The last time that award-winning Canadian writer Candace Savage read in Humboldt, she was sharing from a pair of manuscripts. Those two works in progress were on full display at St. Peter’s College during her return reading on October 1. The reading was sponsored by the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. 

Savage acknowledged that the crowd of university students and literature lovers may have come for her reading and discussion on her latest non-fiction work, but she opened with her illustrated children’s book. Hello, Crow is a whimsical look at the unusual relationship between a young girl and a very responsive corvid. Savage told the audience that while the characters were fictional, there was a basis in truth for the tale. 

“There is a little girl who must be about twelve-years-old now who lived in Seattle. With her mother, she fed crows and fed crows in their back yard. And after a while, the crows started to bring things and leave them. They brought a yellow button, a red bead, and part of a locket with the word best. And it was her interpretation that the crow really loved her.”

Savage spoke about the give and take relationship with her editor who attempted to negotiate fewer words in the book. Savage also experienced the delight of seeing her writing embellished with the artwork of illustrator Chelsea O’Byrne. 

The balance of the reading focussed on Savage’s historical treatment of her home renovation in Strangers in the House. During the initial stages of the teardown, Savage and her partner discovered a variety of artifacts chronicling the house’s previous owners, most notably Napoleon Blondin. 

Savage is a meticulous researcher, and as she began to sift through the story, it unravelled connections to the history of Metis culture, the establishment of Francophone communities in the province, and the unrelenting bigotry that pursued some 20th-century immigrants. She takes into account the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in various regions of the province and the ultra-conservative values that those days wrought. It even explained the impact on the Blondin family, who originally settled in the Harris area, and the family’s choice to forsake their heritage and language.

All of these discoveries emanated from the Saskatoon home that Savage has lived in for decades. She speculated, “I started to wonder if this house was some kind of magic portal into the history of Western Canada. One of the big questions that seems to have been repeating in my work as a writer is ‘what does it mean to have been born and to live in western Canada?’ Our history has been very, very strange. It’s a place where there have been displacements and influxes. It’s an odd, odd history.”

From the most finite starting points to sweeping surveys of plains ecology, history, and society, it’s that combination of curiosity and vision that drive’s savages work as either a children’s author or a social historian.