Read 'A Tale for the Time Being' by Ruth Ozeki and then participate in a tour of the Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery's (JNAAG) 'Many Lives Mark This Place' exhibit featuring artist John Hartman.
Pick up a copy of A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki at Sarnia Library; copies will be available beginning April 14, 2023 at Sarnia Library. A book discussion will be held at Sarnia Library at 2:00PM on Thursday, May 18th and then will move to the Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery (JNAAG) for a tour of the Many Lives Mark This Place exhibition.
A Tale for the Time Being
Told in four parts, A Tale for the Time Being goes back and forth between the stories of two protagonists: sixteen-year-old Nao, writing about her life in the early 2000s, and Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island off the coast of BC. Ruth finds Nao’s diary washed up on the beach shortly after the 2011 tsunami in Japan. As the mystery of the diary’s contents unfolds, Ruth becomes increasingly fixated on tracking down Nao and her family, and the two writers’ stories begin to come together in surprising ways. Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is an inventive and beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
Many Lives Mark This Place - April 14 – September 9, 2023
In 2014, Ontario-based painter and printmaker John Hartman (b. 1950) embarked on a project to capture the intimate relationship between more than thirty leading Canadian authors and the places that inspire them. Hartman’s diverse roster of subjects included writers Esi Edugyan, Ruth Ozeki, M.G. Vassanji, Thomas King, Lisa Moore, Neil Bissoondath, Susan Swan and David Macfarlane. The result was a body of large-format portrait paintings that celebrate the richness of Canada’s literary fabric.
Many Lives Mark this Place will feature a selection of large-scale paintings from Hartman’s portraits series. Through powerfully uniting the parallel fields of literature and visual art, Hartman underscores our collective desire to take inspiration and celebrate Canada from coast to coast. The portraits speak to the power of the imagination in experiencing – physically, emotionally and philosophically – the diverse landscapes of our country and the stories that they hold.
