Sandra Louise Birdsell, CM (née Bartlette) (born 22 April 1942) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer of Métis and Mennonite heritage from Morris, Manitoba. Life and career Born in Hamiota, Manitoba, Birdsell was the fifth of eleven children. She lived most of her early life in Morris, Manitoba, where the family moved after her father joined the army in 1943. Her father was a French-speaking Cree Métis born in Canada and her mother was a Low-German speaking Mennonite who was born in Russia. When Birdsell was six and a half, her sister died from leukemia, which left a four-year gap between her and her next older sister. Her loneliness led her to ponder by herself to the nearby parks and rivers allowing her imagination to go wild. Her hometown of Morris experienced a major flood in 1950. Her first three stories in Night Travellers are based on that flood. Birdsell left home at the age of fifteen, where she studied at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba, where she studied under Robert Kroetsch. In 1996, she moved to Regina, Saskatchewan, and currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario. At the age of thirty-five, she enrolled in Creative Writing at the University of Winnipeg. Five years later, Turnstone Press published her first book, Night Travellers. In January 2007, Birdsell began a four-month term as the Carol Shields writer in residence at the University of Winnipeg. In 2010, Birdsell was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada and in 2012 she was invested with Saskatchewan Order of Merit (SOM). She is a mother to three children and a grandmother to four children. Publications Short stories Night Travellers Birdsell's first book, a collections of interconnected short stories, Night Travellers(1982), is set in the imaginary Manitoba town of Agassiz, and concerns the large Lafreniere family: the teenaged sisters Betty, Lureen and Truda, their Mennonite mother Mika and their Métis father Maurice and the girls’ maternal grandparents, Oma and Opa Thiessen. Agassiz is based on the flood-prone town of Morris, on the banks of the Red River. where Birdsell spent her childhood. The source for the name Agassiz is Lake Agassiz, an enormous glacial lake that around 13,000 years ago covered much of what are now Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, northern Minnesota, eastern North Dakota, and Saskatchewan. Lake Agassiz is a controlling metaphor for the stories ... representing memory and ancestry". While