Songs from This and That Country

It is 1996: a mortar shell explodes, shredding nine Sarajevan citizens, while a Canadian opera singer and others huddle together in horrified solidarity;

thirty years earlier: a mother gives birth to a caul baby, a strange child who seems able to will events into being;

forty-five years earlier: a young man returns home from the Italian front and his hair has turned snow white;

600 years earlier: a young woman leaves her father, a despot under the Ottomans, to meet the witch Baba Roga from whom she learns that father and Turk are not so very different;

and back in 1996: a young opera singer, estranged from her parents, sings about all of this and contemplates killing her father.

Songs from This and That Country is an inter-generational story that examines the reality of age-old ethnic conflicts between Serbs-Croats-Muslims, exposing these divisive and acrimonious relationships as recursive and mirrored in the lives of first- and second-generation families. As a blend of family drama, historical fact and fairy tale, Songs reflects a South Slavic immigrant experience, WWII infantry service in 1940s Italy, the Bosnian conflicts in the 1990s, and the rise of a second generation Serb-Canadian opera singer-all set in relief to a Slavic fairy tale in the time of the Ottoman Empire.

Gail Sidonie-Sobat is an award-winning writer and educator and a Serbian-Ukrainian Canadian. She is the author of a dozen books, the creator-director of YouthWrite multidisciplinary camps for young writers, and is an educator. She has frequently been writer in residence and has presented across Canada, US, Qatar, Vietnam, Switzerland, Finland, and Turkey. She currently lives in Edmonton and on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.

You can read more about her at www.gailsidoniesobat.com