Media Release

Media Advisory

November 2, 2015

The Lethbridge launch of Jane Harris’s memoir, Finding Home in the Promised Land, a personal history of homelessness and social exile is this Saturday, November 7, 2015, at Chapter’s 701 - 1st Avenue South, Lethbridge.

Finding Home in the Promised Land is the fruit of Jane Harris’s journey through the wilderness of social exile after a violent crime left her injured and tumbling down the social ladder toward homelessness—for the second time in her life—in 2013. Her Scottish great-great grandmother Barbara`s portrait opens the door into pre-Confederation Canada. Her own story lights our journey through 21st Century Canada.

She asks why Canadians fell into accepting diminished dreams, and ignoring the obvious—that trauma and poverty are inextricably linked, and it is social exiles who fall through the cracks. She asks why Canada, a nation of exiles driven to create their own Promised Land came to accept
first poor houses; then soup kitchens, food banks, shelters, and a silent suffering class of working poor? Why did charity, another word for love, become cold bureaucracy? She uncovers that sad truth, that the taxes and charitable gifts the prosperous among us pay as tolls to avoid looking at the poor, fix nothing. Instead, they fund a poverty industry that keeps the dispossessed in an exile thornier than any back bush squatter’s camp. But she also uncovers a path out of the bureaucratic wilderness that could eliminate social exile in Canada.

“On a personal level I had to retrace my own path into social exile. I had to come to terms with my own suffering, but I also had to know why 21st Century Canada traps some of us in poverty. I had to know how the place my own hard-working ancestors thought would be their children’s children’s Promised Land, became just another place of hungry exile to hundreds of thousands of its children.”

Jane Harris turns complex research into engaging scenes and easily understood messages.

Finding Home in the Promised Land is her second book to be published by J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing. The first, Eugenics and the Firewall: Canada’s Nasty Little Secret, was published in 2010.

Jane has also contributed to two Canadian anthologies. Her articles about business, personal finance, history, faith, politics and social issues have appeared in more than a dozen publications including the Winnipeg Free Press, Canadian Capital, The National Post, Alberta Views, Alberta Venture, Lethbridge Herald, and The Anglican Planet.

Media Contact:

Jane Harris

Phone: 403 381-3390

Email: jhz27@telus.net