Good evening, everyone. I am so honoured to be speaking to you tonight about that shining star of Canadian fiction, the quietly brilliant, seminal novel of the Canadian West, W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind.

Many of you here tonight will have known W.O. well. My only encounter with him happened maybe 35 years ago at a post-reading reception in the Swift Current, Saskatchewan, library. Peter and I had driven the hundred miles north strictly to lay eyes on him, to hear his actual voice. A country man through and through, my husband had come because of Jake and the Kid. Trying to teach myself to be a writer, I was there for Who Has Seen the Wind; I was there to stare at this icon of Canadian literature in wonder, hoping the sight of him, the sound of his voice, the way he moved and his fleeting expressions would tell me… whatever it was I needed to know to do what he had done.

After his reading the chairs were rearranged against the walls, and sandwiches and tea were served. When he turned away from the tea table, he saw an empty chair, headed for it and sat in it—right beside me. When I recovered, I knew I should speak to him, but every time I thought of something to say, turned my head to him, opened my mouth, no sound would emerge, and I would turn my head away again, while he sat there, teacup in hand, looking straight ahead in a not-unfriendly way, chewing on something that, although he claimed not to chew tobacco, was probably tobacco, and saying not one word. Thus we sat, squeezed in side by side, for a half hour, I in misery, and he… rest…fully. Then it was over, and cringing with shame, I slunk away. All these years later, now knowing his reputation, I realize he had been playing a game with me.

The book is sprinkled with intense beauty, the language chosen with a poet’s precision and originality.

But when you think of it, what do you say to the man who wrote a masterpiece about your own world The very world you, a novice writer, are trying to find a way to see—whole—past the harsh facts of a rural agricultural person’s daily life, and at the same time, to the glistening, otherworldly mirages, to the omnipresent wind, to days the air is so hot you have to push your way through it, or so cold that in the icy, frost-ridden stillness you can hear voices speaking from miles away, while all around you the sky leans down on you or soars away, and the grass whispers to you. The prairie being so much more, it turns out, than “the skeleton requirements, simply, of land and sky.” All of these giving you hints, clues, intimations of the Great Mystery inherent in it that the boy, Brian Sean MacMurray O’Connal, seized by it, over and over again, comes to a halt in wonder, puzzlement and yearning.

Up to the publication of Who Has Seen the Wind, most fiction set on the Saskatchewan prairie tended to be “realist” recountings of pioneer life. Macmillan, on receiving the manuscript, must have seen that it had a Canadian classic on its hands, that it was privileged to publish a novel of such rare sensitivity, and especially authenticity, and, wonder of wonders, set in and about the heretofore “boring” Canadian prairie West, and yet, not to be classified as “prairie realism.” Even though Mitchell broke that mould with Who Has Seen the Wind, for many years after that too many prairie writers—myself included—kept on writing realistic fiction, for the most part, unable to find a way to do what Mitchell had done.

Who Has Seen the Wind was first published in February 1947, and in what is still a coup, simultaneously by Macmillan in Canada and Atlantic Little Brown in the USA (although the American edition cut about 7,000 words). It didn’t initially sell particularly well, but as time passed sales began to improve until by the 1960s it was a steady seller, as its fame and the recognition of its true worth grew. Cumulatively, to this day, it approaches sales of up to a million copies, and it keeps on selling, it keeps on being read, taught and admired by writers and readers of all ages, although Mitchell insisted this was not a children’s book.

It has been said by who knows how many writers, scholars and statesmen-and-women that a place does not exist until a writer writes about it. From Catherine McLay’s 1986 essay:

“Robert Kroetsch remarked to Margaret Laurence, ‘As Western Canadian writers [we] are involved in making a new literature out of a new experience…. In a sense we haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real.’”

W.O. Mitchell, in Who Has Seen the Wind, created the Western Canadian prairie, and all we writers of the prairie West since have paid homage to him, fought against him, argued with him in our prose, trying hard to find another way to write about it, or trying to write of the same world but through the eyes of adults, not children, or of women, not boys and men, or of farm or ranch kids, not town kids as Mitchell was, or, especially, of those not so privileged as he had the good fortune to be. The privileged had, in that era, childhoods of both a freedom to play and to wander as Brian did, and, at the same time, of the certainty of their ultimate safety. Those less privileged far too often slaved away their childhoods on the farms, or had already had trampled out of them the ability to see the magic on the land that surrounded them. Maybe W.O.’s success in describing that child’s world with such warmth, humour and wonder came not only out of his inborn artistry but out of his childhood’s very security and freedom. For many readers and writers who grew up on the prairie in those more difficult times, Who Has Seen the Wind returned to them, or helped them to see for the first time, the magic that was always there and that was theirs too.

You sit, silent, radiating awe. Then, later, and for all your life, you dream of writing such a book yourself.

Who, of all our many writers now, has written so beautiful a description as this:

“Shadows lengthen; the sunlight fades from cloud to cloud, kindling their torn edges as it dies from softness to softness down the prairie sky. A lone farmhouse window briefly blazes; the prairie bathes in mellower, yellower light, and the sinking sun becomes a low and golden glowing, splendid on the prairie’s edge.”

Although this is the most often quoted passage to illustrate his lyricism, in fact the entire text is sprinkled with phrases and clauses of intense beauty, the language chosen with a poet’s precision and originality. The book lifts us into myth and, with heartbreaking intensity, uses the prairie to illustrate the human struggle—in this case incarnate in a small child—between the knowledge gained through the senses and that of his soul, that comes from where he doesn’t know, but that begs for answers, or cries to touch something that might be God. I, a long-time writer, remain stunned by Mitchell’s achievement.

I am struck too by his literary inventiveness, even daring, in finding ways to solve the problems all we writers wrestle with: the death scene, two lovers parting, a young boy’s reaction to his father’s death, the many funny yet non-trivial dialogues.

For instance, this reading, my third or fourth, was the first time that I paid close attention to Mitchell’s “old-lady-near-death” scene, in which his character both speaks aloud and thinks, she herself no longer knowing a difference:

“–when the sound of the grinding is low.” The curtains flapped and were sucked from the room as though the window had drawn its breath. “–or even the silver cord be loosed.” The curved sides of the chamber-pot caught and held the afternoon light in pearly gleams. “– or the golden bowl be broken –” The gilt framed picture of John MacMurray stared unseeing from the wall. “–shall the dust return –” “Ticket-a-roo – ticket-a-roo,” said the pigeon under the window.

I hadn’t read two lines before I heard echoes of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf: the mixture of quotes from Ecclesiastes, the author’s voice, the voice of the natural world. Throughout this novel that seems, deceptively, the simplest of books, you’ll find evidence as well of Mitchell’s considerable scholarship.

As is too often the case with the best books, the ones that last, like Who Has Seen the Wind, the juries of major literary prizes did not honour this book when it first came out (other than the IODE prize), but the rest of the country gradually saw its worth and continues to do so: Mitchell was awarded the Order of Canada in 1973; in 1992 he became an Honourable Member of the Privy Council, the highest of civilian honours, for his contribution to our national story and national art; our universities gave him, I think, nine honourary degrees. Most extraordinary of all is that when he died in 1998, across the country the Canadian flag was flown at half-mast.

Finally, tonight I get to say to him, wherever he is, what I could not say that endless, mortifying afternoon many years ago. I am still struggling, though, to find those words, which would then have been, and to this day remain, about how he wrote, how he found the place inside himself, so deep, so profound, and that he then put on the page as the story of a child on the prairie, and what the prairie taught him, and how it formed him. I found it so true a book that it required no comment: truth blown on the wind for prairie children to hear, the prairie’s capacity to drive the vulnerable mad, and the biggest truth of all: death, and how it comes to all things, from archbishops to gophers, and even—defying understanding—to a boy’s beloved father.

Do you comment on the weather, or the afternoon’s turnout Do you kiss his hand, or kneel at his feet No. You sit in silence, radiating awe. And then, later, and for all your writing life, you dream of writing such a book yourself.

To prepare for tonight, I read the novel again. If this time I started out my reading as a dubious old woman, I finished it in that state that with the best books all readers reach—of an inner hush, not recognizing where I sat—and when I rose and gazed out at the muted glitter of the snow falling, cone-shaped, under the streetlights, for a moment, in the achievement all novelists dream of creating with their work, Who Has Seen the Wind had reawakened me and I saw the world with new eyes.

Sharon Butala is the author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction, numerous essays and articles, some poetry and five plays.

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The post A Tribute to W.O. Mitchell appeared first on Alberta Views.

Published in Eye on Alberta, Alberta Views, June 2022.

The ranch has fallen on hard times. The once prosperous land is dry and food scarce for the ranch’s animals. Hungry and crestfallen, the animals grumble. Only the eldest among them can remember such difficult times.

Joshua, a power-crazy magpie, squawks aggressively to all that would listen, declaring that the ranch is a victim of “outside forces,” blaming the eastern beavers who manage the waterways and promising that he alone can bring back prosperity. The ranch’s many herd animals—cows, horses, sheep and goats—are convinced by the magpie and angered by stories of unfair beavers and conspiring forces. They elect Joshua to lead the ranch, ousting Hannah, the diminutive but kind and wise swift fox.

Out on the prairie a locomotive rumbles along, carrying Banff-bound tourists. Its iron wheels strike a stone, sending a single spark into the tinder-dry grass. A prairie fire grows rapidly and threatens the ranch, where industrious burrowing animals and wise owls scramble to shore up the fire defences.

“Please stay in your corrals. We’re all in this together,” hoots Cheryl, the pint-sized barn owl charged with organizing the fire brigades. Meanwhile the gophers, squirrels, chipmunks, mice and badgers desperately dig trenches to protect the Ranch and its inhabitants—courageously placing themselves in harm’s way.

“Your hooves will spread the fire and more animals will get burned or hurt by the smoke,” hoot the other owls, carefully studying the fire.

“We won’t mooooove. You are heroes,” the cows low thankfully.

The burrowing animals and owls eventually control the fire, examining it closely to learn much about its dangers, how it spreads and how to best protect the ranch.

“Fire is not a threat. We must be free!” Joshua caws disapprovingly. “The owls want to keep us locked up. We are self-reliant, personally responsible animals.”

Behind Joshua, a group of castrated bulls band together with a pack of yappy dogs. “The fire isn’t dangerous. We don’t believe it burns, and we have our own fire protections and treatments.” They bark and bellow, rolling in fresh cow patties.

Restless, the herd animals return to the dry fields. But the grassfire smolders on and the stamping hooves cause the grassfire to erupt again—leading to the deaths of many animals, especially the elders who cannot quickly flee.

The burrowing animals, badgers and owls again work furiously to fight the fire, treat the injured and protect the ranch. Again, the fire abates, but before it is out Joshua disparages the owls’ advice—and again the fire erupts.

As summer approaches, the danger subsides after the third grassfire. Joshua, eager to please the bulls and dogs, declares a premature victory. “Animals of the ranch, the fire is over!” he caws. “Now we can enjoy our traditional Summer Ranch Festival! This summer will be the best ever!”

The herd animals, tired of the fire’s impact and anxious for merriment, cheer loudly.

The gophers notice the prairie smoldering and winds rising. They squeak their warnings to the animals and beg the barn owl Cheryl to convince Joshua of the danger. Unfortunately, scared of the dogs, Cheryl says little.

Intent on celebrating, Joshua, the steers and the dogs protest loudly against the burrowing animals. “You know nothing and only want to stop us from enjoying the summer we deserve. Our festival will entice the rain clouds and bring back prosperity!”

The owls and burrowing animals, exhausted from fighting the fires and saddened by the destruction and deaths, anxiously warn Joshua—but to no avail.

The prairie’s fourth fire explodes, and this time destroys entire swaths of the ranch—corrals, winter shelters, barns, hay, grains and gardens. Overwhelmed, the exhausted burrowing animals send out distress signals that are thankfully answered by a platoon of eastern beavers—but it’s not enough.

The ranch burns on and the spring-born calves, foals, kids and lambs begin to fall injured. All looks bleak on the ranch as many more animals die in the fire and others suffer permanent lung damage from inhaling the thick smoke, made toxic from the prairie’s poisonous over-fertilization.

Eventually, seeing smoke on the horizon and hearing the animals’ distress, a bison herd escape their nearby pen where they’ve been relegated despite living longest on the prairie. The bison help the exhausted burrowing animals and owls dig the required trenches and stamp out the fire—saving the ranch.

Realizing the many lives lost and destruction around them, the animals angrily turn on Joshua and his followers.

The magpie protests, “I’m sorry, I’m not sorry. It’s not my fault! I was following Cheryl’s advice. She’s the fire expert. We didn’t need help, especially not from beavers—they hate us.”

Annoyed by Joshua’s incessant squawking and lack of remorse, a bison elder charges at the petulant magpie and his followers, who together run away, still bellowing and barking about cow patties and beaver conspiracies.

“What now?” squeak the mice, licking their burnt paws with singed whiskers and blackened faces.

The wisest bison elder scans over the remaining animals and speaks solemnly. “The fire was Mother Earth’s way to remind you about your ranch’s lack of balance and the danger of over-extracting this land. We cannot live apart from nature nor divided between animals.”

Leaderless, the animals ask Hannah the swift fox to lead them again.

“What are we going to do?” meow some kittens, poking their heads from behind a scorched haybale.

“We will bury and remember our dead,” says Hannah, softly. “We will thank the brave animals who sacrificed for all the others—then we rebuild.”

“Woof!” barks the largest dog. “The fire wasn’t so bad. Let’s just go back to how things were.”

Protest and bickering flare among the animals, venting their sadness and frustration caused by the collective losses.

“I know we just want to forget and move on,” says Hannah. “But we can’t. The fires may return, and many would have died and much lost for nothing if we don’t learn and change.”

Dr. Fabreau is a general internist at the Peter Lougheed Centre, director, Refugee Health YYC Research Program, O’Brien Institute for Public Health, and an assistant professor at the University of Calgary.

The post The Cautionary Tale of the Grassfire and the Prairie Ranch appeared first on Alberta Views.

The bullet, however, split the branch where the partridges roosted, and as its two halves snapped together, all the birds were caught by the feet! As Johnny went to collect them, he slipped and fell into the nearby river. Struggling his way back up the muddy bank, Johnny noticed his pants, which had filled with water, were now teeming with fish. Johnny was saved! “You never know when your luck’ll change!” he said.

This scene is from Johnny Chinook: Tall Tales and True from the Canadian West, a 1945 collection of folktales, popular history and travel writing by Robert E. Gard. The character of Johnny Chinook, Gard’s own invention, appears periodically in the book, linking its various vignettes. Johnny Chinook is “a muse, or spirit, [a] supernatural being,” Gard writes, “who represents all the good storytellers in Alberta.” Written by an American who only lived in Alberta a few years, Johnny Chinook was nonetheless a foundational and influential expression of official, state-funded Albertan culture.

Much like Johnny’s, Alberta’s luck was changing in the mid-1940s. After a decade of Depression, wartime spending had pushed the economy into the black, and an oil strike in Leduc was about to ignite a boom that would last largely uninterrupted for four decades. More than anything, however, Gard’s book reflected Alberta’s recent Depression-era experience as well as its colonial past. Through its commitment to ordinary people’s stories, Johnny Chinook displays a working-class sensibility, and its humorous, sometimes satiric tone demythologizes the so-called frontier.

Robert Gard was born to a middle-class family in the farming town of Iola, Kansas in 1910. As a young man during the Depression—“a sad time and a bad time” as he wrote in his 1956 book Grassroots Theatre—Gard took to the road with thousands of other itinerant men. He eventually attended the University of Kansas, where he studied drama (against his lawyer father’s wishes), and, with the help of the New Deal-era College Student Employment Program, found his first job as a helper at the university’s theatre. On a scholarship he then shipped off to the prestigious Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to study under A.M. Drummond, a specialist in folk drama. Under Drummond’s direction Gard helped produce and perform plays for popular audiences across upstate New York.

As Gard writes, in Ithaca he put on “country theatre experiments” with the aim of “developing fine original plays authored by the people of the area.” Gard travelled to towns and villages, conducted interviews with residents and incorporated their stories into a play he wrote in collaboration with them. The show was then performed in the town, with roles often filled by the residents themselves. Gard would use similar methods of community engagement to write Johnny Chinook.

Folk culture was an especially influential force in the early decades of the twentieth century, and it continues to appeal today. Fuelled partly by a disenchantment with modern society, folk culture is an attempt to find authenticity in the traditional arts and culture of rustic and rural peoples, those supposedly least touched by modernity and in most direct contact with nature and the land. Urban, middle-class cultural producers selected, collected and purveyed folk cultures to a wider audience, shaping to a large degree what was seen as legitimate.

Unsurprisingly, folk culture is a strong influence on Gard’s Johnny Chinook. The foreword, penned by Donald Cameron, president of the University of Alberta Department of Extension (where Gard worked), indulges in a painstaking description of Alberta’s geography and weather before proffering those as a foundation for an Albertan identity: “The people have become acutely aware of the Alberta sunshine, the hail, the rain and the warm chinook wind with its mysterious arch in the west. Such things have had much to do with the creation of a distinct western spirit, an optimism that is at once hopeful and fearful, a sense of humour.”

For as compelling as folk culture can be, in his book The Quest of the Folk, Canadian historian Ian McKay points out that folk culture was popular in elite institutions partly because it defined “the people” in a way that overwrote class conflict in contemporary capitalist society. The land could be the source of a shared provincial or national identity, encompassing everyone who lived there, whether worker or boss, renter or landlord, papering over more meaningful tensions over ownership, control and distribution of wealth. In colonial societies such as Canada, folk culture tended to erase, belittle or romanticize Indigenous peoples, the actual first inhabitants of the land.

Johnny Chinook represents all the good storytellers in Alberta.

Gard came to Alberta in 1942 to teach at the Banff Extension School, the predecessor of the Banff Centre for the Arts. There he taught playwriting to summer students, and in 1943 he settled in Edmonton at the University of Alberta, where he became head of the Alberta Folklore and Local History project, establishing the short-lived Alberta Folklore Quarterly. This and later work was funded by numerous grants Gard received through the Rockefeller Foundation.

Gard quickly became a prominent public intellectual, “the Mark Twain of Alberta” as he was labelled by the press. He lectured across the province, at the same time collecting material for his folklore initiative, “asking people desperately about their yarns, materials about themselves and their places.” This material would be the basis for Johnny Chinook. Gard even read some of these stories on air at CKUA radio in Edmonton on a popular show.

Gard was a key member of the earliest cultural institutions in Alberta. The Banff School was one program of the University of Alberta’s Department of Extension, which offered informal adult education across the province. Established with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation in 1933, U of A’s was the country’s largest such program, reaching some 380,000 Albertans in the 1930s. Teachers travelled to far- flung towns and villages to offer free lectures in community halls, church basements and barns. As academics PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall write in their book Uplift, public arts education in Alberta promised students “a higher quality of life, moral uplift and shared citizenship.” It was during these years also that the CBC and NFB were established, with mandates to educate, inform and entertain the public.

It wasn’t a coincidence, however, that such programs, funded both by governments and by wealthy philanthropists, were launched in midst of the Great Depression when popular support for capitalism was being deeply shaken. Political parties such as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Communist Party of Canada provided free education to their members on topics including arts and culture. Amid the intense class conflict of the era, state- and philanthropist-funded public education programs sought, as Reichwein and Wall emphasize, to promote “social harmony” by “align[ing] popular taste and knowledge with elite, conservative values.”

Whatever the higher goals of these institutions, art does not always lend itself to such instrumentalization, and Gard himself was primarily interested in the development of local culture. “I have wanted the arts,” he wrote, “to come into their own as a vital force in community life.” Because Johnny Chinook is interested in the stories of ordinary Albertans, the book ends up criticizing capitalism and colonialism.

Gard’s books display a fondness for the working class and outlaws—who are often the same people. In Fort Macleod, Gard hears the story of Jeff Davis, an ox-cart teamster who, after the arrival of the southern branch of the railway, is ordered by his employer to deliver the oxen to the slaughterhouse. Davis is so attached to the animals, however, he can’t bear to do it. Gard writes: “You can imagine how Jeff felt. He sat on his wagon seat and thought the matter out. The oxen symbolized his whole life, the plodding, the twelve-miles-a-day treks across the prairie, the camp at night[…] It seemed to Jeff that his life had ended.” Taking it upon himself to save the oxen, Davis hides them in a distant pasture, claiming that they had wandered off and gotten lost. Still attached to the beasts, however, Davis visits them every night under cover of darkness until one evening he’s discovered and the oxen are repossessed.

In Lethbridge Gard hears the tale of Dave Cochrane, a well-known character who squatted on various properties, resisting all attempts to dislodge him. In the meantime Cochrane lived frugally. In one anecdote he steals a stove from a detachment of the nearby North-West Mounted Police. Cochrane ingeniously makes off with one piece of the stove at a time, while hauling away other junk, then reassembles the pieces at home. “Not long after this,” as Gard retells it, “[a] police officer paid a visit to Dave’s cabin, and saw the fine-looking stove. ‘Where did you get that new stove, Dave?’ asked the Mountie. ‘Why,’ said Dave, ‘it was amongst the junk you told me to haul away from behind the Barracks!’ ”

Later in the book the author travels to Waterhole, Alberta (now a community in Fairview, in Peace Country) to interview John Sweeney, a retired agricultural labourer and amateur poet known as the “Bard of the North.” “One thing that does make me good and mad,” Sweeney says, “are these fellows who set out to make a lot of profit out of the man who doesn’t have anything anyway. I speak my mind about this whenever I get a chance, and as a result some people call me a communist.” Gard reprints Sweeney’s verse at length:

In Heaven I never want a seat,

If I have got to shovel wheat.

To tell the truth upon my soul

In Hell I’d rather shovel coal,

To keep old Limbo good and hot

And burn the whole infernal lot.

That owns a damn old threshing rig

And tries to make their profit big.

Sweeney adopts the traditional social hierarchy on earth, in this satiric version of the afterlife, with bosses on top and workers below, only to invert it when the worker stokes the furnace so hot that he exacts revenge on his exploiters above.

Along with its appreciation of working-class heroes, Johnny Chinook displays a populist disdain of the professional classes, including lawyers and doctors. Gard retells a story of a Dr. McMurder and Dr. Slaughter who perform unnecessary surgery on their patients just so they can charge them more. “I wonder if I’ve given him an overdose of chloroform,” says Dr. Slaughter. Then, “with his ears against the patient’s chest, Dr. Slaughter laughed heartily,” before rushing off to spend his windfall on a lucrative bit of real estate, his patient still unconscious.

The oil industry receives a relatively brief treatment by Gard. He was writing in the years before the discovery of major reserves at Leduc in 1947. But of the earlier strike in Turner Valley, Gard writes, “Calgary’s staidest citizens engaged in an orgy of speculation which reached such fantastic heights that some brokers used waste baskets as temporary containers of money eagerly offered by purchasers of oil stock—most of it entirely worthless.” Having lived through the carnage of the Great Depression, Gard was understandably critical of this kind of rampant speculation.

To my mind, the funniest section of the book is about “remittance men,” what we might call today “trust fund kids.” These younger sons of well-to-do British families arrive in Alberta intent on setting up a ranch or a farm, but mired in incompetence and bad habits, they don’t get very far. Gard retells the story of an unnamed Britisher who spent all his allowance in the bar at High River. When surprised by an unannounced visit from his family, the young man gave his father a tour of a friend’s ranch, pretending it was his own. Satisfied with his son’s progress, the father left his son an extra 1,000 pounds—which he spent on drinks for his friend.

Alberta’s “country western” identity proves adaptable to the uses of swaggering corporate executives and working-class people alike.

Johnny Chinook includes many stories about Indigenous people, some of them containing offensive tropes common to the era. While no one should treat Johnny Chinook as an authority on Indigenous culture in Alberta, the book does in its way attempt to include Indigenous perspectives. Gard retells a lengthy story offered to him by Chief Mike Mountain Horse of the Blood Tribe, whom he met in Lethbridge. One story is the epic of Charcoal, a member of the Blood who became a fugitive from the RCMP after killing his wife’s lover and who was executed by hanging in 1897.

In Rocky Mountain House Gard writes about the nearby O’Chiese First Nation, which refused to sign Treaty 6 until 1950, five years after the publication of Johnny Chinook. Gard adopts the O’Chiese’s point of view in reporting the issue: “In refusing the offer the Indians argued that this was their country and had been theirs long before the white men arrived[…] They said that the white man was the intruder and should leave them in peace on the land that had been theirs since the world began.”

The same year Johnny Chinook was published, 1945, Gard left U of A for a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he spent the rest of a storied career. He wrote dozens of plays, essays and books, becoming a dynamic administrator in community arts and working in educational initiatives at state, national and international levels. Gard passed away in 1992 at the age of 82. In 2003 a foundation promoting Wisconsin community arts was created in his name and continues today.

Despite his brief tenure in Alberta, Gard did leave a legacy. While at the Banff School, he taught drama to Elsie Park Gowan, who would pen many stage plays and CBC radio plays in the 1950s and 1960s. The work of influential Albertan poet, novelist and academic Robert Kroetsch, especially his 1967 book set in the Great Depression, The Words of My Roaring, seem particularly indebted to Johnny Chinook’s tall-tale style.

Johnny Chinook was a key contribution to official Albertan culture, shaped by folk notions as they were imagined for Alberta. As the postwar welfare state developed at both the provincial and federal levels, financial and institutional support for Albertan cultural production grew, as recommended by the 1951 Massey Commission. Johnny Chinook was republished by Mel Hurtig in 1967, Canada’s centennial year, a nod to its importance in official Canadian culture as well. That edition was illustrated by Walter Phillips, another icon of Alberta culture.

Over the ensuing decades, cosmopolitan values such as multiculturalism and diversity have mixed with Alberta’s folksy, western image, sometimes ingeniously, sometimes uneasily. Clearly Alberta’s “country western” identity is still powerfully resonant, proving remarkably adaptable to the uses of both swaggering corporate executives and working-class people. To my mind, however, Johnny Chinook’s sympathies are with the latter.

The post Johnny Chinook appeared first on Alberta Views.

Ronald Ross Annett was the author of a long-running series of family-friendly short fiction in the iconic American magazine The Saturday Evening Post. His 72 stories, appearing between 1938 and 1960, feature six-year-old Babe and her family: father Big Joe, drunken Uncle Pete, tutor Miss Hans and older brother Little Joe. The stories are set in the fictional prairie town of Benson, Alberta—inspired by Annett’s life in the farming village of Consort, Alberta, where he lived for 30 years. With his fiction appearing regularly in a magazine that enjoyed a weekly circulation of six million at its height, Annett may have been the most widely read Canadian writer of his time, and most certainly was the most widely read Albertan.

Why, then, has Annett’s work fallen into obscurity His stories were strongly shaped by a Depression-era populism, which aligned the common “people”—generally Babe’s family—against the “elite”: the police, debt collectors, the wealthy, even a fussy reverend. This populist vision thrived during the scarcity and class conflict of the 1930s. In the post-Second World War period, however, Annett’s populism fit awkwardly into a nation growing in affluence and developing a social democratic consensus, which accepted the legitimacy of elite management of the economy, government and even culture, through cultural institutions such as the CBC, the Canada Council for the Arts and the expanding public universities. Today, we are living through our own economic and political turmoil, with the legitimacy of the social democratic nation severely eroded by decades of neoliberal disinvestment, and with distrust in institutions and elites growing. In our time of renewed populism, Ross Annett’s Babe stories are worth revisiting, not just for history’s sake, but also for their unique charms and comforts.

Annett was born in 1895 in Watford, a farming village in southwestern Ontario, halfway between London and Sarnia. According to a 1941 autobiographical note included in The Saturday Evening Post, Annett lived in New York as a young boy, but then was sent back to Watford to live with his grandparents, where he spent the rest of his boyhood. (His mother’s grave is in Saratoga County, New York, and so perhaps she never returned to Canada.) A 1978 biography lists Annett’s favorite writers as Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and—the most obvious influence on Annett—the late-19th-century popular adventure author G.A. Henty. After graduating high school, he took a job at the London Advertiser and sold his first story, a piece about hunting, to the Canadian outdoors magazine Rod & Gun. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Annett attempted to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force but was rejected for being too short. Then he moved west, to Wetaskiwin, where a brother lived, and there he met his future wife, Lenora (known as Leyanne). Annett hustled jobs around central Alberta, including as a farm labourer and biscuit salesman, but found out he could make as much money teaching. After brief assignments in Thorsby and New Norway, in 1915 he successfully enrolled in the armed forces, joining the Western Universities’ Battalion. He fought and was wounded in the hip at Vimy Ridge, which incident, according to The Saturday Evening Post, left Annett with a limp.

The acceptance letter came with a request for more stories—and a cheque for $500. That was nearly half a year’s salary in Annett’s school district.

After the war Annett returned to teaching in towns across Alberta and dedicated more time to writing for “the pulps”: westerns, war adventure and detective stories. He married Leyanne in 1922, and a year later the couple found themselves in Consort, where Annett was teaching at the school. However, in 1924, still hoping to become a professional writer, Annett packed up his young family and headed to the US, first to Great Falls, Montana, then Salt Lake City, then finally New York City. “To make money, you have to go where the money is,” Annett wrote about this experience in Maclean’s in 1926. The young family rented in New Jersey while Annett worked an office job in Manhattan. By 1929 he had a poorly paying magazine writing contract for an overwhelming 20,000 words a month for Street & Smith Publications, which owned several pulp outfits. With the Depression now beginning to bite, in 1930 the couple returned to Alberta, settling again in Consort, where Annett was offered the principalship of the school. The farming village in eastern Alberta became the Annetts’ long-time home and furnished Annett with the material for his unlikely writing success to come.

While working as a teacher and raising his family, Annett still wrote and sent out stories, with declining success as the Depression wore on and publishing venues closed. According to a 1956 column in the Calgary Herald Annett liked to write late at night. He’d drink a pot of strong coffee at 10 p.m., stop for a pipe of tobacco at midnight, then keep writing until 3:00 a.m.. The Christmas break of 1937 allowed Annett some breathing room, an opportunity to put extra care into a story called “It’s Gotta Rain Sometime,” about a widower father on a dustbowl farm. He sent it to the prestigious and well-paying The Saturday Evening Post on January 31, 1938. “I never even told my wife,” he said. “Just false hopes.” On February 17 the acceptance letter came, with a request for more stories—and a cheque for $500. That was nearly half a year’s salary in his school district. “I’ll never forget getting my first $500 cheque,” he said in a 1971 interview. “Word got around, and the postmaster asked, ‘Gee, Ross, that’s for how many volumes?’ ”

Annett would publish another story in the Post that year, “The Tooteress,” in which he introduces the character of Miss Hans, and both stories were smash hits. In a poll of Post editors “It’s Gotta Rain Sometime” was chosen story of the year, and “The Tooteress” received top spot in a poll of Post readers.

In 1941 Annett quit his day job to write full-time for the Post, publishing four or five Babe stories a year for the next 22 years. Established with the Post, Annett wrote little else during his career, although I found three of his short stories published in Maclean’s magazine in the early 1940s. In 1953 Annett moved to Edmonton to be near his adult children, and while he lived in the provincial capital until his death in 1988, Annett, his wife and two of his children (that I know of) are buried in the Lakeview cemetery in Consort, indicating the deep connection they felt to that place.

Annett’s characters are simple but charming. “Children and even animals took to Big Joe fearlessly,” Annett writes of the wheat-farming and cattle-raising father, despite his “ragged black mustache and generally uncouth appearance.” Big Joe, too, is loyal to the memory of his dead wife when it comes to taking care of the family. The equally lovable Uncle Pete is an “old soak” who only desires two things: his next drink, and the best for Babe. “Sometimes his bleary eyes rested upon Babe with a faint awareness, as though he were thinking: In an otherwise drab world, ain’t she somethin’.” Babe herself is an angelic creature whose “yellow hair was bright as summer sunlight,” who likes everyone and is adored by them in turn. Eight-year-old Little Joe, “black of hair and eyes and mood,” likes hunting gophers but hates school. The severe tutor and housekeeper Miss Hans extracts Uncle Pete and Big Joe from their run-ins with the law: “Are you smart or are you smart,” Big Joe will typically say to her.

The plots almost always revolve around money. Big Joe needs gas for the tractor, Little Joe wants a .22 rifle, Babe wishes for a new Sunday dress—but where will they find the money Sometimes Big Joe and the family rebuff an evildoer’s deceitful design, like the rich rancher Bill Hausmann, who falsely claims they rustled his cow. The earliest stories relate the impoverishment and precarity of the Depression, as Babe and Joe don’t even have enough clothes: “Their bare hands were blue with cold, for it was a raw March day and they had no mittens. They had no stockings either. Bare legs and feet showed here and there through rents in overalls and shoes.” Whether Annett’s family experienced this level of poverty, I don’t know, but certainly for Annett money was a constant concern. In a 1941 editorial note to the Post Annett says, “Sometimes I think I write because I need the money.”

Annett writes adeptly in different genres over the run of the series, producing comedy, mystery and western stories, consistently delighting with a twist ending. His limited means (stock characters, happy endings) spur admirable creativity, much as a skilled cook, constrained by frugality, uses the same ingredients to produce new recipes each time, with an added spice here and there.

Nothing bad ever really happens to Babe or her family. In a clever metatextual commentary, Annett shows he’s well aware that his duty is to provide feel-good tales. In the 1939 story “Uncle Pete Laid a Negg,” Big Joe is telling Babe a tragic bedtime story—about a blind girl named Mabel and her dead cow—but soon realizes he needs to change tack:

“‘O-o!’ moaned Babe. A hot tear fell on Big Joe’s hand and played hob with the stern realism of the creative artist. Having decided upon a happy ending, Big Joe made a thorough job of it… Babe sighed happily. Big Joe wished the Lord would banish grown-ups’ troubles as quickly as he himself could wipe away Babe’s.”

In the 22-year run of Babe, the children do not grow up and the adults don’t age. “The Post actually ran a poll with their readers,” said Annett in 1978, “and thousands wrote in saying ‘Never let Babe grow up.’” With its creator thus committed to keeping things as they are, as the years wear on Babe’s world is out of step with the emissaries of the contemporary world that arrive, and this becomes the source of narrative conflict. In the final instalment of the series, “Big Joe’s Dilemma,” published in 1960, the modern style of the young woman selling encyclopedias—“who is so sleek and self-possessed”—both intrigues and threatens Big Joe, “who feels more than usually big and awkward.”

Yet if read the right way Annett’s stories register the passing of time in his own life. A story in the Calgary Herald on May 8, 1944, reports that Ross Annett’s son, Robert J. Annett, a sub-lieutenant in the Canadian Navy, was missing in action after the sinking of HMCS Athabaskan. The ship was torpedoed on April 29 while engaging German vessels near Île-de-Batz, off the northwest coast of France, killing 128 Canadian sailors, Robert Annett among them. Robert (Bob) Annett’s service portrait can be found online, showing a shyly smiling, good-looking young man of 19. The next story his father published in the Post, just one month later, in June 1944, hinges on the return of a young man named Wally Stevens, who is sorely missed by his elderly father. Wally makes a triumphal entrance in a climactic courtroom scene:

“Hi, pa!” cried Wally. He left the stand and bounded across to his father, hugged the old man to him.

“Wally!” cried Mr. Stevens. “Where you been, Wally?”

“I’ve been bombin’ Germany, pa.”

“I knew it!” declared Mr. Stevens, looking about him proudly, and everybody cheered.

This happy ending, as pat and formulaic as it is, is in fact what tens of thousands of Canadian families like the Annetts would have preferred to the news they did receive.

Annett had four sons with his wife Leyanne, and one daughter, Carol Lynn. She was born in August 1937, five months before Annett sent his first story to the Post featuring the angelic Babe. Sadly, according to findagrave.com, Carol Lynn died in April 1940 at the age of two. Annett never mentioned a daughter as inspiration for the Babe character, but a story titled “Especially Babe,” published in the Post in December of that year, just a few months after Carol Lynn’s passing, is Annett’s most lyrical, perhaps the best of all his stories. “There was a snoring wind that you had to lean into,” he writes in the opening paragraph, “It whipped at Babe’s dress and stream-lined her yellow hair and snatched the words from her lips when she tried to speak.” In this story, Big Joe is plunged into renewed grief about his long-dead wife, described with elegant simplicity: “For awhile it was hard to see anything was worth while.” Annett himself seemed to consider “Especially Babe” his best story, or at least the most representative of his work, since he named his one and only book after it. And the dedication page reads “To Babe.”

Magazine publication meant Annett’s work would be ephemeral. Especially Babe can still be found used online and in most Alberta libraries, and while it’s still a delightful read, the stories lose some of their charm by not appearing in their original format accompanied by the striking visuals of the Post’s illustrator, Amos Sewell.

Annett never completed a novel, which might have given him a firmer presence in the literary canon, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. An editorial note in the Post in September 1939, just a year after his first Babe story, announced that Annett was working on a novel, as did another interview with Annett in the Calgary Herald in 1971. In 1978, however, he said that by the time he retired the Babe series and had more time, he had “lost his pep.”

The biases of Canadian cultural institutions also militated against including Annett in the canon. Canadian culture was built by explicitly differentiating itself from the American. But Annett’s major work appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, an iconic publication of its era, the famed outlet of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations, and a magazine that claimed on its cover (rather dubiously) to have been founded by an American founding father, Benjamin Franklin. In George Melnyk’s The Literary History of Alberta, Annett’s work is described as “Americanized.” But in Annett’s day, especially during the Depression, there were few publishing opportunities in Canada. “I always resented having to sell in the US,” wrote Annett, “but I had to make a living.”

In his introduction to Annett, Wiebe claims Annett as “the first of the popular prairie humourists,” and we can understand Annett better by comparing him to Canada’s recognized master in the genre, W.O. Mitchell. A 1942 editorial note in Maclean’s, which had recently published stories by both Mitchell and Annett, mistakenly asserted that both men lived in Castor, Alberta, and that they knew each other. Only Mitchell lived in Castor, but the mistake is understandable given the similarities of their humorous prairie tales.

Given that they work in a similar genre and are from the same region, the differences between the two men’s writing are perhaps more revealing. Mitchell, born in 1916, was nearly a generation younger than Annett. Mitchell’s tales are doubtlessly more modernist and more psychologically complex than Annett’s. Coming to prominence in the postwar era, Mitchell’s work embodied the dominant ideology of the emerging affluent nation, with its existentialism and humanist liberalism, philosophies that highlight individual experience. For the growing middle classes in the postwar period, with the worst problems of capitalism apparently solved, life’s concerns took an increasingly individualistic hue.

Annett’s work, on the other hand, was honed in the Depression, a time of scarcity and intense class conflict. It was strongly populist, with an underlying ideology that distrusted the elite, the rich and the powerful. This point of view did not age well in the postwar decades of affluence, when the growing middle class aspired to be or actually were elites themselves. Annett’s simple characterizations often emphasized type—what class or group a character was—over their individual psychological profile. This can be insufficiently nuanced, and at times it was. But sometimes simplicity is morally clarifying.

Mitchell himself became one of these elite. He had a bachelors degree and a masters and held positions in key Canadian cultural institutions during his career, including as literary editor of Maclean’s, founder of the Banff Centre for the Arts creative writing program and writer-in-residence at several Canadian universities. None of these professional-class positions were available to Annett, a working writer. It seems Annett sometimes claimed (at least according to columnist Ken Liddell of the Calgary Herald) to have attended Queen’s University, although this fact doesn’t appear in any official biographical note.

Late in life, Annett perhaps regretted that he didn’t have Mitchell’s success. The 1978 biographical note for Especially Babe mentions that “it was his dream to live in a house in the foothills south of Calgary, close to trout fishing, but that dream never materialized.” Fair enough; that sounds like a pretty nice dream—but it’s also the rather well-known biography of W.O. Mitchell, who lived in a house in High River, now known as the W.O. Mitchell house, and whom the Edmonton Journal described as “a foothills fisherman” in 1948 on the heels of the success of Who Has Seen the Wind.

But if Annett had some regrets, I can’t help but admire someone who raised a family on his writing alone and who garnered millions of readers in his time.

Aaron Giovannone’s most recent poetry collection is The Nonnets (Book*hug, 2018). He lives in Calgary and in the Okanagan.

The post Ross Annett appeared first on Alberta Views.

Any recent library user knows it’s been ages since libraries simply offered what Bill Ptacek, CEO of the Calgary Public Library, calls “just buildings with a bunch of books.” He recognizes that “if that’s what we are, we’d have been extinct years ago.” Today’s library has become “a community centre on steroids,” in the words of Michael Brown, the president and CEO of the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (which played a large role in making the new Calgary building possible). Local libraries have begun to redefine their mission as supporting the multiple literacies essential to any functional 21st century citizen: financial, health, cultural and media literacy.

To see what this looks like in practice, and what difference it might be making to Albertans, I took a little library road trip in fall 2018.

You enter Edmonton’s downtown public library—in the temporary space it’s using until 2020— through Enterprise Square on Jasper Avenue. Inside, the swirl of activity sums up the glories and challenges of a truly inclusive urban space, and the abstract concept of multiple literacies takes obvious, concrete form.

Through a small window you can see a patron in headphones recording electric bass in a studio available to the public. You press yourself against the wall to make way for tightly managed herds of schoolchildren who parade past banks of computers where slouching Edmontonians scroll through job ads, play games and check email. Some mutter to themselves, others sway intently to earbud music. One kid-herd enters a glass-walled play space for reading time; another follows a tour of the whole library. Bright lime-green robots scattered on the floor await programming from other kids in coding workshops. Oblivious to the 40 or so children a few metres away, another musician works with audio-editing software, headphones clamped over her ears. Library staff help a customer log in to video games at a dedicated terminal, while digital librarian Holly Arnason of the library’s MakerSpace shows me things people have made with the library’s 3D printer, vinyl cutter and one-stop book-printing-and-binding machine.

When did the library become a workshop or an art and music studio As Ptacek put it: “The idea that you can create stuff in the library is a new thing. The idea of coming to a place where you don’t have to spend any money to learn how to use these state-of-the-art technologies—I think that’s what a library should be all about.” It’s certainly happening on Jasper Avenue. But what are libraries in smaller centres doing?

Just a short drive south, but far from the everything-at-once urban buzz of a downtown library, Lacombe’s Mary C. Moore public library fills up with mothers and kids on their way home in the late afternoon. In the central space, a long table holds platters of cookies—and we’re all invited to help ourselves! I’ve arrived in time for the annual Christmas baking contest, where adults and children judiciously nosh and comment. Some older patrons reading magazines nearby join in, and now it’s a three-generation cookie-fest. I ask some of the moms what—besides books and cookies—brings their families to the library. The answers include the armchair-travel speaker series (this winter includes Iraq, Afghanistan, India and the First and Second World War sites of the Lacombe Legion tour), the international film screenings, and all the online resources. Throughout my visit, behind a Do Not Disturb sign posted on the glass looking into the History Room, a highly concentrated young woman completes a university exam. If you take a distance education course you still need to write timed exams in a controlled space—public libraries provide that service too.

Compared to a big-city branch, Lacombe’s library seems very cozy and traditional. But it too works as a community centre serving multiple literacies. It plays a civic role of a physical town square in a time when so many “public” spaces have been privatized.

You see this contribution across the province: the Lethbridge main library branch’s recent renovation created a spacious community meeting room. As in so many European public libraries, Lethbridge also hosts social workers for part of each week, who can connect residents with mental health and addiction services, seniors services and so on.

In the downtown library’s main space, a wall covered with cotton shopping bags on hooks offers a financial literacy kit, a digital literacy kit or a book club kit (to help you start one up). To develop your physical literacy you can sign out basketballs, baseball kits, soccer balls, skipping ropes, horseshoes and lawn darts. But why, I ask the staff, do I see… a rubber chicken Silly question: It’s a “motivational throwing tool.” Anything to get patrons moving.

And there are snowshoes. I chat with local library user Nicola Wood, who explains her mixed feelings about borrowing snowshoes. Tramping around in the snow and cold was never her idea of fun. Still, she got out there to support her daughter’s curiosity about the sport. The experiment bore unexpected fruit when her daughter joined a group that’s now, aboard their very own snowshoes, helping conduct annual winter bird counts in the Crowsnest Pass. It’s an example of one form of literacy development leading to others—ecological and scientific, in this case. What’s more, it led one Lethbridge family to broaden their community connections.

This is not an isolated example. Another Lethbridge patron, Deanne Broderick, tells me how the library contributed to her life even before a library building existed in her part of town. As a new mother in West Lethbridge, she discovered that the public library housed children’s storytime programs in nearby senior citizens facilities, to the delight of the residents, the kids, and the mothers who needed to travel only a few minutes. Literacy-building turns into community connections once again. Deanne’s very earliest library experiences didn’t involve a building either. When she was 11 years old the highlight of her summers was the “old, stinky” school-bus bookmobile with its trove of Nancy Drews.

That bus full of books reflects the way libraries, for centuries, pursued their work of connecting, informing, teaching and supporting, mainly through print and cultivating print literacy. Today’s emphasis on fostering multiple literacies rests on another important motivation: removing barriers. Lethbridge library CEO Terra Plato can recite her mission statement to me from memory: “Lethbridge Public Library provides, preserves and promotes valuable resources, in a comfortable, welcoming place, where people of all ages can express their creativity, stimulate their imagination and satisfy their learning.” As she explains, “It’s all about making people more successful.” But which people All people—as she points out, you need not be a cardholder to use library space and resources. (You should still get a card, she insists, if only so you can revel in all the online material it provides access to, from music and film to instructional video and research databases.) “We’re one of the last truly open, available public spaces. We’re here to equalize the playing field for everybody,” she says.

Openness and inclusivity come with challenges. Plato notes that “as this very open public space, we were one of the first places to feel the impact of the opioid crisis. Lots of at-risk people spend time in the library.” For her this diversity of users is desirable: “We are here for everybody. We have standards of behaviour, but until they are breached, everybody’s welcome here.” (This policy has its critics: An online comment in the Calgary Herald called that city’s new library “the world’s most architecturally stunning homeless shelter.”)

This social-barrier-busting inclusiveness has never discouraged Nicola Wood from bringing her young children to the Lethbridge library. For them “it’s a safe public space where you can just hang out. I want my children to go out of the house. Get off their phones. Socialize. And this is an accessible space they can go to and do something good, cool, fun, interesting.” The family uses the library as a base from which to learn more about and get more involved in their own city. For instance, the Lethbridge Presents program provides library patrons with free tickets to concerts, basketball games and museums. As a result, says Nicola, “My kids can be more active and engaged in their community.”

By making community resources available for playful, barrier-free experiment—why not try the symphony if it’s free?—the library offers up the city’s cultural life for the kind of cost-free sampling and experimentation that happens when you randomly choose books from the shelf and discover a new favourite author. Facilitating these community connections benefits everyone, in part by creating a more resilient population: “People with connections to the community, who have something to do, are better able to cope with hard times,” argues Plato.

With these conversations in mind, I head back to Calgary for a good look at the new building—for now, the most celebrated and visible demonstration of the ongoing renewal of local public libraries’ mission. This includes embracing reconciliation as a fundamental part of libraries’ community role. One of the first things I notice in the new building’s soaring entrance is an enormous three-part mural by Keegan Starlight, Kalum Teke Dan and Roland Rollinmud. Raising my eyes past the mural, I find another of the library’s Indigenous placemaking elements, in the form of Lionel Peyachew’s buffalo sculpture composed of words from Indigenous languages. In the top-floor Elders’ Guidance Circle the furniture is by Glenna Cardinal, and on the wall a photo-text piece by Brittney Bear Hat addresses storytelling. Also on the top floor, Calgary’s inaugural Indigenous Languages Resource Centre builds on existing courses in Blackfoot, Michif and Cree, which local branches had already begun to offer in partnership with the city’s Aboriginal Friendship Centre.

“Being able to come into the library and share our stories—from Stoney, Tsuut’ina, Blackfoot… it’s an amazing step for Calgary.”
—Keegan Starlight

When I toured the library just before it opened in 2018, painter Starlight was making final touches to his section of the mural. He shared his own reaction to the new facility: “The inclusion we have now, being able to come into the library and share our stories—from Stoney, Tsuut’ina, Blackfoot… it’s an amazing step for Calgary. To have things like the Elders’ Guidance Circle; that’s where you see hope coming right back into the community.” Starlight, who is from Tsuut’ina, says his grandmother needed five languages to navigate her world, to make connections and learn what she needed. That learning took place face to face; it was spoken and heard. A “building with a bunch of books” could never have worked as a way of transferring and sharing that lived knowledge and wisdom.

In their own fashion, Alberta’s public libraries grasp that print literacy and solitary book-consultation now take their place within a constellation of multiple literacies and essential human exchange. Citizens need places to meet, to experiment freely with new ways of learning and creating, to gather and discuss and plan and decide. And while the visible architecture of our new “community centres on steroids” matters enormously, the less-visible human architecture of connections and increased capacities will form a more lasting gift from public libraries to their communities.

Harry Vandervlist, professor at the University of Calgary, has served on the editorial boards of U of C Press and NeWest Press.

The post The New Literacy appeared first on Alberta Views.

From “Swather As Threshold” in Afternoon Starlight

Charles Noble, poet, in these lines is speaking about being part of a farming family. His lineage goes back 115 years to his grandfather, Charles Sherwood Noble (hereafter called C.S.), who pioneered and innovated as a farmer in southern Alberta beginning in 1902, three years before the formation of the provincial Department of Agriculture. C.S. became famous even beyond his region.

“Grandfather was a gambler. He came from nothing,” says the younger Charles. Today, C.S.’s descendants still farm land—not the same fields, but nearby—east of Barons, northeast of Nobleford and about 40 kilometres north of Lethbridge. Charles, his younger brother Bryan and other family members including Bryan’s wife, Carol, work the farm.

Back in 1902, Iowa-born C.S. came up from North Dakota and acquired a homestead at Claresholm, where he would break the soil with a team of oxen. Lore has it that he was seen in 1905 plowing a field in bare feet, with three oxen and a horse.

This land, previously inhabited by Indigenous peoples of the Blackfoot Confederacy, is in the southwestern portion of the Palliser Triangle, the semi-arid region surveyed by John Palliser between 1857 and 1860 that stretches through what is now southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Palliser declared that the land was too dry for farming. Soon, however, the Canadian government was advertising it as good for growing wheat, and immigrants from poorer countries began flooding in.

Lore has it that C.S. Noble was seen in 1905 plowing a field in bare feet, with three oxen and a horse. By 1918 he had the biggest farm in the British Empire.

By 1907 C.S. Noble was already showing himself to be an ambitious, innovative, knowledgeable farmer and an astute businessman. “Take your soil seriously,” he said. By 1908 he was among the first to use a steam tractor to plow. In 1909 he bought 5,520 acres northwest of Lethbridge and moved the family there. The hamlet that arose nearby took the Noble name. C.S. built a general store and houses in the area. The hamlet was renamed Nobleford in 1913. C.S. combined his soil savvy with tolerance for risk, visionary scope spiced with megalomania, a dose of charisma and a penchant for “bigger.” His yields earned him championship titles—“Flax King” of Alberta in 1912, “Oat King” in 1915, and in 1916 “Wheat King” with a yield averaging 53 bushels per acre on 1,606 acres. By 1918 C.S. had the biggest farm in the British Empire, at 56 sections, or just under 36,000 acres. At one point he was running 600 horses and 61 binders. But in 1921 things took a bad turn. Drought, grasshoppers, hail, falling wheat prices, cutworms and creditors darkened the glory.

The world is falling apart
not apocalyptically apart
nor humpty-dumpty down
entropically at times
other times the King’s men
are up to the job
and a not terribly just
redistribution is born

Untitled excerpt from Mack The Naïf

C.S. lost almost everything, including the family house, but within eight years he had recovered and gone on to greater things. During the dusty devastation of the Dirty Thirties, he turned his mind and his machinery to soil integrity. He sought a method of tilling for fallow without disturbing the surface residue, to minimize soil drifting caused by rampaging winds. In 1936, at age 62, he invented a revolutionary farm implement—the Noble blade cultivator, a flat blade that cut through subsoil and disturbed the weeds but left the surface plant material bound and holding together against the winds. He fabricated a few blades for nearby farmers, and before long, demand—from down the road or as far away as Russia and Australia—became so great that he created an industry.

Up and down Alberta you travelled,
once on the railroad, on a handcar
preaching to the gathered farmers in small towns
methods of controlling the terrible soil drifting.
In the photograph you stand over six feet
in the crop up to your shoulders.

From “Big Ears In The Fields Say The Railroad Is Coming Through Till The Trains Flatten Them, or, The Devil’s CN” in Afternoon Starlight

While heading Noble Cultivators Ltd. and manufacturing other agricultural implements to keep up with changing technologies, C.S. continued to farm until his death in 1957. His son Gerald Noble was president and general manager of the manufacturing and farming enterprises. C.S. had also created the Noble Foundation to benefit his employees through profit sharing. At its operational height it had over 300 employees, and most of them referred to C.S. as “The Chief.”

“I relate to my grandfather through my father,” says Bryan Noble. “He was the main man in working for my grandfather…. He was put in charge of cleaning up the messes…. They had tremendous respect for one another but they had their battles.” Gerald, who had a degree in agriculture from the University of Alberta, was the troubleshooter and only person who would stand up to C.S. when he came up with a risky idea for expansion.

Charles elaborates: “Father was a good mechanic and welder and he used every excuse to get out of the office. He wanted to be more a farmer than a general manager of a cultivator company… there was a lot of stress… managing the company, all those employees, dealing with the bank. Dad was only 49 when he had the stroke and a heart attack at 51.” Gerald’s wife, Lillian, was also active in the businesses. Gerald Noble survived and continued his management role until the business was sold in 1978, living a year after that, to age 72.

The telephone rang as we expected it would.
I let my mother answer in her bedroom
while I sat in the big armchair in the den and waited,
hot and cold shivers electrified my back,
they did nothing but hook deeper.
A lump formed in my throat.
Finally she came into the front hall
and told me he was gone.

From “The Telephone Rang” in Afternoon Starlight

The desire to farm remained strong in the family. Bryan and Charles, as partners, with dividends from Noble Cultivators and the necessary bank loan, purchased their first land in 1981. They now farm 4,100 acres, or 6½ sections.

Bryan reflects on the knowledge milieu of his grandfather’s era: “It was a very different environment then. There was the Lethbridge research station. The door swung both ways. There was a great intellectual exchange between my grandfather and others. Now there’s been a complete erosion of that. I like to use the expression that it’s the closure of the intellectual commons, the conversation on patenting, genetics and varieties and so on. Now you see that all this public good has been transferred by governments trying to decouple from the expense of it. We have these beautiful research stations; we once had all the state-based funding for the scientists, but now their operational funds come from large agricultural firms. With the ability to patent technologies that once flowed freely from the research facilities, companies can bundle technologies primarily for their own gain. Common good is at best accidental. The landscape begins to become a reflection of these patented bundles of technology, for better or worse. Notions of research for public good, both present and future, are clouded in the process and it reshapes the countryside.”

“I have a tendency to feel like I’m under siege most of the time,” says Bryan. “Every time we would have market crashes or droughts, you would have this tremendous crush of people going out of business, and [the government’s] quick answer was… bigger farms… they’d be more economically sustainable… beginning with the Liberal federal governments from the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn’t publicized, but they had all sorts of policies to try and phase the smaller farms out.”

Of his poetry Charles says, “My aesthetic is digression upon digression and recapitulation trying to figure out—risking getting lost, in fact enjoying being lost.”

Nonetheless, the Nobles have shown that the “small” farm, if well and knowledgeably managed, is viable. “The moisture battle”—as Bryan calls it—is a constant challenge. Bryan is a proponent of no-till farming and continuous cropping, and he understands the science: “Each time you till a field you probably lose half an inch of moisture. You’re only getting eight, nine, ten inches of moisture in the summer season. If you till it five times you’ve lost two and a half or three inches of reserve moisture. Plus, as you break down the straw cover you lose a lot more to evaporation.” And microorganisms are depleted when tilling diminishes the plant material. On those fields left fallow you have the high cost and impact on the soil of weeding by machine, plus lost crop revenue, as compared to the expense of using herbicide and less fuel when “recropping.”

Standing in the farm
with botany, mechanics and business
clawing the air
over the frozen economy of buildings and fields.…
standing where the bank’s interest
sniffs around the fields and into the yard
like a twister …

From “Working Yourself Up” in Afternoon Starlight

Charles Noble is now semi-retired from farming and tills a different soil. He cultivates words—as an avid student of social and economic philosophy reading deeply into the heaviest tomes, and as a practising poet with 12 books to his credit. His work has appeared with publishers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Ontario.

“When I went to university [of Alberta],” he says, “I started writing poems instead of going to my physics class. I published in a little literary magazine that was inserted into the university paper.”

Charles received a BA in English and philosophy. He can readily discuss philosophers and economic and social critics from Plato to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Peirce. And poets Jon Whyte, Sid Marty, Walter Hildebrandt or Robert Kroetsch might pepper his conversation. The scope of his own poetry is as wide as the plains, and can be rural or urbane, serious or witty, referencing agriculture or modern myth, while harrowing language for its humour or authenticity.

Wheat plants rose out of the ground. I climbed up
and walked across their heads where the music faded
arousing the wind in the leaves and the dust we created.

From “2001 Monoliths” in Haywire Rainbow

The family takes pride in having a poet among them. Carol says, “I brag about it all the time, to everybody.” Bryan, who has an honours degree in English literature, continues, “It’s a source of pride, for sure. And there’s a circle of people in Lethbridge who overlap in the research and farming sectors that are aware of him.”

Charles, freer now to pursue his passions, is a fixture in two towns—Nobleford, where he occupies the grand family house, and Banff, where he’s lived part time every year since 1971 and where he can be found, evenings, reading or writing in his “office,” over two glasses of wine, at the end of the bar in the Saltlik Steakhouse.

“When I first moved here [to Banff], my mother and father were both alive and I wanted a little more freedom, rather than living in my parents’ home.… Banff was ideal… it was a nice size and I would run into these interesting artists and poets. So now I have two residences, and I like going back and forth. I like the big house [in Nobleford] with its 7,000-plus books and I like my den, that La-Z-Boy and a nice lamp.” By contrast, in Banff he’s “in a little cabin.”

Swinging down the middle lie
of Banff Avenue
at six thirty in the morning in August—
the light is visibly swelling
but is still coloured by the physical dark,
still given grey by the night psyche

From “I” in Banff/breaking

On crafting his poems Noble says, “My aesthetic is digression upon digression and recapitulation trying to figure out—risking getting lost, in fact enjoying being lost, and then recapitulation in order to find out how I got there… When I’m writing a poem I have lots of time to think.”

Now with Charles assisting just as needed, Bryan and Carol conduct the day-to-day farm operation in this area they’ve known all their lives. “I grew up in Barons,” says Carol. “Bryan played baseball with my brother. We were at parties together up at Keho Lake. That’s how we met.” Now their three children are grown and have dispersed.

“The one thing that’s most rare about our particular farm is that we’re probably the last generation that owns the bulk of their land,” says Bryan. “As land values go up it’s extremely hard to recapitalize every generation.” And few farm family offspring want to stay.

Daughter Jayne lives in Golden. Andrea lives in Nelson, but she does love to come back and help part time with the farm. She has a degree in fine arts and is reported to be terrific at maintaining a combine, not just driving one. “She sets it, fuels it, greases it,” says Bryan with a hint of pride. Michael, 32, an excellent mechanic, commutes from Lethbridge to work full time on the farm.

Bryan notes, “Michael looks at living here and I think one of the biggest holdbacks for him is that his kids would have to ride one and one half to two hours a day to go to school, likely in Picture Butte.”

Yet Michael, it seems, is the natural heir. “Michael has a good chance,” Bryan says, “by the good graces of his uncle [Charles], who is making it as easy as possible for him to take over the farm by not demanding to be bought out… If it weren’t for that and his Aunt Eleanor working out a deal for her half section it would be extremely difficult. And that’s why so many small farms disappear.”

“We’re probably the last generation that owns the bulk of their land,” says Bryan Noble. Meanwhile, few farm family offspring want to stay.

Andrea and Michael worked the 2017 fall harvest and Charles joined in for just four days. Despite an early-season drought, it was successful. “In some instances,” Bryan says, “the crops made do with what was there and in other instances because of the date of seeding they hung on long enough to catch a few showers in mid-August that made all the difference in the world.”

Their soft-wheat yield was about 115 bushels per acre—notably some of their land is irrigated. By comparison, this was just over double their grandfather’s 1916 yield of 54 bushels per acre of hard red wheat, a different strain, and on only dry land. This year the Nobles’ full harvest included spring wheat, durum wheat, canola, peas and lentils. “It was truly amazing,” Bryan says.

This farming business is a complex of unsparing factors and tests of resolve. But there are also unexpected exhilarating moments in this deep connection with nature. Carol tells of the time when Bryan came in and spoke tenderly to her about the tiny baby deer he saw lying in the open field after its mother, frightened by the tractor, had run away. Bryan jumped off his machine to pick up the fawn. Carol speaks for Bryan, who seems to be re-experiencing the emotion of that moment. “He said he held it in his arms and felt its softness, and then moved it to shelter. Bryan loves animals.”

Or there’s Charles’s story of working all night combining in the dark, spurred in anticipation of rain. “We’d finished the field and I remember driving home thinking oh, it can rain now. And the sun was coming up and I was going by the lake and it was all quite sublime. And of course it
didn’t rain!”

Wheat plants warmed like sun rays
coming back at the sun,
wormed up under my eyelids
so that the tight grey drooled down
where the swather reel flapped it up dry
with the chaff particles floating
over the separate thin fingers of the field.

From “On A Clear Day Night Rounds Them Up” in Afternoon Starlight

With luck, these fields, tended with care for decades, will continue to produce in the hands of Noble generations to come.

 Steven Ross Smith is a sound poet, fiction writer, arts journalist and arts activist, best known for his fluttertongue poems.

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But in this precise moment, when the doctor lifts my son up from Moonira’s last push and places him in her arms, I feel only astonishment. Wonder. The sight of my little boy bewilders me. I can’t believe what I see. Suddenly, there is a baby in the room. And he is mine. Suddenly, there is a father in the room. And he is me.

I am the first to say “It’s a boy.” The words erupt from me, and when I hear myself I am surprised how much it matters that I am the first to say it. That my first declaration as a father announces our child is a boy. Moonira, though, is the first to say his name. “Hello, Amedeo,” she sings to our wet and wiggling son. “Hello, Amedeo.”

We named him after my mother’s father. I’ve known my entire life that I would name a son Amedeo, and I suspect a part of me wanted a boy just so I could give him this name. I admire my grandfather. He was born in rural Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini forced him into a uniform during the Second World War, and he fought in Italy’s doomed North Africa campaign until the British took him to London as a prisoner. There, a Nazi bombing raid broke his back. After the war he walked across Europe to his hometown, where he married my grandmother. They had three daughters, but he left them when they were still young girls to find work in Calgary. He laboured for two years before earning enough to bring his family over the sea.

My grandfather is gentle and honourable and brave. He is the kind of father I want to be.

To read the entire article, from the November 2010 issue, click here.

Di Cintio revisits “Fatherhood”:

Somehow eight years have passed since Amedeo was born, and fatherhood still bewilders me. I remember in particular an emotional afternoon in 2015 the day before I left on a two-month trip to the Middle East. Amedeo looked up at me from his Lego and asked why I was crying. I told him I was going to miss him, then I fled the room to fetch a tissue. When I turned around Amedeo was standing behind me. He too was crying. “Daddy, I want you to have this,” he said, then handed me a hundred-dollar bill.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, suddenly less concerned with my trip than with Amedeo’s apparent stash of C-notes. He told me his Baba—my wife’s father, Taher—had secretly slipped Amedeo the money during one of his visits. Amedeo had been hiding it among his toys for months. Now he wanted to give it to me because he was going to miss me, too.

Baba passed away suddenly in the summer of 2016. He, like my grandfather, was gentle, honourable and brave. Amedeo adored him. That my little boy had to mourn a grandfather before I did seemed terribly unfair. The elder Amedeo is 94 years old. He is a little slower than he was eight years ago and, if you ask my grandmother, a little less gentle. But he is still the kind of father I want to be.

I admit I haven’t always managed this. There are times when I could have been gentler with my words. More patient and more kind. I feel a different strain of fatherly astonishment during those moments. I stand baffled by my own small malfunctions. Suddenly there is a father in the room, and he is failing. Thankfully, though, the joys far outnumber the failures.

There is something else nobody told me about before I became a father: the phenomenon of conjoined happiness. Not long ago, I watched Amedeo ride his bicycle smooth and straight for the first time. I physically felt his surge of accomplishment in my own chest from across the park. When I make him laugh—not the little giggles but the full-body guffaws that shake and bend his body—my own stomach aches. I feel his joy every time he scores a goal in soccer, and during the 3D fight scenes in the superhero movies we watch together.

I’ve enjoyed countless happy moments with my wife, my family and my friends over the years, but Amedeo and I share something both mystical and visceral. A telepathy of bliss. It is our own superpower.

Marcello Di Cintio’s latest book is Walls.

The post Retrospective: Fatherhood appeared first on Alberta Views.

Sometimes a person feels pain
when poems wait & grow
like feathery hands
silently reaching thru the rib cage
to touch the sun

(From “Circles,” Leaving, 1974)

I don’t doubt it, but after all, you did bag the first pheasant that day, so what’s the beef Some have snidely suggested that I resented Suknaski because he wouldn’t give a pheasant a sporting chance to take flight. If you replace the word “pheasant” with “poem,” there might be a hint of truth in this; otherwise, not. Given his financial situation (non-existent), Suknaski—a hunter and gatherer to the manner born—would not let a perfectly edible pheasant take wing, preferring to put the front bead of his faithful Cooey single-shot on it and blow it skyward himself. But imagine, if you will, having that same 12 gauge shotgun fired two feet from your ear, inside a car that day while you were busily filling your pipe bowl and innocently nattering on about the pioneering imagism of W.W.E. Ross. (The first question that springs to mind for many of you would be—who is W.W.E. Ross?) I think you can imagine the noise of the blast would be astounding. Some might actually piss themselves in terror. But to me, hardened by days spent running a chainsaw without ear protection, this loudly illegal tactic was less traumatic. All I said was, “Nice rain-barrel shot, Andy.”

In the backseat, a shadowy Suknaski, his trusty Peterson bent still fuming away, blinked owlishly at me over the gleam of his wire-rimmed specs. Picture Trotsky riding the Siberian railway in a film noir. He leaned forward and hooked a pipe-ashed thumb out the window at his ring-necked trophy. “Observe carefully, Meester; the muzhik has a pheasant. You and your famous Ithaca 16, you have no pheasant.”

Suknaski, then deeply immersed in Russian and Ukrainian history, constantly referred to himself in the third person in this wise. Muzhik (or mujik) is a term for the Russian peasant. It was a fitting handle, given his ethnic and socio-economic origins and salty rural habits. Ironically enough he was then wintering not in rural but in urban poverty, for a change, in Regina. While in “Redchina” as he styled it—in tribute to the NDP government—he haunted the main library, where the late John Newlove was then writer-in-residence. Arriving with a battery of pipes preloaded and a new MS to hand, he would barrage Newlove with his celebrated ethno-docu poems, then smoke him out of his office into the nearest bar. Newlove summed it up for me in a terse phone call one day: “The halls are alive with the sound of muzhik.”

That annual bird hunt was on a big-sky autumn day with the bite of winter in the breeze. In the afternoon, old pal Brian Coulter and I are busting through buck brush and rosebush on either side of the creekbed, shotguns at high port. Duke, Brian’s black Lab, is buried in willow bush below us. Suknaski is supposed to be between us. Bird hunters keep abreast of each other for safety’s sake, so Brian keeps urging Suknaski to keep up. Suknaski ignores all advice, his position in the thick willows marked only by an occasional smoke signal wafting up from his pipe. I picture him plucking pensively, betimes, at his prophet’s beard, communing with his muse. His battered Cooey, its fractured stock held together with duct tape, rests on the shoulder of his sheepskin coat. That’s right, sheepskin coat. Did I say Trotsky Actually, it was more like going bird hunting with Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Just then Duke sticks his muzzle out of some rose bush, freezes on point, and a cock pheasant bursts up from my feet like a winged rocket. I swivel around, throw up the shotgun, leading the bird’s head on a steep, going away angle.

Now, Suknaski, I know my 16 gauge was pointed your way when I squeezed that trigger, but goddamn it, there was no danger to you. You were bunkered eight feet in the ground and the pheasant was high overhead. A few pellets of spent shot bouncing off that bird, then pattering down onto that infamous railroader’s cap—remember that blue pom-pom and the eagle feather stuck through its strap That does not count as attempted murder, Andy. No doubt glancing up to see the dead cock pheasant falling out of the sky, with talons reaching out for you like a pre-Stephen Colbert eagle, freaked the shit out of you but it is not evidence of any murderous motive on my part, though I can’t speak for the pheasant. In fact, it proves I was not shooting at you and yet you assume the opposite. If ever there were a verbal athlete who could pole-vault over a wall of fact to arrive at a bizarre conclusion, albeit one rife with poetic truth, that would be Andrew Suknaski.

Who cares for lies when glimmerings of possible truth
flood some dark recess of the mind

(From “Dance in Wood Mountain Community Hall,” The Ghosts Call You Poor, 1978)

Exactly, and dark is the operative adjective for your mood change that day. I’m thinking Hillcrest Mine Disaster dark. Back in the car, confronted by an ominous silence, I finally turned around and demanded, “Andy, what the fuck are you brooding about?”

From the shadows, silence and then you muttered those angry words: “You tried to kill me, Meester. Not enough for you to be the mountain poet, now you want to kill the prairie poet and take over here too.”

There was no reasoning with Suknaski in that mood. We dropped him at his shack, the former telegraph office in Wood Mountain, there to brood about a fire that burned down his mother’s church, to ponder on about Babi Yar and Sitting Bull and attempted poeticide, or maybe to summon the ghost of General Custer by Morse code. Coulter and I decamped for Assiniboia to find strong drink and country-western music.

Dear paranoid Ghost-Who-Calls-Me-Poor: This is what happens to us sometimes in this parochial literary culture of hyphenated poets whose authenticity is pegged to ethnicity or postal codes. More to the point, this is what happens when I write a poem about a dead fox in Wood Mountain that gets anthologized more often than your poem about the same fox. And your reaction “You should go skin out the hide and have the fucking thing stuffed.” That was deliberately misleading, Andy. You knew very well coyotes had already shredded that hide. Also—damn your eyes—why do I keep addressing you as if you were alive to read this Get the fuck out of my head, Suknaski! Get back on the page, where you belong.

“Search in vain
in the rosebushes
finding only the cold reproving wind”

(From “The Grave of an Unknown Homesteader,” The Ghosts
Call You Poor, 1978)

Exactly; we all hate wading through rose thorns.

What’s the use. I’m going to be talking to your ghost for the rest of my life. Your death is a hole in my heart no stent of time or laughter can bridge. The last time I spoke to you on the phone and asked “How are you doing?” you said “Big loneliness, Meester; big loneliness.” I could picture nearly every one of the 655 kilometres to that halfway house in Moose Jaw. Do you realize you had no goddamn right to go crazy, get sick and die before your time like that Do I realize that is a stupid question Yes, I do. Do I ask myself questions I already know the answer to Apparently. It has become a form of verbal social disease these days.

Here’s what I think we were all trying to do out there, Andy: We were killing the blues, out where the only black dog was a grinning Labrador retriever. If I could have done it on purpose, I would have dropped another pheasant on your head that day, like some kind of gun-slinging Zen master saying “Yes, the sky really is falling. It’s not just an ethno-cultural memory, it’s right now; duck!”

Once, you were alive in the moment, in both body and mind. I saw your joy every day; I knew your competitive spirit. I remember those days at Lake Louise, where you worked every summer for many years. I can still see you running ahead of me, actually running up the steep mountain trail from Wapta Lodge to Sherbrooke Lake in a plume of pipe smoke, a fishing rod in your hand, a pack on your back and a huge cast iron fry pan depending from the pack frame and banging you on the ass at every step. I recall there was a hatchet head involved sometimes too, so the pan rang you like a bell at every jump, terrifying any grizzly bear within earshot.

Remember how you made the first cast at least a hundred feet from the edge of the lake Sometimes the lure landed on dry ground. I swear to god you built a fire of driftwood with one hand and reeled in the first trout of the day with the other. You never stopped moving, or allowed yourself a grin, until you had that first fish sizzling in a half pound of butter, mixed with shots of Worcestershire sauce and homemade bingo. Then you would reload your pipe with that mundungus blend of willow bark, kinnikinnick and Sutliff Mixture 79, snickering with glee, while I stood there gasping for breath, still trying to put my rod together for the first cast.

In a phone call back in 1989, your voice trembling, you asked, “Do you think we could make it up to Sherbrooke Lake one more time?”

“Are you kidding Listen, I’m sending you a bus ticket today. I’ll carry you up there on my back if I have to.” You chuckled sadly at the notion, and then there was a long silence; the most prolific poet and letter writer I ever knew was too weak to even write a note.

Clinical depression is no joke, but then neither is so-called normal life for a 70-year-old human, so I’ve discovered. Your fierce will pulled you through before, so try again anyway, like all of us crazy bastards have to do, I should have said, even to no avail; wake up for those who loved you and needed you. Don’t abandon us to our own darkness, leaving us with nothing but hindsight and maturity. Though the trail to the abyss is blazed with poems, step back, back from the brink and let that sonofabitch swallow its own disappointment. Let’s step from this dead gray room outside, where the prairie sun waits to throw its friendly arms around your shoulders, and come dwell, once again, in the land of the living.

Andrew Suknaski,
July 30, 1942, Wood Mountain, Sask.–
May 3, 2012, Moose Jaw

Sid Marty is the author of five books of poetry and five of non-fiction. He is currently at work on a new book of poems.

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The post How I Did Not Try to Kill Andrew Suknaski appeared first on Alberta Views.

“We were all Albertans. That was agreed upon and taken for granted. The catch was: where to find Alberta?”

This is how Robert Kroetsch introduces his masterful book Alberta in 1993. In the 300 pages that follow, he elaborates on that question. The physical facts of the province (established: 1905; area: 661,190 km2; population [1993]: 2,574,000 etc., etc.) were perfectly obvious, but for a poet like Bob Kroetsch—as for me, his Alberta friend—the search for much wider responses was necessary. What are we talking about when we talk about “finding Alberta”?

To begin with, neither of us personally chose to be Albertan. Bob’s mother “delivered him,” as we say, on the family homestead near Heisler on June 26, 1927; at age 12 I was carried into Alberta, May 15, 1947, in a brown ’30s Ford. It brought my parents and sister and me from the Saskatchewan homestead where I was born to a house my father had bought in Coaldale. I remember nothing of that first green glimpse of Alberta along Highway 1; there is only the certainty of packed back-seat nausea, the interminable rout of gravel in the wheel wells. But on Saturday, January 10, 1998, when I drove my red Celica on cruise-control pavement out of the Saskatchewan hills and down onto the Alberta prairie at that same spot, in the lowering winter dusk I saw an immense herd of antelope. Spread out along the highway and north over the misty shoulders of the hills, wild antelope, lithe bodies bent to hoofs pawing at the snow or suddenly twitching, jerking their heads up, staring. Pointed grey-white heads, hundreds upon hundreds.

“When the eagle comes,” Pauline said, “we know the Creator is watching over us.”

“Stop—please stop! Look, there’s an eagle—there!”

A Cree Elder, Pauline Shirt, was driving with me home to Edmonton. We had been visiting a mutual friend in the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge in the Cypress Hills, and she had looked to the sky while I had noticed only the animals on earth.

The eagle soared over the antelope, riding its giant wings motionless in the silver mist that enveloped everything we could see: bird, animals, snow and the orange thread of sun beyond the line of prairie. We stood together on the edge of the highway, looking, and the cold was fierce as fire.

“When the eagle comes,” Pauline said, “we know the Creator is watching over us. The eagle is his Messenger. He cares for us.”

The eagle’s high body slanted slowly into a relentless circle, and then, gradually, its head became a golden arrow pointing us. As it came on I could see its head tilt, back and forth, as if studying the ground, but then it was lifting, away from us over the antelope in the mist on the darkening hills.

“It’s hunting,” I said. “Looking for the weakest…”

“Yes,” she said. “He cares for us all.”

Our house in Coaldale is still where I look for it in May 2016. A year from now would be the 60th anniversary of our arrival here (three months after Leduc blew in) but, at my age, I better not wait. Still neat and exact: the three side windows facing the street, walls painted white and the asphalt shingles I nailed down a decade before my father died, the single side door. A short grey man answers my knock; when I ask he nods and moves aside for me to come in. We are in the kitchen-dining room lean-to I will never forget, the stove—first wood, then gas, now electric—stands exactly where my mother always made my favourite food, deep-fried kotleten (Russian Mennonite meat patties). I swallow, and I taste them. The grey man says nothing as I look around: the ripped ceiling, the debris and clutter, the incomprehensible, complete ruin of the room. The two doors, one that should open into the living room and the narrow one that once led up steep stairs to Liz and my bedrooms under the eaves, are both closed and suddenly I cannot endure this, I nod, turn, reach for the outside door. He says “I’ve lived here 17 years” and I close the door behind me

Edmonton, October 1967: I met Robert Kroetsch for the first time. My wife Tena and I had decided to return to Alberta after four years of my teaching creative writing in Indiana; he was still teaching in upstate New York, but we were both western Canada homestead kids with immigrant forebears whose mother tongue was German; we’d both graduated in English from the University of Alberta, and during the later 1950s wrote novels for theses—he a Ph.D. at Iowa, I an M.A. at Alberta. By 1967 we had both published two novels with large publishers and were furiously working on thirds. In fact, he was taking a “break” from his novel to finish a commissioned volume in “The Traveller’s Canada” series, Alberta; the manuscript would be complete by Christmas and published in 1968. He visited my university writing classes—he told us he had “a kind of mad missionary impulse to preach ‘writing’ to young westerners”—and we explored parkland Alberta all the way to Heisler and his Kroetsch grandparents’ beautiful 1905 farm site; we read each other’s books and talked, talked. After holiday celebrations with countless Kroetsch–Weller relatives, he and his wife and two small daughters left for England, where he could continue wrestling with The Studhorse Man. He wrote me he longed for Alberta—“I need the sun on my neck, the occasional blizzard”—and that he would “not miss the beautiful Sussex countryside in which we, at the moment, live. There are no sloughs in Sussex.”

I left Coaldale when I was 18. Like every immigrant child, but smart enough, I’d long been told I would want to become a medical doctor. In September 1953, Arts and Science faculty classes at the University of Alberta, Calgary Branch, were taught in Second World War barracks that stood on the present site of the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium. The English 2 classroom looked south down the Bow Valley to where “Robin Hood Flour” stuck up out of a carpet of city roofs. Calgary: 130,000 people. So huge to me then, its houses covered the hills even beyond the river.

It was English poetry that first hooked me. Sidney, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Donne, Herbert… and love, forever love, their only topic. I finally cornered the English prof, Wilfred Watson, smoking a long cigarette between buildings, and asked him what I did not dare in class: “Why is it, just all the time, love?”

He coughed, chuckled a little. He would not look at me, but after some time he questioned the sky,

“What else is there?”

Now, in 2016, when you drive over the crest of De Winton Hill, the city of Calgary fills the landscape. To get to Edmonton, you avoid Calgary altogether by following Highway 201 east and north, the snow line of the western Rockies hidden by endless banks of houses. And you remember: you are driving the Pan American Highway that stretches 30,000 km (18,600 miles) or more—depending on which route you follow—the length of two continents from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. You’ve driven parts of it north from Edmonton to Dawson City, to Inuvik, or south to Colorado, and also long desert stretches in Paraguay and Chile: a lifetime would be long enough to complete it, if only you had dared. As you did dare in 1954.

How far can you see in Alberta That depends on your imaginative eye; on not allowing your gaze to be “reduced by realism.”

Wilfred Watson in Calgary was explicating metaphor and simile, but then he stopped, stared out the window at the houses squared into blocks over the Bow River hills. We knew nothing of his writing; we found him consistently strange but had no inkling that within a year his book, Friday’s Child, would win the Governor General’s award for poetry. Now he said, “Look at that.” Obediently we all did. “Do you see it?” he asked. The city’s folded landscape of river and rooftops was so familiar, no one knew what to answer. “Don’t you see?” he said, as I abruptly recognized his hands were shaping tombstones in air. “It’s a graveyard.”

The easily memorized reasons and proofs and laws of physics, chemistry, zoology; compared to this sudden, questionable, seeing beyond our classroom window. I’d been fenced into hands-on work all my short life—weeding gardens, carrying firewood, hoeing beets, milking cows and cutting hay in Saskatchewan sloughs, being “rod and chain” and shovel man for the engineers laying sewers in Coaldale, heaving cases of Coca-Cola bottles off a truck and dragging dolly loads into restaurants in Crowsnest Pass and Waterton National Park, walking 2×4 house walls in Lethbridge and pounding spikes into rafters—but I had also been nurtured on singing, on prayer and spiritual contemplation, on story, especially the stories of escaping communism, on listening to the Bible, the poetry of the Psalms and Isaiah. So this particular illogic of image, this mystery of physical vision and the numinous words spoken over it—which inevitably revealed themselves again whenever I looked—would not let me go all that university term. Nor the summer months of mixing concrete while the sun burned me dark as Alberta mud, a relentless need I finally had to try and explain to my parents in Mennonite Low German: I didn’t want to study any more science. I was going to switch to arts.

“What do they do there, that ‘arts’?” my father asked. I was their youngest child, the only one (of seven) able to attend school past Grade 9, so the structured life of a profession….

What indeed. I fumbled, “Read… Jeschijchte….” Luckily that word means both “history” and “story,” so I didn’t need to elaborate.

“Just read,” my mother said. “But… what will you become, then?”

Indeed, what Nevertheless, I dared it, September 1954. Riding the Greyhound north through Calgary for second-year university in Edmonton I was apprehensive, almost afraid, very nearly happy. The delight and wonder of it: “It’s a graveyard.”

Do you see it How far can you see in Alberta That depends on your imaginative eye; on, as Bob Kroetsch once said, not allowing your gaze to be “reduced by realism.” For example, when you drive the Pan American Highway (sometimes called the Queen E 2) from Edmonton toward Calgary and come up over Antler Hill south of Red Deer and behold!—there’s the shining line of the Rocky Mountains, there, and you try to look back some 55 or 80 million years to when tectonic forces shoved continental plates over each other, crumpling, bunching them up like carpet on the rock floor of the Canadian Shield into those 3,000 miles of peaks. Or when you drive up between the folds of the Wolf Ear Hills north of Hardisty and stop to look east, the long fields of wheat and golden canola and hay become the rolling earth uncovered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet melting back to the Arctic some 15,000 years ago. Or when I walk from my log house down into the valley of Strawberry Creek and scoop a handful of coal from the thick seam in its cliffs, I see infinitely farther—140 million years or so—in the plant veins that rub into flecks of black between my fingers.

Our downstream neighbour Bruce Morden once told me of the mastodon bone he found exposed in a Strawberry Creek bend; 100,000 years old, the university profs told him. Long gone now, but the beaver, the unstoppable beaver he trapped on our adjoining lands with their curved dams and lakes and huge heaped houses, relentlessly gnawing down and peeling for supper any sprout of aspen and alder and willow, well, they were still here, more than ever; a million years ago, the profs had told him, they were giants weighing 300 pounds with cutting teeth six inches long.

“One and a half is long enough,” I said, and we laughed together. “But I wrapped chicken wire around that big poplar, they won’t get that one!”

“Never know,” Bruce said, “them buggers.”

And 20 years later, my neighbour has returned to the earth and I come along the same trail and—WHAT!—the tree is down, a shredded trunk heaved high in the air with its great green crown dropped perfectly into the pond behind the beavers’ secondary dam. They have clawed aside the wire mesh—rusted?—the wire still stands there, crumpled open around a gnawed two-foot stump—how many nights of work Giant splinters stick up out of the stump, ripped from the trunk when it crashed down and tipped over the cliff into the water, splinters bright as shredded paper.

Twenty years; relentless Alberta animals.

“The Traveller’s Canada” book Alberta, Bob’s wondrously detailed exploration of our geography and history and psyche, would be 25 years old in 1993. It seemed that in the quarter of a century since our Centennial celebrations, Alberta had transformed itself into a province second to none in Canada. He and I hatched an idea: Why not bring out a new edition, updated NeWest Press immediately agreed, so we planned our travel.

Sunday, July 5, 1992: Bob with a suitcase full of notebooks flies in to Edmonton;

Monday: we drive south via the Peace Hills (Wetaskiwin, and Maskepetoon’s peace treaties), the Medicine Lodge Hills, Didsbury (where my parents arrived from the Soviet Union in 1930) to Calgary; friend and writer Aritha van Herk welcomes us with broiled steaks;

Tuesday: Stampede day. Bucking horses, blacksmiths hammering, chuckwagons imitating millennia of chariot races, a $20 casino bet played and played until all is lost, cowgirl/boy lamenting poetry;

Wednesday: to The Gap where the Oldman River breaks through the Livingstone Range, and two cowboys packing salt blocks for communal summer pastures; Crowsnest Pass, backyard bachelor shacks and coal;

Thursday: to Lethbridge via the Siksika First Nation; fields big as countries, and grain elevators, abandoned farmsteads and one-room schools; my sister Liz and husband Nick; artist Isabel Hamilton talks Arctic painting and McIntyre Ranch;

Friday: enormous ranch on the Milk River ridge; Bob jots in his notebook “Some of the bulls aren’t doing their job”; Settler Days ice cream in Coaldale; the small house once my home; the cemetery where my parents are buried;

Saturday: east and north; pelicans on the Oldman River; cattle and antelope on prairie; Jenner Rodeo with an Australian rodeo clown in the arena; Bull’s Forehead Hill (Big Bear’s power bundle vision, 1840); Buffalo Trail north to Consort with k.d. lang lemon pie memories; Sounding Lake dry as bone (Big Bear’s futile Treaty 6 debate with Liard, 1878); Vermilion, and Bob’s sister Pat and husband Harley;

Sunday: three hours at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, and then to Edmonton; almost 3,000 km. Notebook refill.

Today’s Pan American Highway down the length of Alberta, 1,523 km from Indian Cabins on the 60th parallel to Coutts on the 49th, roughly follows the Ice Age corridor that, over the millennia, melted between the two immense continental ice sheets, the western Cordilleran and the eastern Laurentide. That is how Homo sapiens hunters spread throughout the Americas, by following the corridor south. West of Calgary, in a bend of Highway 68 above Sibbald Flats, is the earliest site yet found of humans living here. Eleven thousand years ago, the ashes and stones of their campfires, fluted spear points and arrows. Here, backed against the warm southern slope of the plateau, they would look out over the flats for animals—antelope, bison, elk—they could stalk and surround in their communal hunts for food.

Monday, July 13, 1992: our Travel Alberta journey continues, north from Edmonton to Athabasca, Slave Lake, Highway 88 through boreal forest over the Buffalo Head Hills to Tallcree Reserve and finally HBC Fort Vermilion (1788);

Tuesday: Fort Vermilion Experimental Farm (where our Edmonton apple tree came from), High Level, north to Meander River and west to boreal oil: Zama City (Hakan Sahin fixes our flat tire) and Rainbow Lake;

Wednesday: Assumption Dene Tha’ Reserve (band manager Steve Didzena, residential school survivor), Manning (in town, my niece Eunice), Dixonville (on ranch, my brother Dan and wife Isola), Grande Prairie;

Thursday: Pacific Rim Balloon Competition, Japanese balloonists: “This is the world’s perfect place for hot-air ballooning!” Beaverlodge (artist Euphemia McNaught), Wapiti River, Big Horn Highway to Grande Cache, quiet motel rest;

Friday: Hinton, south on Coal Branch Highway to Robb, Cadomin (bat cave), Luscar (open pit coal), Mountain Park (hillside cemetery and mountains); Bob’s notebooks stacked in the back seat; cross-country forestry road; Drayton Valley and Strawberry Creek Lodge;

Saturday, July 18, 1992: at the lodge, writers on retreat, writing; Leduc (Bob’s sister Kay and husband Al), Edmonton (Strathcona Hotel, rowdy beer), streets already in waiting for THE FRINGE ALSO RISES! More than 6,000 km of pavement and crushed gravel and we’re still laughing together.

The evening sky over the canola fields stunned me.… “Mom always said, ‘Alberta isn’t heaven, but for us it’s close enough!’ ”

By 2009 Bob was deciding, in his gradual way, to return to live permanently in Alberta—as he had not done since 1947. But even before he settled in Leduc he often visited, and one summer day we were together contemplating tombstones in the Spring Lake Roman Catholic cemetery north of Heisler where his mother’s 1903 settler family, the Wellers, are all buried. Suddenly, between memories, he said, “You know, we should try to find that Iron Creek Hill, where the meteorite once was.”

“You mean… the Manitou Stone?”

“Yes, that one. Old Man Buffalo.”

Days before, we had seen him—known to science as one of the world’s largest iron meteorites (175 kg)—in the Royal Alberta Museum. We were both mesmerized by the shining, pitted shape. “Can you see him?” Bob whispered, and I whispered back, “Yes.” A jagged human head, gleaming black and pockmarked with smallpox scars, the right side a perfect profile of forehead, eyes, long bent nose, the open—speaking—mouth. As light moved over it, the face moved, talking; neither of us understood.

“We could just drive along the creek and look.”

So we drove north and east of Heisler looking for Iron Creek, the Alberta Road Atlas guiding us, and as we eased through Sedgewick, Bob noticed—“Hey!”—the Archives and Gallery Museum. A town of 900 with a local archives and open on Friday Incredible. While I considered horse harness, he talked to the smiling attendant and in three minutes her copier whirred and she brought us two reports by Allen Ronaghan, one handwritten. Ronaghan had been visiting what he was convinced was the Iron Creek Hill since 1958, and gave its exact location: NW 17–44–10–W4. Well, I could certainly find that. And when we drove east out of town, we recognized it almost immediately: not huge, but rising splendidly solitary beyond the willow twists of the creek, Range Road 105 cut through its base. We parked on the shoulder and climbed, two aging men, as we could.

Green grain and dazzling sky… golden canola… the bushy humps of the Wolf Ear Hills. In a notch beyond them, the unnatural white spots of Hardisty tanks pipelining oil to Oklahoma. And we fumbled through the sad, sad story, again: how in 1866 White missionaries came with a cart to this sacred high place and stole Old Man Buffalo.

Where are the buffalo Perhaps the men of the band are hunting along the creek, scouring the ravines of the Wolf Ear Hills for any possible animal. Perhaps, as the moon rises red out of the edge of the earth, a woman stands here on the hill, praying, “O Great Spirit, we are dying. Our children cry for food. O Only One, have pity.”

And suddenly: a flash of light splits the sky over her, and out of that exploding light bursts a gigantic ball of fire, a roar such as she has never heard and she collapses in terror as the immense fireball smashes into the valley. The earth shudders as if it were riding a long roll of thunder. A gift from the Great Spirit: “Here, pray here, and I will always care for you. Here.”

How many thousands of prehistoric people saw this unimaginable gift come from the sky Bob and I stood on the high place where they carried it after they dug it out of the earth, where they prayed and waited to see, anywhere around them, the buffalo herds coming. Their food from the Creator Who Cares. And they came, for generations they came, brought by Old Man Buffalo. Torn away now from his place for over 140 years.

A pickup stopped on the road below us, behind our car. A stocky man got out, bent through the fence and climbed toward us. He said he was Bill Paterson, and his family had lived on this land since 1908. What were we doing on the hill?

We told him. We talked as the clouds travelled over us. Then, still talking, together we gathered and ate purple saskatoons growing down the north slope of the hill.

After Iron Creek Hill, west of Camrose we turned right onto Highway 21, driving north toward Edmonton. The evening sky over the canola fields stunned me. I began to sing a hymn my parents often sang in harmony in that Coaldale house:

Dort ueber jenem Sternenmeer,

dort ist ein schoeneres Land…

Bob glanced at me, so I spoke a bit of it in translation:

There, over yonder sea of stars,

there is a more beautiful land…

And I had to laugh. “Mom always said, ‘Alberta isn’t heaven, but for us it’s close enough!’”

After a mile or so Bob said, “I believe in longing too.” #

Rudy Wiebe received Governor General’s Awards for The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and A Discovery of Strangers (1994).

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Three Alberta writers in a row. Alberta rules the Giller!

Only what does that mean, exactly—Alberta writers Believe me, it’s not that I don’t want Albertans to have an edge on the Giller, this and every year. But few contemporary fiction writers situate their work in the province they come from. Cochrane’s Fred Stenson leaps to mind as one whose writing springs from the landscape he knows and loves; David Adams Richards dips straight from the Miramichi; you could make a case for Gail Anderson-Dargatz writing out of the BC Interior. But the idea that art derives from place has lost some of its force. Or has expanded, perhaps, as our places have expanded. Hardly any of us come from just one locale now, which makes it difficult to figure out what a local writer might be.

Who are we Are we, as writers, extensions or relaters of the places we are from That’s Golden, BC, for me. Of the places where we first begin to think and imagine and dream in words I started in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Where we finish school Toronto. Where we start work Toronto again, then London, England. Where we find our true work I found mine in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (where I also found my husband—the marriage bed being another place writing rises from). Where we had the hardest life I’d probably have to say Mayerthorpe, Alberta, but there’s some competition…. Is it the landscape we love the best, or simply the place we’ve lived the longest?

Every writer is a local writer, writing from his or her own location. Whether those bones are placed in Alberta or Tibet.

Of course the answer is yes. Yes to all. We write from where and who we are. But the answer is also no—there is no longer such a thing as a regional writer. Some writers draw from their own geography, but they’re not limited by provincial boundaries, and they’re not provincial.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when Canadian literature was constructing itself as an idea, publishers celebrated regional differences. Books such as Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley, Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House and Mordecai Richler’s Duddy Kravitz were celebrated partly because they gave the rest of Canada a useful glimpse of life in Canada’s regions: not just geographic detail, but their cultural and religious landscapes.

But the necessary progress of the country in the last few decades has blurred regional differences. Greg Hollingshead once said, “The three sorts of geography that affect my work most are tract development and strip mall suburbia, the open prairies and the Canadian Shield.” Strip malls are now identical from coast to coast, and for too many of us tract development has replaced ravines and riverbanks as the general landscape of childhood.

I don’t think we can write regional books anymore. Or at least, the regions have narrowed down so far that they are our own peculiar, individual regions: our own bodies. The outer landscape we inhabit certainly informs our ideas; it offers a grounding, a stage for our characters. But we write from the inner landscape, from the closest, most closed, most individual part of ourselves. Every writer is a local writer, writing from his or her own exact location, the bone castle we peer out of as we work. Whether those bones are placed in Alberta or Tibet.

Just how Albertan are those last three Giller winners?

Esi Edugyan was shortlisted in 2011 for the trifecta of Canadian fiction awards: the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Writers Trust Fiction Prize. Half-Blood Blues, her reconstruction of jazz musicians riffing in the shadow of Nazi Germany, went on to win the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (a US prize honouring books that make important contributions to the understanding of racism) as well as the Giller, and was shortlisted for the UK’s main event, the Man Booker Prize.

Esi Edugyan, author of Half-Blood Blues; Giller Prize winner, 2011.

But Edugyan wasn’t up for Alberta’s Georges Bugnet fiction award, even though she was born in Calgary, because she’s no longer an Alberta resident. Eligibility varies from prize to prize, and each prize must draw the line somewhere. Even the newest award, England’s Folio Prize, which will consider any work of fiction published in English in the UK regardless of the writer’s country of residence, has found a way, via a three-stage judging process, to cull the field.

Edugyan didn’t win the Folio—doubtless only because it hadn’t yet been instituted in 2011. After Calgary, she has lived a peripatetic life, holding fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain and Belgium; she now lives in Victoria, BC, with her husband, the writer Steven Price, and their young daughter, an ornament of the literary festival circuit.

Will Ferguson lives in Calgary now with his wife Terumi (whom he met in Japan, where he spent five years) and their two sons; he’s written thoroughly, even exhaustively, about what it is to be Canadian, but hasn’t had as much to say about being specifically Albertan. Maybe Katimavik shook the Alberta specificity out of the boy and replaced it with national wilderness.

His novel 419 links a Calgary family with a Nigerian email scammer and two other Africans living in an area where religious violence and hardship would have made research travel foolhardy. Ferguson could draw on his Alberta experience to write about Calgary, but to make the Nigerian sections vivid and believable, he did the ordinary legwork that fiction writers do: research, reading. Because we don’t only write about where we’re from.

Lynn Coady is from Ontario these days, although she may still have an Alberta Health card. Just before her Giller win she went to Toronto to do the prestigious television-writing course at the Canadian Film Centre; she’s now writing for the smash-hit clone-riddled conspiracy thriller Orphan Black. Coady was raised in Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia, at the tail end of Cape Breton. She has lived and worked in Ottawa, New Brunswick, Banff, Vancouver and lately Edmonton. Nova Scotia claims her, and several of her books are set there; while at UBC in her early career she was a west-coast writer; lately she gets called Edmontonian. Some of the short stories in Hellgoing are set on the prairies, some—naturally—on the way to hell in a handcart. But Coady always writes from the innermost cavern of the self.

In the 1960s and 1970s publishers celebrated regional differences: not just geographic detail, but cultural and religious landscapes.

Tao Lin, in an essay about reality and abstraction, phenomenon and noumenon, called novels “the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another’s world of noumenon.”

Sometimes that noumenon, that innermost cavern, involves the land we live on, an artistic vision so grounded that it can’t be separated from a specific place. Sometimes, as in the case of Annie Proulx, writers relocate from place to place and write about the world they’re beginning to understand—Newfoundland for The Shipping News, Wyoming for Close Range and other books. Sometimes place is a political or religious idea of country, like Mark Helprin’s Israel in Refiner’s Fire, or Miriam Toews’s Mennonite community in Canada or Mexico. Sometimes it’s just not important, because the writer has other concerns. It doesn’t really matter which ocean Yann Martel’s Pi floats over or in which small town horror writer Susie Moloney (note: recently relocated to Edmonton) plays out her delicious mayhem.

Will Ferguson, author of 419; Giller Prize winner, 2012.

This summer I was on a panel with Heather Birrell, a Toronto writer who is now working on a novel partially set in Cuba. I asked how she liked Cuba, and she said she’s never been. “I’m going, I’m going,” she said, quick to defend the choice. “But I want to go after I’ve finished the first draft—I don’t want to be too influenced by the real place, to have Cuba confuse the story before I know what it is.”

It’s a reasonable decision for a writer to make: to put place in its place. For me, it seems useful to go to where I’m writing, to walk the ground and smell the air, but maybe I’m kidding myself. Will Ferguson managed without travel to convey Nigeria’s northern Sahel, Lagos in the Yoruba west and the Niger Delta region in the east—by working, reading and imagining.

Ferguson didn’t take the Georges Bugnet award in Alberta the year 419 won the Giller. He was eligible, and he was shortlisted along with Alberta Views’s own Naomi K. Lewis. Unaccountably (since juries are not accountable to anyone but themselves), the jury chose another book, Richard Van Camp’s Godless But Loyal to Heaven. In case you are wondering, Richard is from the Dogrib Nation near Fort Smith, NWT, but now lives in Edmonton.

The year Hellgoing won the Giller, Coady didn’t take the Bugnet either—it went to Ali Bryan, a Calgarian, for her comically sad first novel, Roost. Every jury is different, every jury has quirks and foibles. Juries are always wrong, in fact. When your book doesn’t win, of course they’re wrong; when it does win, you realize exactly how crazy wrong they are. (Just take the prize and say thank you.) Sitting on a literary jury, you discover how cockeyed the conversations can get; you know the moment where you fail in eloquence in defence of a beautiful book or are feebly swayed by the snake-oil charm of another juror.

Given the whimsicality or pigheadedness of juries, prizes are always a crapshoot. Therefore it is kind of interesting (although entirely unattributable to the writers’ province of residence) that the dice have turned up Alberta three times in a row.

Connie Gault, whom I refuse to call a prairie writer (although her luminous novel A Beauty, which comes out in 2015, roams the Saskatchewan map), was asked at a conference in Mexico to define a Canadian short story. She said that question made her wonder “whether there is such a thing—or if there are only stories written by Canadians.”

Like Gault, I don’t believe “Canadian” books must or should have anything in common. “Our writing is influenced by our cultural inheritance, by our gender and our place,” she said. “But the problem of discussing Canadian writing is that we are a population scattered across a huge continent, with landscapes and histories so diverse it sometimes seems the only way we can define ourselves is by who we’re not… Even when our definitions and our theories come from wide reading and knowledge, our writing comes from a deeper place.”

Alberta will continue attracting writers from elsewhere for university jobs, or for the joys of the Banff Centre for the Arts, or for our sheer land-based beauty; we will continue sending off citizens to work elsewhere while maintaining some tenuous link to here. We’re all Albertans! But it’s equally the case that we are all ourselves. (In the University of Calgary’s engineering department, where I was a writing coach for a few years, a snowflake poster read: “Always remember that you are unique. Just like everybody else.”)

I say, let the unalloyed bounty continue. Good luck to all the Alberta writers who may be up for awards this fall. I’d love to see recognition go to any number of them, such as Padma Viswanathan, an Edmonton-raised writer now living in Kentucky, for The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, which bravely tackles the Air India bombing; or Peter Norman, who lived in Calgary for several years, for his teasing intellectual gothic, Emberton, about an illiterate man working for a dictionary publisher.

Or Fred Stenson, that genuine, rooted, Alberta-all-the-way-down writer whose new novel Who By Fire came out this fall: It moves from the arrival of a sour gas plant on the edge of a southern Alberta farm in the early 1960s to a present-day oil company manager in Fort McMurray who struggles to reconcile work, love and money with his conscience.

Okay, that’s an Alberta book—or at least, that’s the kind of book that makes people talk about “Alberta books.”

Marina Endicott‘s novel Good to a Fault was a finalist for the Giller Prize in 2008. She writes and teaches in Edmonton.

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