This year, we celebrate Canada 150 with Markham’s largest and most vibrant Canada Day celebration yet! Each year, this signature event draws over 25,000 attendees from Markham, the Greater Toronto Area and across Southern Ontario.

From the Citizenship Ceremony, to the sold out Seniors Luncheon, People’s Parade and celebrations at Milne Dam, this is an event you won’t want to miss.

Today, Mayor Frank Scarpitti and the City of Markham’s Canada Day Co-Chairs, Councillor Alex Chiu and Councillor Amanda Collucci, announced the winner of Star Search Markham and the outstanding entertainment that you can expect at Markham’s Milne Dam celebrations on July 1.

This Canadian children’s music duo is a three-time JUNO nominated and three-time INDIES Children’s Group of the Year award winner. Splash’N Boots started out as a class project at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Since then, the group has released nine albums, three DVDs and has traveled across the world performing. Nick Adams (Splash) and Taes Leavitt (Boots) from Treehouse TV will have families singing and dancing the afternoon away.

Continue reading “Markham Brings Exciting Entertainment Lineup to Canada Day Celebrations”

Hylke Speerstra has never been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize or the Man Booker. He writes in a minority language understood by about half a million people and read by only a fraction of that small number. But that does not mean his books don’t deserve your interest or attention. Hylke Speerstra is ‘world famous’ in Friesland (a province of the Netherlands) after all. He writes with conviction and emotion about the proud people of that tiny patch of northwestern Europe where they speak their own beautifully expressive language and hang on to their historic traditions.

Like all marginalized rural regions of Europe, Friesland has seen its fair share of migrants leave in search of a better life elsewhere. In 2005 Speerstra’s collection of oral history emigrant memoirs was published in English translation as Cruel Paradise. Now, twelve years later, Mokeham Publishing is proud to announce the release of The Comfort Bird, Speerstra’s second book to be translated from Frisian into English – by Prof. Henry Baron of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The Comfort Bird follows the experiences of three generations of two families of farm laborers from a small town in Friesland. One family moves across the ocean and passes through Ellis Island in 1911 to seek their fortune on the American Prairies. Despite depression and dust bowl, with the perseverance typical of the migrant farmer they build a life for themselves in the USA. The way back to Europe for one of the family members goes through Utah Beach on D-Day as an enlisted soldier in the American Army.

The second family is too much rooted in the heavy soil of the old country to emigrate. They keep their head above water by performing seasonal work in Germany. Rebellious and always searching for social justice, they make decisions which will put them on the wrong side of history.  In a strange twist of fate World War II brings the families together again, on opposing sides of the conflict.

The Comfort Bird is based in fact and Speerstra, who lists John Steinbeck and Truman Capote as great examples, traveled extensively in the USA, Germany and the Netherlands to research original sources and interview descendants. Continue reading “Frisian author Hylke Speerstra visits Canada to launch new book”