l soon be available worldwide in e-book format through Signature Editions. Stay tuned for details in next few weeks.
Jane Harris (Harris-Zsovan) has won a 2016 Alberta Literary Award. She received the James H. Gray Award for short non-fiction at the Alberta Literary Awards Gala June 4th in Calgary, Alberta. Jane’s essay, “The Unheard Patient,” published in Alberta Views November 2015 issue was also short-listed for a 2016 Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Showcase Award (essay category.)
Jane is also the author of Finding Home in the Promised Land, a personal history of homelessness and social exile (J. Gordon Shillingford, 2015) and Eugenics and the Firewall (J. Gordon Shillingford, 2010).
Here’s the news release: https://lnkd.in/bNa2kz2
Jane will be sharing insights and reading from Finding Home in the Promised Land, a personal history of homelessness at the Lethbridge Public Library, May 13, 2016 at 7:00 pm.
Jane Harris, author of Finding Home in the Promised Land, a personal history of homelessness and social exile (J. Gordon Shillingford, 2015) will be facilitating a one day workshop, “Is My Writing Good Enough?” at CASA Lethbridge, June 12, 2016. Registrations are now open: http://www.casalethbridge.ca/classes-registration/1058
Jane Harris, Alberta author, journalist, writing instructor and presenter, seems like an unlikely candidate for homelessness, but she’s twice come very close to being in that situation.
In Finding Home in the Promised Land, she explains how she became what she terms a social exile and examines how Canada has developed a poverty industry to deal with people in similar circumstances. She uses her personal experiences and research to fuel the argument that Canadians need to rethink how we help.
Harris’s most recent brush with poverty and homelessness was triggered by a violent physical attack. Her husband, who was addicted to prescription drugs, suddenly attacked her in their Lethbridge home. The attacks went on throughout the afternoon before Harris realized that she had to escape or she would die. While her cuts and bruises eventually healed, the long-lasting effects of the brain injury that she sustained are what left her barely able to cope with daily living. She was forced to sell the family home, pay outstanding bills and then try to find a decent place to live with no secure income and no guarantee of being able to resume her career as a writer and teacher.
She got a job as a product demonstrator, but her inability to function mentally left her barely capable of working. “I should not be working in a mall. I panic when anyone walks up behind me. I turn white with horror when I hear loud noises in the warehouse. I slur my words four hours into my shift.”
Harris said the only thing that stopped her from jumping off a bridge was her writing. She uses excerpts taken from notes she made at the time throughout the book to help illustrate her journey back from despair. These glimpses into her life at its lowest point add a personal touch to the
he was forced to sell the family home, pay outstanding bills and then try to find a decent place more factual information she includes about Canada’s poor, and make the book more accessible.
She proudly recounts the fighting spirit shown by her Scottish ancestors, especially her great-great-grandmother Barbara Gilchrist, who came to the Garafraxa district in Upper Canada with her family in 1849 in search of a better life. She details the establishment in 1877 of the first poorhouse, the Wellington County House of Refuge and Industry, located between Elora and Fergus, Ont. While Barbara was widowed with young children, she quickly remarried and managed to keep her children out of the poorhouse.
These early Canadian settlers — at least the young, healthy men — could head west to work toward a brighter future. “Our vast frontier fuelled our belief that hard work could pull the unlucky out of their bondage to poverty.”
These would-be settlers were encouraged to make their way in the promised land, but Harris shows that some couldn’t realize their dreams of success and were forced to accept charity from the few agencies operating in the late 1800s.
She contends the old belief still exists that only people who are lazy and morally lax find themselves at the bottom of Canada’s social ladder. This misconception is at the heart of the way our current society deals with the less fortunate. Harris details how agencies such as food banks, social services and women’s and homeless shelters degrade clients by trapping them in situations where they become increasingly dependent on help and handouts to stay alive.
Rather than encouraging people to become more self-reliant, Harris maintains many “poverty industry professionals” instead actively work to keep their clients coming back for services.
She recounts how she managed to draw on her skills as a writer and on her inner strength to extricate herself from what she sees as the quicksand of social assistance, but knows that others can’t easily follow her.
While some of the information Harris provides about Canada’s social assistance programs is a bit academic, her own experiences help to add interest to the material she covers.
Andrea Geary is a reporter with Canstar Community News.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 26, 2015 D23
I read Finding Home in the Promised Land on the plane today. Bravo! It’s a great weaving of history, memoir and cultural analysis. Thank you for so much food for thought! Barb Howard, Author Western Taxidermy, Notes for Monday,The Dewpoint Show, Whipstock . Calgary, AB, Canada
“Jane’s memoir is more than her own story — she has an important statement to make on the value of a civilized society….Along the way,you will admire her courage and her upbeat style.” Goodreads Review Excerpt, Gordon Tolton, Author, Healy’s West, The Cowboy Cavalry, Prairie Warships, Rocky Mountain Rangers, Coaldale, Alberta, Canada.
Finished reading your book, Jane– a courageous report of the journey from anonymity to triumph. A great deal for me to think about and reconsider. I loved the link between ancestral past and renewed determination. The courage and internal resources you discovered in yourself and the idea to write a book out of such experience is inspiring. There are still stories within the story for the reader to guess and think about further. You and your book deserve deep attention. — Ruth Hart Budd, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.
Learning a lot from your book. As well as enjoying it, I really like your blend of history and personal journey. I hope you will not mind my saying that your writing style has matured a good deal, over the years. Denyse O’Leary, Journalist, Author, The Spiritual Brain, Faith@Science, By Design or Chance, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Finding Home in the Promised Land provided authentic insight into poverty and homelessness. The author has woven her own story with the story of her ancestors and the historical context of how the poor have become social exiles in Canada. Jane Harris has done an excellent job researching this book. I hope it will challenge those who read it to reconsider the assumptions we have made in providing solutions to a social issue that shamefully continues in our country. Jan Hardstaff, Edmonton.
I just thought the book was fantastic. Thank you. Jan H., Edmonton, Alberta Canada.
It’s out! Finding Home in the Promised Land a personal history of homelesssness and social exile is now in print and heading to bookstores. I will be at the Whistler Writers’ Festival, October 16-18th. More Tour and launch news to follow soon!
SEPTEMBER RELEASE UPDATE: Finding Home in the Promised Land: A Personal History of Homelessness and Social Exile is the fruit of Jane Harris’s journey through the wilderness of social exile after a violent crime left her injured and tumbling down the social ladder toward homelessness –for the second time in her life—in 2013. Her Scottish great-great grandmother Barbara`s portrait opens the door into pre-Confederation Canada. Her own story lights our journey through 21st Century Canada.
She asks why Canadians fell into accepting diminished dreams, and ignoring the obvious—that trauma and poverty are inextricably linked, and it is social exiles who fall through the cracks. She asks why Canada, a nation of exiles driven to create their own Promised Land came to accept first poor houses; then soup kitchens, food banks, shelters, and silent suffering class of working poor? Why did charity, another word for love, become cold bureaucracy? She uncovers that sad truth, that the taxes and charitable gifts the prosperous among us pay as tolls to avoid looking at the poor, fix nothing. Instead, they fund a poverty industry that keeps the dispossessed in an exile thornier than any back bush squatter’s camp. But she also uncovers a path out of the bureaucratic wilderness that could eliminate social exile in Canada.
Jane Harris turns complex research into engaging scenes and easily understood messages.Finding Home in the Promised Land is her second book to be published by J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing. The first Eugenics and the Firewall: Canada’s Nasty Little Secret was published in 2010.
Jane has also contributed to two Canadian anthologies. Her articles about business, personal finance, history, faith, politics and social issues have appeared in more than a dozen publications including the Winnipeg Free Press, Canadian Capital, The National Post, Alberta Views, Alberta Venture, Lethbridge Herald, and The Anglican Planet.
She is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.
Update: Finding Home in the Promised Land, a personal history of homelessness and exile (J.Gordon Shillingford Publishing) will be in bookstores by September 2015.
Jane’s third book, Finding Home in the Promised Land, a personal history of homelessness and social exile in Canada, will be published by J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing in 2015. Updates to come.
Jane Harris, Author 