Erin Mouré, born in Calgary on 17 April 1955, is the daughter of William Benedict Mouré, a customs broker, and Mary Irene Grendys Mouré, a nurse. She spent her early years in Calgary, where her mother taught her to read when she was four. At the age of six or seven she began writing and making her own books by sewing together pages made from grocery bags. In adolescence she read Irving Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959) and Al Purdy's The Cariboo Horses (1965). These and other Canadian books discovered in her formative years stimulated her attempts at writing. Raised a Catholic, Mouré sees herself as following a specifically Canadian tradition of writing, but also as reaching beyond her prairie background to more universal concerns. She took only two years of formal postsecondary education, and since then her working life has been mainly devoted to...