Luanne Armstrong MFA, Ph.D
winner of the Stegnerhouse Grant for the Arts 2010.

Luanne spent the month of October at the Stegner House.
On the evening of October 22nd, Luanne gave a well attended and much enjoyed reading at the Eastend United Church.
Luanne is an engaging speaker with whom her audience felt immediately comfortable. She gave us an outline of her life's journey from her childhood on a farm to her present work as an adjunct professor of Creative Writing for the University of British Columbia. She is still based, thanks to the IT age, on the same family farm.
Luanne read to us from her recent autobiography, Blue Valley, An Ecological Memoir. This book is an evocative homage to the place around which her life has centred. She read of the joys and sorrows of life on a small mixed farm in one of Canada's most temperature growing regions, breath-taking geography, endless work and bountiful food but never enough money.
This book most eloquently describes the lifelong attachment the natural world can make in the fertile ground of a child's mind and body; the special places of refuge and comfort a child seeks in the land she knows so intimately. The reading brought home to us all the wonder of this phenomenon with which most of us had grown up but which fewer and fewer of today's children will know. We were reminded of our own childhood geography and a sense of pleasure that Luanne has kept hers in her life. MT