2022 National Conference 

Storytelling:
Making People Care Since...Forever

Halifax, NS
October 3-7, 2022  

It’s difficult (if not impossible) to separate the human experience from storytelling. We have a fundamental need to connect with each other and ourselves through the sharing of stories. They are the tool we use to make sense of our lives, experiences, events in history and the world around us. Stories, like interpretation itself, help us make meaning of the world.

Along with our presenting partner, the Association of Nova Scotia Museums, Interpretation Canada’s 2022 National Conference in Halifax will explore the connection between interpretation and storytelling.

LAWRENCE HILL is the internationally bestselling author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including (most recently) Beatrice and Croc Harry, The Book of Negroes (which was made into a six-part TV mini-series) and The Illegal, both of which won CBC Canada Reads. His previous novels, Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood, also became national bestsellers. Hill’s nonfiction work includes Blood: The Stuff of Life (the subject of his 2013 Massey Lectures), and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada.

Hill is a professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph. His volunteer work has included Crossroads International, the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, Book Clubs for Inmates, The Ontario Black History Society, and Walls to Bridges – a non-profit group offering university courses to incarcerated Canadians.

Hill is writing screenplays for a TV miniseries in development, and a novel about the African-American soldiers who help build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and Yukon during World War Two. He is a member of the Order of Canada, and a winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

This keynote session is generously supported by Parks Canada Agency.

“Salar” is an environmental theatre performance about the Atlantic Salmon that inspires a greater awareness of the salmon’s life cycle. This 50-minute interdisciplinary performance weaves together stories, myths and science through language, movement, live music and puppetry. By employing methods in knowledge translation and exchange, this transformative experience fosters a greater understanding of this fascinating creature’s importance to peoples across the northern hemisphere over the last 25 000 years and highlights the connection between ocean and forest, and our shared human responsibility to the environment. Salar premiered at Stratford’s SpringWorks PuppetWorks Festival in August of 2021, followed by a run at the 2021 Halifax Fringe and a tour to 5 Atlantic Region National Parks and National Historic Sites.

The artists of Salar have woven their work into Nova Scotia’s artistic tapestry over the past three decades, crossed paths at various intersections along the way, and now come together as the creative collective The Hatch, based in K’jipuktuk/Halifax. The ensemble includes Benn Ross, Kersti Tacreiter, Cathy Porter and Alexis Milligan, with a special guest appearance by Mi’kmaw Elder and national park interpreter, Mary Louise Bernard. For this production they are joined by a number of supporting artists who have added their expertise and creative energy to the development of this new work.

The Hatch fosters understanding, inspires action, and creates lasting connections through arts-based practices in knowledge translation and exchange.

The artists of Salar acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Haliburton House Museum

Grand-Pré National Historic Site