Joan
Finnigan of Aylmer
Award for Community Service in Arts & Culture
Joan Finnigan has given
her time for countless talks on the Ottawa Valley and its history. She has
also preserved and publicized the history of West Quebec in her thirty
books, on CBC Radio and via the National Film Board. She is the
acknowledged social historian of life in the Ottawa Valley.
Joan Finnigan celebrated over 50 years of the writing life this year with Penumbra Press’s publication of her 270-page illustrated Life Along The Opeongo Line; this, her thirtieth volume, sets a benchmark for oral/social historians with its seamless integration of stories, poems, songs, colour photos and commentary by the author.
Finnigan has been at the forefront of Canadian literature and oral history since the 1960s, when Robert Weaver featured her poetry on CBC Radio, and her volumes of oral/social histories remain widely read and popular . In 1965, the National Film Board produced her Genie Award-winning screenplay The Best Damn Fiddler From Calabogie To Kaladar to national acclaim. Joan has published thirty books, half of them inspired by the Ottawa Valley, including her ground-breaking, best-selling oral histories, Some of the Stories I Told You Were True, Legacies, Legends & Lies, Tell Me Another Story, and Tallying the Tales of the Old-Timers. She is the acknowledged social historian of nineteenth-century Ottawa Valley life. Her oral histories have won several prestigious regional awards, while her poetry books The Watershed Collection and Wintering Over have been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and the Trillium Award, respectively.
The daughter of Ottawa Senator hockey legend Frank Finnigan and the mother of three children, Joan Finnigan was born in Ottawa and educated at Lisgar Collegiate, Carleton University, and Queen’s University. She now summers at her log farmhouse on Hambly Lake north of Kingston, Ontario, and winters in Aylmer, Quebec.
One of Joan Finnigan’s major goals for this book has been to increase awareness of the Opeongo Line as a national treasure, and to arouse concern for its preservation.