keeps on finding new readers?

At the time, Two Hills and its countryside of family farms was located in the heart of the Ukrainian bloc settlement in east central Alberta, but shared a history with earlier settlements such as the Victoria Mission and Metis Crossing.

The bloc came to be celebrated as Kalyna Country. Why “Kalyna”? Fifty years later, what remains of its Ukrainian heritage even in Two Hills?

Myrna Kostash’s Literary Legacy

Moderator: Natalia Khanenko-Friesen 

Mariya Shymchyshyn: "The Return of Baba: (Grand)Children, Ghosts, and the Work of Memory."

Olha Poliukhovych and Jeffrey Stepnisky: "Bringing Ghosts to Life: Sociological and Literary Perspectives from Canada and Ukraine"

Lindy Ledohowsky: "Myrna and Me: I Think I’ve Read Everything You’ve Written"

Four scholars discuss the impact of five decades of Kostash’s production of magazine articles, books and essays and their contribution to the genre of literary nonfiction. 

Alternative Ukrainian-Canadian Ethnicity

Moderator: Larisa Sembaliuk Cheladyn

Chrystia Chomiak

Kalyna Somchynsky

In the 1980s in Edmonton, the Ukrainian Canadian cultural circle, Hromada, in which Kostash became active, advanced socially progressive projects such as The Second Wreath conference in Edmonton, and organized a socialist, feminist and Ukrainian housing co-op, Hromada. 

Initially, Ukrainian settlers’ group identity remained largely unintelligible to outsiders, but by the next generation (“Baba’s Children”) their stories were entering “public memory” especially in response to official multiculturalism. But there have been gaps in the narratives, in museums, monuments, festivities and archives, and these are being challenged. 

Two poets with roots in Alberta, one Métis and one of Anglo-Ukrainian heritage, “speak” through poems about Settler-Indigenous relations and the question: "Must Truth come first?"