St. John's Storytelling Festival: Elder Alex Saunders
Date: Oct 16
7:00 pm
- 8:00 pm
Where: Theatre
Storytelling Festival
Join us for an engaging storytelling session with Inuit Elder Alex Saunders, whose captivating storytelling is rooted in Inuit, Innu, and Labrador traditions. A Q&A will follow.
Tickets: $12 ( plus HST). Free for Rooms Members. Get your tickets online or by calling (709 )757-8090.
About the Speaker:
Alex Saunders, born in the original hamlet of Davis Inlet in 1940, is an Inuit Elder of mixed ancestry, with Innu and British Heritage. Though naturally gifted in storytelling, Alex only recently embraced his passion for writing. His work is dedicated to preserving the stories, traditions, and culture of the Inuit, while also offering insight into the adventurous spirit of Labrador’s Indigenous communities.
Alex was awarded the Lawrence Jackson Writers Award in 2017 for History of My Fishing Life. In 2016, he received the Northern Public Affairs Emerging Writers Award, and in 2020, he won the Percy Janes First Novel Award.
Events & Programs
Two very significant, early European paintings depicting Newfoundland are coming to The Rooms in early November for an extended exhibition. These works by the Dutch artist Gerard van Edema may be the earliest European paintings of Newfoundland (if not of North America). It is thought that he may have visited the island in the late 1600s to travel and sketch along the “English Shore” between Bonavista and Trepassey.
Who was Edema? How and why did he come to Newfoundland? What do we know about these works and why they were created?
Rooms Curator Mireille Eagan moderates a conversation about these paintings with Heidi Sobol, Senior Conservator of Paintings at the Royal Ontario Museum, and Mark Ferguson, Collections Program Supervisor at The Rooms.
Tickets: $12 plus HST. Free for Rooms members. Get your tickets online or by calling 709-757-8090.