Creator Profile:
Miriam Körner
Home Location: Air Ronge, Saskatchewan
Website: miriamkoerner.blogspot.com
Available for in-person visits: Saskatoon region and Prince Albert region
Craft: Author/Illustrator
Genre: Picture Books, Middle Grade, Young Adult
Target Audience: Kindergarten to Grade 12
Cost for School and Public Presentation: $250.00, plus applicable taxes
Biography
Miriam Körner is an award-winning writer and illustrator, whose work expresses her love and concern for the natural world. She lives with her husband and their seven sled dogs in a small cabin in northern Saskatchewan’s quickly vanishing old-growth forest. Her children's book Fox and Bear, recently a finalist for the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, is a modern fable that asks existential questions for readers of all ages.
Presentation Information:
Reading and Illustration Workshop: Fox and Bear (Grades 1-4)
This workshop will encourage young children to create art with reused and recycled materials. After a short reading, I will present a behind-the-scenes look of the creation of the illustrations in Fox and Bear which were created with reused cardboard, assembled in dioramas and photographed.
Children will each create their own cardboard animal or tree, colour it and assemble it in a cardboard box together with their classmate’s creations.
Materials needed: Cardboard from i.e. cereal boxes, child-safe scissors, pencils, crayons, glue.
Time required: 15 minutes reading/presentation. 40 to 45 minutes hands-on-creation.
Reading/Presentation: Yellow Dog or Qaqavii (depending on age group; Grades 4-12)
This presentation will start with a short reading of either novel and is followed by a ‘fact & fiction’ presentation. Both novels’ main characters feel they don’t quite fit into society, but things change quickly when they have the chance to train their own dog team under the guidance of a Cree Elder (Yellow Dog) and a young Inuk and his grandparents (Qaqavii).
The reading is followed by a PowerPoint presentation of my own dog team-powered adventures in northern Saskatchewan as well as along the coast of Hudson Bay between Churchill, Manitoba and Arviat, Nunavut. I will show images of the dog sledding culture past and present, what let me to the writing of the story and how being emersed in an Indigenous culture changed my characters’ and my view of the world.
Time required: 50-60 minutes.
Book List
Seagull Island (YNWP, 2023)
Fox and Bear (Red Deer Press, 2022)
Qaqavii (Red Deer Press, 2019)
When we had Sled Dogs (YNWP, 2019)
Yellow Dog (Red Deer Press, 2016)
When the Trees Crackle with Cold (YNWP, 2016)
Li’l Shadd: A Story of Ujima (2015)