The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Artscene · FRIDAY, JANUARY 8, 2010 17 NIKKI WESLEY / OAKVILLE BEAVER PEEKING INTO THE MINDS OF AUTHORS: John Bemrose, author of The Last Woman, and Catherine Gildiner, writer of After the Falls, were featured at the latest Bookers Brunch at Oakville Golf Club. Also featured, but not pictured, was Karen Connelly, who penned Burmese Lessons: A Love Story. Brunch gives readers insight into stimulating reads By Melanie Cummings SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER Authors Catherine Gildiner, Paul Bemrose and Karen Connelly have tested themselves in unknown landscapes and lived to tell the story. Each of their novels takes readers through a minefield of personal experiences: amid a civil war in Burma, the remote north of Ontario and the inner turmoil of the teenage mind. The trio parlayed their stories of lifechanging experiences recently to rapt attention at the latest Bookers Brunch held at the Oakville Golf Club. Catherine Gildiner's After the Falls is a followup to her childhood memoir Too Close to the Falls. The overly energetic, pre-teen's curiosity certainly has not waned with age, despite altering hormones, a change of address and the heady times of the 1960s. This, combined with the jam-packed experiences that a teen faces in a short span of time -- dating, moral development, sex, career plans -- are told in chapter after chapter. The self-described Q-Tip looking teen had "a high moral sense at the expense of common sense." Through her teen years, Gildiner, who is Cathy McClure in the novel, becomes a cheerleader, vandal, hotel hostess and civil rights demonstrator investigated by the FBI. She told the local crowd about her misguided activism in holding a sit-in at a department store in her newly adopted hometown of Buffalo, which involved she and her friends eating club sandwiches daily over a week. See Authors page 19