The Wrights actually built/designed in reaction to the kind of accidents which killed Lillienthal and Pilcher: gust upsets of planes controlled by weight shift and subject to the vagaries of relative wind. They deliberately made their "Flyer" control oriented, rather than auto stable. They wanted laterally and longitudinally (really regarding all three axes) to control the plane's motions and attitudes. While they anhedralled the wings to direct the plane into, rather than out of side gusts when near the ground, they wanted to be able to overcome upsets by their own will and skills. So they carefully taught themselves to pilot an unstable plane. They overdid it in the 1904 plane and corrected for that. Remember though that their invention relates to aircraft control, and it was to that end that they designed their plane. At a time when the rest of the world's aviators were just "hopping" with insufficient control, they were flying round and round Huffman Prairie for times approaching an hour. They had a much more sophisticated knowledge of flight dynamics than most realize, having approached the flight problem very scientifically and methodically, inventing (e.g. the aircraft propeller) along the way. They were aware of stalling phenomena and the forward "rudder" (canard surface), too. They just needed to know about Reynolds numbers, which came later. See their complete note books on the internet, or examples in the archives of the two most active CL forums.
Canards are fun, and I'm always happy to see anyone giving them a try. Don't expect them to match stunt or glide performance of conventional aft-tail planes though, unless they are part of a three-surface configuration. The a.c. and necessary static margin (as well as interference) don't allow the main wing to use it's entire lift potential. There's some good info in the archives, despite the crash. Try also Stanford Aero and - maybe - NASA (Rutan). Some fairly recent papers/articles (1980 and later) have addressed this.
I like your project and would like Bob Hunt to let us in further on his results with his own configuration. There's a lot to be learned from the unconventional, and winning stunt contests isn't everything (OMG!).
SK