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
