Former Home of Margaret Laurence

Who would have thought that one day I would find myself standing in front of Margaret Laurence' residence to paint like this? After all it was almost 22 years ago way back in China when I first came across an excerpt of Margaret Laurence's novel The Stone Angel. Margaret Laurence wrote a series of novels creating a fictional town of Manawaka using her birthplace Neepawa as a source of inspiration. When I read her novel The Stone Angel the allusion to the town of Neepawa was quite obvious for instance she mentioned the stone angel in the cemetery which we were going to locate soon and also she mentioned the local newspaper Manawaka Banner and the river which was obviously the White Mud. Well if Margaret Laurence's antagonist Hargar Shipley did step out of her fictional world and resurrected into today's real world of Neepawa she would be marveling about how much better life has been changed. However she would realize the hill remains , the river remains and the trees remains, and what is different now is how much free the town is now of its distant shadow and social economic shackles.