Celebrate Women 2025!
CFUW - Sudbury, in partnership with the YWCA Sudbury and LEAF Sudbury presented the 29th annual Celebrate Women on Wednesday, May 21 at 7:00 pm, at Sudbury Secondary's Sheridan Auditorium (154 College Street).
Claire Cameron, award winning author and journalist, and outdoor adventurer joined us for a "fireside" chat about her book "How to Survive a Bear Attack: A Memoir", followed by a reception.
The event was livestreamed.
Claire Cameron, award winning author and journalist, and outdoor adventurer joined us for a "fireside" chat about her book "How to Survive a Bear Attack: A Memoir", followed by a reception.
The event was livestreamed.
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About the book:
How to Survive a Bear Attack: A Memoir is beautiful and powerful and poignant and moving. It is a memoir about grief, family, cancer, the wilderness, animals and so much more. In this debut memoir from the bestselling author of The Bear and The Last Neanderthal, Claire Cameron confronts the rare genetic mutation that gave her cancer by investigating an equally rare and terrifying event—a predatory bear attack.
When Claire Cameron was nine years old, her father, a professor of Old English, told her he was dying. In the years after he was gone, she found a way to overcome her grief among the rivers and lakes of Algonquin Park, a vast Canadian wilderness area. Around that same time, in 1991, a couple was killed by a black bear in a rare predatory attack in the park. Claire was shocked and, never fully sure of what happened, the attack haunted her. Now older, with children of her own, Cameron was diagnosed with the same kind of deadly skin cancer as her father. Caught in a second wave of grief, she was told by her doctor, “the ideal exposure to UV light is none.” No longer able to venture into the wilderness as she once had, with long scars on her back, she became obsessed with the bear attack in Algonquin Park again. How could terror rip through such a beautiful place? Could she separate truth from fiction? She headed north to investigate.
Seamlessly weaving together nature writing with true crime investigation in this unflinching account of recovery, HOW TO SURVIVE A BEAR ATTACK: A Memoir is at once an intimate portrait of an extraordinary animal, a bracing chronicle of pain, obsession, and love, and a profoundly moving exploration of how we can understand and survive the wildness that lives
inside us.
When Claire Cameron was nine years old, her father, a professor of Old English, told her he was dying. In the years after he was gone, she found a way to overcome her grief among the rivers and lakes of Algonquin Park, a vast Canadian wilderness area. Around that same time, in 1991, a couple was killed by a black bear in a rare predatory attack in the park. Claire was shocked and, never fully sure of what happened, the attack haunted her. Now older, with children of her own, Cameron was diagnosed with the same kind of deadly skin cancer as her father. Caught in a second wave of grief, she was told by her doctor, “the ideal exposure to UV light is none.” No longer able to venture into the wilderness as she once had, with long scars on her back, she became obsessed with the bear attack in Algonquin Park again. How could terror rip through such a beautiful place? Could she separate truth from fiction? She headed north to investigate.
Seamlessly weaving together nature writing with true crime investigation in this unflinching account of recovery, HOW TO SURVIVE A BEAR ATTACK: A Memoir is at once an intimate portrait of an extraordinary animal, a bracing chronicle of pain, obsession, and love, and a profoundly moving exploration of how we can understand and survive the wildness that lives
inside us.
About the Author:
CLAIRE CAMERON's most recent novel, The Last Neanderthal, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. It sold in eleven territories. Her second novel, The Bear, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, sold in 10 territories, and was a #1 national bestseller. It won the North from the Ontario Library Service, which her first novel, The L also won. Claire has led canoe trips in Algonquin Park and was an instructor for Outward Bound, teaching mountaineering, climbing and whitewater rafting in Oregon and beyond. Her writing has appeared in New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and she is a contributor to The Globe and Mail. She lives in Toronto.