EAST SHORE AUTHOR ALANDA GREENE’S DEBUT NOVEL TO BE LAUNCHED AT NELSON’S OXYGEN ART CENTRE, NOV. 9, 7:30 PM

From the mountains of Kootenay Lake’s East Shore in the 21st Century to the prairies east of the Rockies in the mid-1800s may seem a huge distance. But Kootenay Bay author Alanda Greene ably transports readers through space and time in her debut novel Napi’s Dance, to be launched at Nelson’s Oxygen Art Centre, 320 Vernon St. (alley entrance), on Friday, Nov. 9 at 7:30 p.m.

The event, part of Oxygen Art Centre’s Presentation Series of readings and talks, is free and open to the public.

Greene’s novel, published by Toronto’s Second Story Press, describes in part how a group of women in a Blackfoot band cope with the practical and spiritual devastation that white incursion brings to the nomadic inhabitants of southern Alberta’s plains. The life of the young daughter of settlers a generation later provides added perspective to the tale.

Greene, a second-generation southern Albertan, taught school for 24 years on the East Shore, and has published widely on middle school educational issues. For several years she managed the bookstore at the Yasodhara Ashram at Kootenay Bay.
Also reading with Greene at the Nov. 9 launch of Napi’s Dance will be Nelson author Eileen Pearkes, whose books include The Geography of Memory, a history of the West Kootenay’s Sinixt or Lakes Indians, and The Glass Seed, a memoir about her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.