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 the
devastating flood that happened in Morris in 1950 "is a related image that reverberates throughout the text". 1984
Night Travellers received the
Gerald Lampert Award from
League of Canadian Poets. Usually this its awarded for a first book of poetry.
Ladies of the House Birdsell's second collection, from 1984, is a sequel collection to
Night Travellers that the focuses on the Laftenierre family women from Agassiz and their women friends, though most of the stories ae set in Winnipeg. In 1987 it was republished with
Night Travellers, in one volume called
Agassiz Stories. An American edition, titled
Agassiz: A Novel in Stories, appeared in 1991 (Minneapolis: Milkweed).
Children's literature The Town That Floated Away (1997) was influenced by Birdsell's experience as a child of the 1950 flood in Morris, and narrates the adventures of young Virginia Potts after she is left behind when her town floats away. Birdsell also wrote
A Prairie Boy’s Winter, a one act play for children, which was co-written and produced by
Prairie Theatre Exchange, in 1986.
Novels The Missing Child Birdsell's first novel, published in 1989, is "an evocative
magic realist portrait of the fictional town of Agassiz", which won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
Chrome Suite Birdsell's second novel was published in 1992, and covers four decades of script-writer Amy Barber's life: from an extraordinarily hot summer in a small Manitoba town in 1950; "to the 1960s and the 1970s, when Amy marries, goes to live in the city, and begins to have reason to fear for her young son"; to the present, with Amy traveling from Toronto to Winnipeg with her young Polish, film-maker lover.
The Russländer Published in 2001, this is Birdsell's third novel, and it explores Birdsell's own family history. The word
Russländer means "Russians" in German and her mother and maternal grandparents were Mennonite emigrants from Russia. It was published as
Katya in the US. It is the story of Katherine (Katya) Vogt, and her Mennonite family's life in Russia from the end of 1910, until she, her husband, two sisters, and grandparents emigrated to Canada in 1923. Katya was born in 1902. The story begins with the family living on the prosperous Mennonite estate of Abram Suddermann in
Ukraine, where Katya's father is the overseer. They are under the protection of the Tsar whose wife is German. This is part of the
Chortitza Colony, land granted to
German-speaking Mennonites for
colonization. Chortitza was founded in 1789 by
Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite settlers from
West Prussia, and consisted of many villages. It was the first of many Mennonite settlements in the
Russian Empire. Life then becomes much harder when
World War I begins and there is suspicion as to the loyalty of the Mennonites because they speak German. Life then eases when where the area is occupied by Austrian and German soldiers. However, Russia falls into chaos when they leave in 1917, with the
February and
October Revolutions. The Russian workers on the estate take the bloody revenge on the Mennonites. Katya's parents and her siblings, but for two sisters are brutally murdered. After years of poverty and near-starvation. Katya, her husband, sisters, and grandparents eventually emigrate to Canada in 1923, to settle in Manitoba: "Between 1923 and 1930, nearly 25,000 Mennonites fled violence that erupted in the
Soviet Union". == Recognition ==