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Heartland

© Paula E. Kirman

The Prairies are a mosaic of people, places, fun activities, and work. Writer Jo Bannatyne-Cugnet and visual artist Yvette Moore have teamed up to celebrate a land and its people in Heartland: A Prairie Sampler (Tundra Books).

A picture book for all ages, A Prairie Sampler describes the beauty and power of the Prairie land, and the strong, hardworking people who live there. Moore's breathtaking illustrations complement Bannatyne-Cugnet's descriptive prose, as she writes about hay-bale jumping, one-ton grain trucks, curling, games, and the joys of extreme weather changes.

"I was trying to establish things about the people who come to the Prairies and choose it as their home and remain here. What is it about us? What is it we like? What are the things that we identity with, or are part of our being?" says Bannatyne-Cugnet, who was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan but moved to a farm outside of Weyburn after marrying her farmer husband.

Bannatyne-Cugnet and Moore have a long history of working together. Their first work, A Prairie Alphabet, was a huge success, winning the Mr. Christie Award for Illustration and being shortlisted for numerous other awards.

"I was familiar with Yvette's work because she grew up 20 miles away from where I lived and I had seen her work on display in the library when I went there with my children," says Bannatyne-Cugnet, the mother of four grown sons.

Moore's artwork that appears in Prairie Sampler is a mix of original work and images from her archives. "There are about 17 new images; the other ones already existed. I picked out pictures that I liked, that I wanted to use," Bannatyne-Cugnet says.

A Prairie Sampler is the third in what Bannatyne-Cugnet calls a 'Prairie series," which began with A Prairie Alphabet in the early '90s and continued with A Prairie Year. What got her started writing about the Prairies, was to fill a need caused by a lack of appropriate books for her children. "I discovered I couldn't answer my children's questions as to what that piece of machinery was in the yard. I didn't know wheat from oats; I wasn't familiar with anything. I was frustrated by that, because I grew up in Saskatchewan and had 17 years of formal education by that point and I was appalled by my ignorance," she says.

"I went looking for books I could share with the boys about the farm, and looked high and low and could not find anything that was contemporary."

The copyright of the article Heartland in Canadian Literature is owned by Paula E. Kirman. Permission to republish Heartland in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.