Do you participate in the Canmore Museum Stories of Canmore Book Club? Do you want to learn more about the themes highlighted in the monthly books? Do you need a way to spend more time with your Canmore Book Club friends? If so, please join us for our Stories of Canmore: Topic Deep Dives where guest speakers will add different perspectives to the themes brought up in our monthly book choice.
In May the Canmore Museum is reading Open Heart, Open Mind by Canmore-based six-time Olympic medalist Clara Hughes. To continue our focus on community mental health and wellbeing, we will deep dive into the topic of mental health and the complicated ways it is tied to sports and families in both positive and negative ways. Angie Abdou, author of many books including Home Ice: Tales of a Reluctant Hockey Mom, as well as her new book This One Wild Life: A Mother Daughter Wilderness Memoir will talk about her own experiences with the emotional ups and downs of engaging in competitive sports. As a varsity athlete herself, and a hockey mom, Angie will draw on personal experience to lead this exploration.
Angie Abdou has written six books and co-edited Writing the Body in Motion, a collection of essays on Canadian Sport Literature. A starred-review in New York’s Booklist declared her best-selling memoir, Home Ice: Reflections of a Reluctant Hockey Mom, “a first rate memoir and a fine example of narrative nonfiction.” Angie Abdou is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Athabasca University. This One Wild Life: A Mother-Daughter Memoir is now available in bookstores and online.
Home Ice: Tales of a Reluctant Hockey Mom
Over 570,000 people are registered in Hockey Canada and over 600,000 in Hockey USA. It’s a national obsession. But what does that really mean when your child wants to play on a team? As a former varsity athlete and university instructor teaching sport literature, novelist Angie Abdou is no stranger to sport obsession, but she finds herself conflicted when faced with the reality of the struggles, joys, and strains of having a child in amateur hockey. In Home Ice, with equal parts humour and anguish, Abdou charts a full season of life as an Atom-level hockey mom, from summer hockey camp to the end-of-season tournament. Her revealing stories and careful research on issues such as cost, gender bias, concussion, and family pressures offer a compellingly honest and complex insider’s view of parenting today’s young athlete in a competitive and high-pressure culture.
This One Wild Life: A Mother Daughter Wilderness Memoir
Disillusioned with overly competitive organized sports and concerned about her lively daughter’s growing shyness, author Angie Abdou sets herself a challenge: to hike a peak a week over the summer holidays with Katie. They will bond in nature and discover the glories of outdoor activity. What could go wrong? Well, among other things, it turns out that Angie loves hiking but Katie doesn’t.
Hilarious, poignant, and deeply felt, This One Wild Life explores parenting and marriage in a summer of unexpected outcomes and growth for both mother and daughter.