The Caring Chapters Club is a weekly virtual book club mainly for caregivers. Reading will be spread over 10 weeks on Monday afternoons. Engage in open discussions, connect with fellow caregivers, and find solace in a community that understands.
Join our Fall 2024 Caregivers’ Book Club for a shared exploration of “The Poetry Pharmacy.” Authored by William Sieghart, these poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice provide comfort, delight, and inspiration for all. Secure your complimentary copy and reserve your spot by September 23.
For inquiries and registration, contact Anaïs Fortin-Maltais at afortinmaltais@jhpartners.net or 581-446-7476
If you would like to register, apply here.
This activity is made possible thanks to
Jog Your Mind is a series of workshops designed for individuals aged 50 and over experiencing normal intellectual aging. This innovative program aims to keep your memory in shape. Tips, advice, and exercises are provided at each session based on the day’s theme.
In addition to receiving material during the sessions, participants also have the opportunity to exercise their cognitive functions at home with a 300-page activity workbook.
This is a drop-in event. No need to register.
Discover our Fun Chair Yoga class for ages 50 and above, to harmonize your mental, physical and emotional dimensions, and cultivate inner tranquility.
Through a balanced blend of postures and breathing exercises, this class releases tension, enhances flexibility and works the entire body. With thoughtful incorporation of chairs, this gentle yet active adaptation of yoga also focuses on mobility. Every posture is tailored to your unique needs, creating a space to realign, calm the mind, and rekindle your inner vitality.
Cost: $60 for all 12 classes
Pay before September 18 to register for the fall 2024 session
The Caring Chapters Club is a weekly virtual book club mainly for caregivers. Reading will be spread over 10 weeks on Monday afternoons. Engage in open discussions, connect with fellow caregivers, and find solace in a community that understands.
Join our Fall 2024 Caregivers’ Book Club for a shared exploration of “The Poetry Pharmacy.” Authored by William Sieghart, these poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice provide comfort, delight, and inspiration for all. Secure your complimentary copy and reserve your spot by September 23.
For inquiries and registration, contact Anaïs Fortin-Maltais at afortinmaltais@jhpartners.net or 581-446-7476
If you would like to register, apply here.
This activity is made possible thanks to
Are you an English-speaking adult 50 years of age or older and want to keep your mind strong and healthy? Join us to play fun and challenging games to strengthen your mind and connect with others.
Train your brain;
Connect with others;
Enjoy a healthy snack.
To participate: Please contact Anaïs: 
afortinmaltais@jhpartners.net 
581-446-7476
To volunteer: Give your brain some power while helping others too! Win-win! To volunteer, please contact Elise: eholloway@jhpartners.net 581-446-6452
Discover our Fun Chair Yoga class for ages 50 and above, to harmonize your mental, physical and emotional dimensions, and cultivate inner tranquility.
Through a balanced blend of postures and breathing exercises, this class releases tension, enhances flexibility and works the entire body. With thoughtful incorporation of chairs, this gentle yet active adaptation of yoga also focuses on mobility. Every posture is tailored to your unique needs, creating a space to realign, calm the mind, and rekindle your inner vitality.
Cost: $60 for all 12 classes
Pay before September 18 to register for the fall 2024 session
Our Stories: Holiday Special Family Event
Join us for this get-together, where you can share tales, stories, legends, and poems that share the holiday season as a common theme. Instructions and materials for creating cards will also be available.
The Morrin Centre team will present this event. All participants will receive gingerbread biscuits and warm drinks.
Enjoy the holidays with a merry Tea Time at the Morrin Centre! Warm up from the frosty winter chill with tea, treats, and traditional Victorian pastimes. Book tickets today to gift yourself a unique experience!
Teatime – December 15
Enjoy the holidays with a merry Tea Time at the Morrin Centre! Warm up from the frosty winter chill with tea, treats, and traditional Victorian pastimes. Book tickets today to gift yourself a memorable experience!
This hour-long immersive and interactive experience will introduce you to tea history and etiquette, teach you some traditional Victorian games and activities, and (of course) allow you to taste several teas and sweet and savoury snacks.
Tickets must be purchased at least 72 hours in advance. If the minimum number of registrations (8) is not reached by the Thursday prior to the event, the activity will be cancelled, and all tickets will be refunded. The maximum number of registrations is 20. Please note that Teatime tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable.
Join us for a cozy afternoon chat about books at 1:30 p.m. every last Monday of the month.
We have a new daytime book club at the Morrin Centre: Morrin Mystery Mondays! We’ll be reading mysteries and other cozies.
The selection for December is Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen by Vicki Delany. The book is available on OverDrive as an e-book and audiobook.
This event will be held in person. Please email library@morrin.org to learn more or to sign up. We encourage new members to join anytime!
This project is in partnership with La Maison Anglaise.
Interested in discussing literature with other book lovers?
Missing connecting over books in the Library? Join Pixels & Pages!
Selection for December: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy is available on OverDrive in e-book format as part of the Morrin Centre’s digital collections HERE.
Please note that this event will be a hybrid. The book club will meet in the Library, but participants can also participate online via Zoom.
Please email library@morrin.org to learn more or to sign up!
This project is in partnership with La Maison Anglaise.
Jog Your Mind is a series of workshops designed for individuals aged 50 and over experiencing normal intellectual aging. This innovative program aims to keep your memory in shape. Tips, advice, and exercises are provided at each session based on the day’s theme.
In addition to receiving material during the sessions, participants also have the opportunity to exercise their cognitive functions at home with a 300-page activity workbook.
This is a drop-in event. No need to register.
Wednesday, December 18, 7 p.m.
A few lines in the margin of a manuscript can tell us a lot about the past. In this talk, the historian Mairi Cowan will show how a single marginal gloss can open new perspectives on how people in seventeenth-century Quebec thought about the wider world. Marie Hiroüin de la Conception, a nun at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, was described as a “Scottish gentlewoman” in one of the community’s records. Further searching through the Hôtel-Dieu archives and documents from Scotland, France, and Italy provides clues about a family that had fled from Scotland to France during the Reformation.
Augustines at the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec thought it was essential to emphasize Marie Hiroüin’s Scottishness and nobility, which raises questions that extend far beyond the small French settlement into what it meant to be “Scottish” so far from Scotland, how social status in exile could be relevant for a nursing order of nuns, and why people in New France described Mary Stewart – also known as Mary, Queen of Scots – as the Queen of England. Thinking through these questions helps us understand the Hôtel-Dieu in New France and the Scottish diaspora, the complexities of Tudor dynastic succession, and the far-reaching web of early modern spiritual geopolitics.
Presenter Biography
Mairi Cowan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga. She has written about the tensions of international theology, national politics, and local tradition in twelfth-century Glasgow; experiences of childhood in the court of James IV, King of Scots; the connections between social discipline and the Catholic Reformation in Scotland; colonial efforts to “Frenchify” Indigenous people in seventeenth-century New France; and Jesuit missionaries’ beliefs about demons in Indigenous societies of North America.
Her most recent monograph, The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), is a microhistory of bewitchment in New France. She is also co-editor of the recent collection Gender in Scotland 1200-1800: Place, Faith and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
This event will be a hybrid.
This event is part of a talk series celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec.
Library Lectures:
📅 Date: January 9, 2025
⏰ Time: 19:00 – 20:30
📍 Location: Morrin Centre Library (hybrid option via Zoom)
🎨 Event Category: Cultural Event
Celebrate the fascinating contributions of women to 19th-century Canadian botany in this illustrated talk by Ann Shteir. Explore the lives and work of figures like Lady Dalhousie, Anne Mary Perceval, Catharine Parr Traill, and others who documented Canada’s natural world through plant catalogues, art, and writing. Discover their legacy and the researchers who uncovered their stories, diving into archives, letters, and herbaria.
About the Speaker:
Ann Shteir, Professor Emerita at York University, is a leading scholar in gender and science history. Her acclaimed works include Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science and Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada.
This event is part of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec’s 200th-anniversary series.
📩 Email library@morrin.org to learn more or register.
Library Lecture: “Women and Botany in 19th-Century Canada” by Ann Shteir
Thursday, January 9, 7 p.m.
Celebrating Historical Research and Historical Researchers: Women and Botany in 19th-Century Canada. An Illustrated Talk
Papers in the Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec from the 1820s and 1830s are historical documents by individuals in early 19th-century Canada who were searching for knowledge about nature in a “new land” and who also wanted to “excite in the rising generation a taste for scientific knowledge and pursuits.” Two women were among the researchers: Christian Ramsay (Countess Dalhousie), who contributed a “Catalogue of Canadian Plants collected in 1827,” and Harriet Sheppard (“Mrs. Sheppard”), who wrote about shells and Canadian songbirds in Quebec and had a keen interest in plants.
This talk celebrates women who pursued knowledge of nature, especially knowledge about plants, in 19th-century Canada. It features Lady Dalhousie and Anne Mary Perceval in Quebec, Catharine Parr Traill and Alice Hollingworth in Ontario, and Mary Brenton in Newfoundland. Who were they? How did they come to know about plants? What were their contributions? What did their work mean to them? How do we find them? And where do we find material by them and about them?
This talk also celebrates researchers in Flora’s Fieldworkers whose curiosity led them to letters and biography, artwork and craftwork, into archives, herbaria, and institutional records, and also into scrapbooks, logbooks, textbooks, and teaching tools to seek answers to those questions about women and knowledge.
Presenter Biography
Ann Shteir is a Professor Emerita in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. She received an Honorary Law degree from York University in 2016 for her work in developing York’s pioneering graduate program in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies.
Shteir is also the author of Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for Women’s History. She turned her attention next to women and botany in Canada. She collaborated with botanist Jacques Cayouette on an article published in Scientia Canadensis (2019) about four women who collected plants in early 19th-century Quebec and Newfoundland. She also organized a workshop at York University that brought together botanists, historians of science, art historians, literary scholars, garden historians, and others who, like her, wanted to know more about women, plants, and botanical work in Canada across the 1800s. The edited book Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) was a happy result.
This event will be a hybrid.
This event is part of a talk series celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec.
Stories of Our Community: A Personal Storytelling Workshop
📅 Dates: January 18 & 19, 2025
⏰ Time: 10:00 – 16:00
📍 Location: Morrin Centre
🎨 Event Category: Cultural Event
Join writer, performer, and teacher Taylor Tower for a two-day workshop on the art of personal storytelling. Through a mix of listening, writing, and oral presentation exercises, you will learn to craft compelling narratives. You will also explore the five elements of a great story, build dynamic characters, and master storytelling techniques for structure, performance, and delivery.
This immersive workshop concludes with participants performing their final stories, offering a rewarding opportunity to share your unique voice and connect with others through storytelling.
📌 Note: Registration covers both days, and attendance on January 18 is required to join the January 19 session.
Stories of Our Community: A Personal Storytelling Workshop
Saturday, January 18 and Sunday, January 19, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
In this workshop, we will identify the ingredients of a compelling story and the best ways to tell it.
Focusing on listening and oral presentation, this workshop will help you develop your voice, hone storytelling skills, and develop a more profound sense of what makes a story worth sharing. We will analyze oral stories and do many written exercises to explore storytelling concepts and find a subject for our final stories, which will be performed at the end of the second day.
Over two days, we will explore together:
- The five essential elements of a great story – using the five senses to create evocative scenes
- Character and Plot: Turning yourself into a character and finding motive and action for your stories
- Structure and Endings
- Oral Vs. Written Stories: The Outline and Voice
- Performance: Rhythm and tempo, repetition, open vs closed postures, habitual muscular tensions and body centres
Immerse yourself in the storytelling practice!
Please note: By booking a ticket for January 18, you are automatically registered for the full, two-day workshop. Attendance on January 18 is required to attend the January 19 session.