Sue Farrell Holler has spent most of her writing life asking other people questions. On the morning of October 24, she is going to turn the interrogation around on herself, and on her audience, in a room at the Grande Prairie Public Library. The event is called, with disarming directness, "Can I Make You Laugh?" It runs from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. at 101, 9839 103 Avenue, and admission is free.
The premise is unusual for a library author talk. Holler is not launching a finished book. She is field-testing an early draft of a memoir she believes is funny, and she wants a live audience to tell her, by laughing or not laughing, whether she is right. Along the way she will talk about writing memoir through what the event listing calls the subtle art of exaggeration, and about why, in her view, memoir has no rules.
That last claim is worth pausing on, because Holler is not a writer who stumbled into the form. She is a journalist by training and trade, and journalism is a discipline built almost entirely on rules. Her career included work as a reporter and editor in Hay River, Northwest Territories, and later as a public affairs officer in Yellowknife. Hay River's weekly paper, The Hub, has been publishing since 1973, and a young reporter arriving in a small northern town would have been handed a beat, a notebook, and very little else.
From there she moved into corporate communications and public relations work in Alberta, but the writing habit stuck. She became a freelance journalist and a regular columnist for Sun Media's Daily Herald-Tribune in Grande Prairie, where her weekly column "Family Matters" ran for years, covering the joys and challenges of family life. A 2010 column of hers, "The Most Perfect Gift," about a ceramic ornament pulled from a "Memory Tree," is still posted on her website, a small artifact of the kind of personal, observational writing that eventually leads a columnist toward memoir.
Her route to books, though, started much earlier and in a much stranger place. As a Grade 4 student she was given an assignment that went badly wrong: she ended up mailing her homework to her great-grandfather. The mistake had an unexpected afterlife. It set her on a path of writing every day and collecting more than 100 penpals across North America, a childhood habit of letters that she has said left her still thrilled to see her name on an envelope. Born on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and educated at the University of King's College, she eventually settled in northern Alberta.
Her published work for young readers spans picture books to young adult fiction. Her middle-grade novel "Lacey and the African Grandmothers" is set on a First Nation reserve. Her YA novel "Cold White Sun," about a child refugee who flees Ethiopia and arrives in Calgary confused, frightened and alone, was a 2019 finalist for a Governor General's Award for literature for young people, and Kirkus Reviews called it an "emotionally gripping work of fiction... A profound, heartbreaking narrative filled with loss, confusion, displacement, and longing." Her picture books "Raven, Rabbit, Deer" and its companion "Finding Moose," both illustrated by Jennifer Faria and published by Pajama Press, follow a boy and his grandfather through the woods and introduce vocabulary in the First Nations language of Ojibwemowin. She has been a member of the Writers' Guild of Alberta, past president of the Grande Prairie Children's Literature Roundtable, and a former director of the Young Alberta Book Society.
Through it all she has kept returning to a single idea: that stories are how people connect, and that we have an obligation both to tell our own and to listen to other people's. It is a conviction that makes an event like this one more than a lark. Asking a room full of strangers to laugh in the right places is, in its way, a test of whether the connection she believes in actually holds.
The session is supported financially by the Canada Council for the Arts through the Writers' Union of Canada, whose National Public Reading Program funds author appearances across the country and provides an honorarium for the writer's time. The Grande Prairie Public Library is handling hosting, registration and publicity. Pre-registration is preferred, the library notes, so that staff can offer attendees a chair, though the event is free and drop-in friendly. There will also be door prize draws, with entries going to people who bring friends or who laugh in the right places, a gentle incentive structure that doubles as a crude audience-response experiment.
For anyone who has followed Holler's column or her books, the appeal is the chance to see a finished writer working unfinished. For anyone who has not, it is a free hour in a library listening to a Cape Breton-born, Hay River-trained reporter try to figure out whether the funniest year of her life actually reads as funny on the page. She will find out in real time, in front of witnesses, which is roughly the situation she was in when she first arrived North of 60.