How Bison Returned to Banff National Park
by Karsten Heuer;
foreword by Leroy Little Bear;
introduction by Harvey Locke
GREYSTONE BOOKS
2026/$28.95/192 PP.

Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once said he believed that “Books find their writers.” A book will come into being when it finds the writer most likely for the story. Viewed from this perspective, the Porcupine caribou herd found Karsten Heuer to tell their story in his 2007 book, Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, and his life partner, Leanne Allison, to film it in Being Caribou. “Karsten,” writes conservationist Harvey Locke, “was an adventurer with an enormous capacity for rough travel and an appetite to initiate big projects.” Heuer’s big project to hike and explore the possibility of a wildlife corridor running north–south through the west resulted in his first book, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears’ Trail. In his latest, Buffalo Lessons, he writes: “Y2Y’s vision to connect and protect reserves along the Rocky Mountains with wildlife corridors was so meaningful to me that I decided to hike its 3,400-kilometre distance, as a wolf or grizzly might, to see if the concept was possible. I discovered it is.” From the start, then, Heuer’s biology degree and his desire to see the world from the points of view of other animals coalesced to make him the perfect warden for the reintroduction of buffalo to Banff National Park, and an ideal storyteller for northern caribou and plains bison. As Leroy Little Bear writes in his foreword, Heuer and Allison were first “cariboued,” and then they were “buffaloed.”

The chapters are sequenced chronologically as the project unfolds and are titled as a series of the “lessons” Heuer and his small team learned both from experienced buffalo managers and from the animals themselves. Some of the titles sound managerial (“Seize Opportunity,” “Leverage Your Success”) and others more like insights into bison psychology (“Embrace Individuality,” “Make Your Idea Their Idea”). Given that an attempt in the 1970s by Parks Canada to restore bison to Jasper National Park failed when the animals dispersed way beyond the park, Heuer undertook a lot of research and preparation in advance. While the book might work too as a manual for wardens and ranchers, its scientific, ecological and even spiritual material makes it a compelling read akin to the works of Alberta naturalists Andy Russell and Charlie Russell, former park warden Sid Marty and UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard. It also reminded me powerfully of Freeman House’s Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species, another rich account of species restoration.

For a book that details the reintroduction of these animals, it is surprising when the prologue begins with Heuer having to shoot one of the buffalo whose life story he had been party to from its birth. But it has ventured beyond the invisible, largely unfenced boundaries of the park, a trespass the Alberta government will not forgive. Even prior to the first chapter, then, two deaths, both premature, have been recorded or anticipated: that of this young wayfaring bull and that of the author himself. Heuer wrote the book during the final months of his life, and it has been published posthumously. The loss of this man who, together with Allison, in essence apprenticed himself to other-than-human animals to understand their specific ways of being, is deeply tragic.

Throughout, Heuer details the remarkable amount of labour involved in this ambitious project. I was blown away by the physical work, skill range and stamina demanded of the wardens, and the logistics. Heuer had to plan for everything from age, number, biological sex and genetics right down to rubber tubing for the animals’ horns so they would not gore one another during transport from Elk Island to Banff National Park. First Nations’ managerial and spiritual expertise with the buffalo were also integral to this project of ecological restoration and reconciliation. Heuer writes that when not sorting animals “I helped erect teepees, partook in pipe ceremonies and listened to prayers, speeches and songs to bless the animals and the upcoming transfer [from Treaty 6 to 7]…. Looking across the teepees and feeling the drumbeats of Native singers in my chest, I saw I was just a Parks Canada pawn in something much larger about to play out: the prophecy of bison returning from the sky and the mountains.” Anishinaabe writer Richard Wagamese characterized humility as “the ability to see yourself as an essential part of something larger. It is the act of living without grandiosity.” This sense of humility with which Heuer approached the world, allowing him to enter at times into profound relationship with the land, also finds ironic expression in his mildly self-deprecating humour about his role in parks bureaucracy and playing “poker” with wily bison.

Buffalo Lessons does not aspire to didacticism but to be a gift to those who come after in the same way as the buffalo are a gift to the land and the people who live here. Printed on FSC-certified glossy paper with lots of photographs of the bison and some of the wardens, including Heuer, who reintroduced the animals into their ancestors’ territory and witnessed how they transitioned to a free-roaming life in the mountains, this book represents only part of Karsten Heuer’s legacy of science, activism and commitment to the multispecies world we inhabit, whether we realize it or not. Buffalo are now living wild in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta!

Pamela Banting writes articles about park warden literature, multispecies studies and ecocriticism.

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by Jaspreet Singh
NEWEST PRESS
2022/$20.95/104 pp.

Jaspreet Singh’s How to Hold a Pebble is published under NeWest Press’s “Crow Said” poetry series in honour of Robert Kroetsch, which emphasizes “places and people outside the literary mainstream” and features poets who “will continue Kroetsch’s literary tradition of innovation, interrogation and generosity of spirit.” Singh and his poetry collection are an ideal representative of the spirit of this series.

Singh’s first poem, “Six Months Ago,” ends with the image of a raven performing two “little love pantoums/ meant to linger/ within me// They linger”, a perfect opening to a collection of poems that also linger in the mind, to the point of haunting, as love poems to the earth. As with this one, many of the poems are deceptive in their smallness, their understatement, but, like a pebble, hold deep complexities. The poem “The Zoo,” for instance, sees a taxi driver admonish the speaker for taking his parents to the zoo, noting that “North America and/ Europe used to display/ non-white/ people in zoos” and suggesting instead to “Show respected parents the Athabasca/ Glacier before it melts”, again reminding the reader of imminent ecological collapse.

The collection is remarkable for the variety of forms Singh deftly employs—from free-verse lyric poetry, reminiscent perhaps of Ondaatje’s early lyricism, to masterful ghazals and the formal experimentation of, for instance, “Cyclone,” in which lines whirl across the page division and words swirl to mimic the cyclical chaos of a storm:

“apart Things         Things Falling         were”

The same words whip past and return, repeating in a different disorder, as objects might in a cyclone—form here not just reflecting but becoming content.

Of particular note is “Whyte Avenue,” an ekphrastic poem that takes a freshly painted mural on Whyte Avenue as the focal point of an extended meditation on art, community, belonging and desire in the Anthropocene. The poem gently invites us to look at a woman looking at a mural of a whale as others on the street “join her/ in the looking”. The speaker watches them watching and feels “I have entered the mimetic/ desire of the first woman”. But the speaker also feels he is “outside/ the frame”. Whether he’s entered the frame of desire or remains outside is an uncertainty that arises because “times have/ changed. Mural making/ and watching have changed”. These changes are simultaneously personal and global: “The sea is rising” in part because Whyte Avenue “will keep making/ heat”; this poem, like so many in the collection, hangs under the shadow of the climate crisis.

Innovative and searching, this rich collection will linger, will haunt, may gently sink beneath your wisdom like a pebble.

Jay Gamble teaches in the English department at the U of L.

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“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).

The post Finding Alberta appeared first on Alberta Views.

There in a New York minute is the effect of Alberta on Robert Kroetsch, and the effect of Robert Kroetsch on Alberta. Although many fine writers live and work in this province, none have captured this mad, restless place as effectively as Kroetsch has, or with his particular combination of tenderness and perceptive irony.

Kroetsch embodies the Alberta zeitgeist in a way that few can claim. Born here, and now returned here to practice, he says, “being old,” he has, more than anyone, articulated the strange and irrepressible spirit of this province. His nine novels and fourteen books of poetry, along with seven works of non-fiction, focus on an Alberta that seems extraordinary, elusive, elementally distinctive, but that is profoundly recognizable to those who call it home. Over the summer I talked with him about his return, about growing old and about changeable Alberta.

Very few Albertans have lived through so many provincial incarnations. Perhaps what enables Kroetsch to look at Alberta so clearly is the fact he’s lived here not continuously but itinerantly, and in that respect too proves himself a model Albertan. He was born in Heisler in 1927, the heart of Battle River country, that central parkland of rich soil and poplar copses, so different from the arid south and the boreal forest to the north. He went to university in Edmonton and began a creative writing class at the University of Alberta with the distinguished F. M. Salter, only to find himself totally intimidated by the experience of returning veterans who had seen action—and death—all over Europe. He dropped out after one class and took philosophy instead.

Having completed his BA, at 20 he went to work as a labourer and purser on the barges of the Mackenzie River (1948–1950). This too is an Albertan habit, to go north to find fortune. One of Kroetsch’s essential essays is entitled “Why I Went up north and What I found When He Got There.” The shift in subject is telling. The person we are when we “go up north” is different from the one we become; going north changes us profoundly. During those years, Kroetsch became fascinated with the “men who moil for gold” (later portrayed in his historical novel about the gold rush, Man from the Creeks), lost his virginity, gathered useful information (“I asked him what to do about the mosquitoes. he told me to ignore them”) and, most important, came to understand that “the north makes possible a new story.”

After a short stint in Churchill, Manitoba, Kroetsch went to work for the US Air force as an information specialist at Goose Bay, Labrador. There he learned how to snowshoe, ran a small newspaper for the base and was interviewed by the FBI. “If you put three stories together that I had written—that I had written—you could figure out the disposition of the aircraft on our base,” he says. “They thought I was sending information to the Russians. We only had about five aircraft! The guy called me in and he was just kind of amused, but it was part of his job.”

Why go to Labrador “Well, for one thing, you could save a lot of money,” he says. “There was no place to spend it. And I was going to save up my money and write. I was going to start writing. So when I got out of there in 1954 I went to Montreal to live in a garret.”

He took a course from Hugh MacLennan and made a serious effort to live in that garret, which was “right in downtown Montreal, very romantic. Except I was sitting there all day by myself, looking at a typewriter.” After 13 days he moved out of the garret and in with a family. “They gave me breakfast,” he remembers. “A wonderful lady. I had a book that tried teaching you French. The landlady read it backwards. In six weeks she had learned English and I hadn’t learned a word of French!” Kroetsch is still, like many Albertans, monolingual.

From Montreal he went to graduate schools at Middlebury College, Vermont (MA, 1956) and the University of Iowa (Phd, 1961), and then taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton (another Albertan tendency, to look south to the States for answers or jobs, or even culture). Then, at the height of one of Alberta’s booms, Kroetsch returned, serving as writer- in-residence at the universities of Lethbridge and Calgary (1975–1976), moving east to Winnipeg, where he taught at the University of Manitoba for a decade, then returning to Victoria, BC, before moving back to Winnipeg again. Along the way he married, had children, got divorced. It seems he could not resist the call of his past, though, and in 2009 he returned to Alberta. He now lives in a retirement community in Leduc, close to one of his sisters, and close to Heisler.

This peripatetic list of addresses is not idle information. Like most Albertans, Kroetsch embodies a spirit of restlessness that’s more endemic to this province than any other. Where are we going, where have we gone Kroetsch believes that “the notion of restlessness is a key word for our experience. We’re restless, but we’re resting. We like being at home, and yet we’re restless. We don’t feel at home the way a European might feel at home. Part of our being at home—our being ourselves—is being restless.”

Of course, many western settlers, both in the present and the past, were and are restless, searching for opportunity and prosperity, not to mention free land, wanting to go somewhere better, different.

And Kroetsch underlines that perspective. “We didn’t just move once, you know,” he says. “We enjoy moving. And movement like that is almost part of our genetic makeup. In fact, we might have been self-selecting, for example, in who would leave Europe. The restless ones came here.” This province does serve as a zone of transience. But many who were born here don’t seem eager to leave and Kroetsch believes that writers authenticate that conundrum.

But why would a man whose vision of the world is more closely aligned to Homer than to R.B. Bennett return, again and again, to this “home place” he has, he says, a profound sense of Alberta as home, of Alberta as having shaped both his character and his imagination. “I think it’s partly imprinted in childhood. The landscape that I feel at home in is our landscape. The landscape is more important than any kind of idea, that sense of a physical landscape, I mean. for me, at least. And it gets more important as we get older. You feel at home living here.”

For all his leaving, Kroetsch couldn’t stay away. He says, “A woman said to me the other day at the lodge ‘Why are you here You could be anywhere in the world.’ And I said ‘That’s right, I could be anywhere, and I want to be here. Because I like this landscape. I could be sitting on a beach in Florida with my daughter, or I could be in New Zealand. But I feel at home here.’ The physical landscape colours the way that people speak and behave. A lot of my attraction to Alberta is nature, but it’s also city and town, a distinctive flavour here.”

He enjoyed other places. “I liked Binghamton,” he says. “I liked Iowa city. I guess they’re both small cities and Leduc is a small city… I had some great times and years in Winnipeg.” But of European cities he says, “I feel kind of closed in there. maybe I have agoraphobia, I don’t know. But if you take space and place as opposites—like, space is freedom and place is security—it’s home here. And space is freedom. I don’t feel enough freedom in Europe. Everything’s been decided. The places where I’ve lived as an older person were intellectually interesting. But they never grabbed my imagination like the world of my childhood.”

“I could be anywhere and I want to be here.” That’s an astonishing statement, perhaps only credible when it comes from a man whose imagination is without peer.

Certainly, Robert Kroetsch, as a writer, has shaped the imagination of Alberta. His chronicles of a profoundly hyperbolic place have articulated this province in a way that can only be compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s portraits of Colombia. And yet, despite his long and venerable list of publications, Kroetsch, quiet and self-effacing, is not as celebrated as he should be. He is Alberta’s Faulkner, Alberta’s Dante.

You could read 100 history books about the rise of Social Credit and the election of William Aberhart in 1935, but none will evoke the spirit of those times so well as his The Words of My Roaring. In that novel, Kroetsch captures the terrible effect of drought and defeat, and how the politicians who promised the impossible offered the kind of hope that people needed so much they elected a chimera.

It is possible to drive across Edmonton’s High Level Bridge, but the experience changes completely if you’ve read about the famous traffic jam of horses in The Studhorse Man, which won Kroetsch the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 1969. Set at the end of the Second World War and just before the 1947 Leduc oil strike that made the horse truly obsolete, the novel helped (and helps) Albertans understand the extent to which we are governed by the dichotomy between horse and car, weather and oil. It combines the energy and madness that give this province so distinctive a character.

It is possible to discuss Alberta’s weather, which we do, interminably, as introduction and demarcation, as aphrodisiac and punctuation, with all the surprise and outrage and resignation that our uneasy climate provokes. But only Kroetsch’s novel What the Crow Said makes our unpredictable snow-in-July and chinook-in-January so extreme that the male characters take up arms in a war against the sky. The humour, the wild surmise of Kroetsch’s stories, reflects beautifully the tall tale that is so often Alberta’s undoing. But it is seductive too, how a hailstone can provoke love, how snow proposes marriage. “It’s snowing. Someone must take a wife,” declares a character in that novel. In the face of an Alberta winter, love is the only answer.

This year was the Royal Tyrrell museum’s 25th anniversary, but Drumheller’s august institution is much richer if one reads Kroetsch’s Badlands, a novel about the crazy excess of the bone collectors and how they fought and feuded in the bone beds in order to get their hands on those fossils. This story is nothing so dry as a squabble between paleontologists, but a fully articulated journey to the underworld, a past where dinosaurs ruled.

In short, Kroetsch has written Alberta, taken its dust and DNA and made those elements into greater stories, words recreated in a mythic context. He’s been called Mr. Canadian Postmodernism, a daunting title. But Kroetsch is also a poet who can make a seed catalogue elegiac, who can turn screen doors into arias, who can, in a mother’s whisper, “Bring me the radish seeds,” encapsulate love. His latest book of poetry, Too Bad, features on the cover a cartoon of a man comically peering into his pants. Even growing old is for him a subject of profound laughter.

And yet, Kroetsch is not sentimental about Alberta’s greed or graft, Alberta’s wealth and deficiency. “Alberta is caught up in a kind of game—it plays hockey against the rest of the world,” he says. “It’s in a competition—partly because of oil and gas—but we love the excitement of the game, we love to participate, and while we talk about being individuals in Alberta, we love being part of a crowd. We vote as a crowd.

“It’s a competitive issue, too: we are really trying to win. And we’ll do anything. Having to win is a dangerous compulsion. That’s why we’re willing to destroy landscapes and natural habitats, in the name of winning.”

The wise talking crow in the novel What the Crow Said asks, “Win Win Somebody’s going to win?” It is obvious that all gamblers lose, and yet they go on gambling. “We love that. We love to gamble,” says Kroetsch, even if we end up a stinking, ragtag crew of ne’er-do-wells.

Worse, he believes, is that we ignore our past. “The Athabasca River has a wonderful history of fur trade and exploration, but now we see it as a place to make money—we don’t want to know about its history,” he says. “We want it to be present and not past. We’re not attuned to the mythos of a place. And Albertans seem susceptible to being controlled by corporations and their version of events. We start to buy their story: ‘Look how wealthy we are!’ We’re so proud of being rich. Wealth has even replaced sexuality in our culture. Instead of having a sexual imagination we have a profit imagination.”

As for our scenery, Kroetsch understands its lure and its danger. “It’s postcard beauty,” he says. “one of the interesting things about postcards is what you don’t see. In Alberta, you stop seeing most of the province. You expect to see Rocky mountains and grizzly bears and badlands, so you don’t see the highways and the buildings and the sprawl. The Rockies have been so central to our invented mythology that we’re stuck with too obvious a landscape. We’re busy looking at the scenery. We don’t know the depths—at least we haven’t acknowledged them—and so we look at surface. Having a scenic imagination is very dangerous because you can fool yourself.”

Kroetsch now lives near the exact spot where the first big gusher of our fortune and misfortune blew in. Is Leduc a beautiful place or is it ugly It’s both, he says, and yet it still bears traces of essential generosity. “The other day I was sitting on a bench in the sun, in the hot sun,” he says. “A man came by and said ‘You shouldn’t be sitting in the sun without water!’ And he gave me a bottle of water. He cared. That’s Alberta, too.”

He remembers returning to Alberta after decades away and being amazed at how urban the province had become. “When you’re away, a place doesn’t change. It stays the way you remember it,” he says. “But one of the side effects of urbanization is homogeneity. Certain kinds of repetition erase place. I mean, look at Canadian Tire. There’s a Canadian Tire everywhere. Earlier you went to an individual store or gas station… now you don’t know what country you’re in, let alone what city.”

Kroetsch’s observations of our present are seasoned by his memories of growing up in the Alberta of the 1930s. “What I remember mostly is space,” he says. “I lived on quite a big farm and there were lots of big farms around. They weren’t big by today’s standards, but you could wander around for days exploring, being in nature, discovering yourself. There was immense freedom in that. Now, space has become place but it’s more contained. You know, space gives you freedom but it’s a little bit scary. Now, we have the security of the city. Which is great security—we have the fire department and the police department— but kind of a loss. Then, we knew we were a part of nature. Now, we think we’re in control.”

Nature, he claims, was respected, even if it brought devastation. “I can’t remember grasshopper plagues much, but I remember lizards one time. It was just the right conditions for them to hatch. I remember too, one year we had a bad hailstorm. ‘We got hailed out!’ I said to my father. He was distressed, but he wasn’t, not really. That was a part of nature. Once in a while in Alberta, you got hailed out. I couldn’t understand his tolerance. But he was an optimistic man. The first thing we did was make ice cream with the hail. That’s an Alberta reaction.”

Kroetsch celebrates a rural spirit that might be vanishing but that still textures this province. We’re careless about that part of our past, think it’s irrelevant to our urbanized culture. But behind our flash and sophistication, it lingers: kids wading in ditches full of muskrats and birds and ducks, an incredible sense of bounty, a garden full of vegetables, a sky full of blue.

As a child who grew up in that time, Kroetsch felt privileged. “My parents thought it was a good life, for sure,” he says. “And you know, when I was a kid, most of the population lived on farms. Not any more. One effect that oil has on an economy is to hurt agriculture. The young men leave the farm and go get a better job, an economic switchover. The family farm is gone.”

But the spirit of rural Alberta seems to percolate through our dreams and memories. Kroetsch has returned, he says, for the landscape and for the community. “One of the interesting things about where I live now, with people who are in their 80s, is how much experience we share. Living on the prairies. Stories about the weather, what you ate, a sense of democracy—we are democratic here in a way fundamentally different from everywhere else, even though living in Alberta has meant a level of prosperity that is quite extraordinary.”

And what about this vigorous, perceptive writer living in a retirement community Is this a deliberate Kroetschian choice, to move into an almost-nunnery of Albertans at the end of life “It’s a nice mixture of solitude and company,” he says. “I’m not very good at being alone. To put it another way, I can’t stand to be alone and I can’t stand to be with people. Which puts me in kind of a bind. I don’t know if it’s the human condition or the Alberta condition or what.”

He exemplifies, he says, a person torn between rural and urban. “The movement into cities [which in Canada are quite new] is a big transition. We’ve had to learn how to be urban. I see that in these women I live with in the lodge. They lived much of their adult lives in cities, but they talk with each other about those early years when they were in small towns or on farms. It’s a more reassuring world. You can sit down at the dinner table and just say the word ‘potato’ and they start talking about potatoes. All the different experiences they had. You wouldn’t know they’d lived in cities.”

But time is fluid and Kroetsch can easily shift to a world of party lines and well water. “I remember the phone—our ring was four shorts and a long,” he says. “When our main well was drilled, I was mystified to think there was water flowing in streams underneath us. Isn’t that amazing I’m still amazed by it. Water, I think, is one of the biggest mysteries. On the surface we were so short of water. And then underneath, here’s all this water. Strange. But it was work, too. I hated wash day because I did nothing but carry water!”

I teach the novels and poetry of Robert Kroetsch to young Alberta students. Every year they read his writing and express outrage and disbelief. “This is a crazy book,” they say. “It’s not realistic.” If we are reading What the Crow Said, I just point out the window. In November the temperature is often balmy. In April there might be a horrific spring snowstorm. The weather in Kroetsch’s writing, I tell them, is only hyperbolic on the page. Translated to Alberta, it becomes commonplace.

That is the hallmark of this astonishing writer. He makes lucid the madness that is our Alberta. he makes realistic our tall tales. He makes hyperbolic our ordinariness. he makes comic our despair. He is the one writer who has truly managed to capture our oxymoronic character, our greed and generosity, our penchant for self-deception, our eagerness to repeat our mistakes. Few places are lucky enough to harbour their greatest scribe. Alberta could not be luckier.

Nobody comes back to Alberta to die. That’s a fact. They return to recapture the dream that Alberta was and to see how that dream continues. Kroetsch has always, he confesses, been interested in places on the edge. This is the edge. #

Aritha van Herk is the author of five novels and four works of nonfiction, including Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta.

The post Our Odysseus appeared first on Alberta Views.

The road to Seed Catalogue—at least 28 months in the conceiving—would seem to have been both troubled and heady. Behind it lies the inhibiting presence of the storytelling father, one of the bullshitters who figures so flamboyantly in the published version of the poem.

It is this figure, a lover of horses, who witnesses what must be one of the most puzzling events in Seed Catalogue. In a memorable passage, the young protagonist falls off a horse, much to the scorn of the hired man and the bewilderment of the father:

This is what happened:
we were harrowing the garden.
You’ve got to understand this:
I was sitting on the horse.
The horse was standing still.
I fell off.

The hired man laughed: how
in hell did you manage to
fall off a horse that was
standing still?

Another figure appears at this moment, acting in apparent protection:

Bring me the radish seeds,
my mother whispered.

My mother was marking the first row with a piece of binder twine, stretched
between two pegs.

The hired man laughed: just
about planted the little bugger.
Cover him up and see what grows.

My father didn’t laugh. He was puzzled
by any garden that was smaller than a
¼-section of wheat and summerfallow.

The sheer “unmanliness” of the kid’s falling Kroetsch has made no effort to hide—within the poem or outside of it. The kid is one version of a Kroetschean character who is a crashing failure as a rural male, a point that David Arnason has made in his essay on Seed Catalogue. Whatever reticence the hired men might have felt out of discretion for their employer, they show little inclination to withhold judgment on the son’s inadequacies: “The hired men… made no bones about telling me I was a disaster, 16 years old and still reading books, often to be seen in the garden doing women’s work when I should be out pitching bundles or working the summerfallow. I couldn’t be trusted with a team of horses… Useless as the tits on a boar, the hired men said.”

The scene of the boy’s fall, followed by his reaction to the mother’s death, is oddly handled. The experience would undoubtedly have been painful for the boy, who obviously is very close to the speaker himself. Exposed in failure before his father, before his mother too, he must have felt terrible anguish. And yet the moments of his deficiency appear in the poem as almost comical, and the mother’s intervention as so brief and so discreet as to be nearly negligible. Sheer and laughable ineptitude might be our own assessment of the boy’s bungling: how in hell could anyone fall off a horse that was standing still The failure is so grievous that the hired man in the poem is allowed openly, and (apparently) in the parents’ presence, to repeat and to amplify his contempt. Without concern for the boy’s feelings, he ventures to call him “the little bugger,” diminishing the protagonist into anonymity and ridicule, dismissing him almost as though he weren’t there. Had the hired man called him “the little guy,” say, he would have softened his derision with something approaching affection and allowed the kid to emerge in a slightly indulgent way. Kroetsch’s decisions to remove the scene from its potential pathos, and to enlist it in a comic pattern of planting and growing, limit whatever sympathy we otherwise might have developed for the kid.

A reader could put more weight on the mother’s role here, hearing her call as tender and even intimate. We would note the distraught son, the nearby mother quietly beckoning him to her. What does the kid think How does he face the adults who surround him in ridicule, perplexity, concern Would not this—even the gesture of rescue—perturb him What does he think of his own colossal failure as a horseman, which is exposed so irrevocably, so demonstrably, in the hired man’s laughter What is his relationship with his befuddled and perhaps helpless father His soft-spoken mother who hovers on the edge of the scene Why is the narrative so truncated and the event so seemingly diverted What is not said here?

It is perplexing that the fall would be so rendered: the hired man’s mocking dismissiveness, the father’s baffled reaction, the mother’s brief intercession. Readers may find that that invitation, which echoes in the kid’s mind—“Bring me the radish seeds, my mother whispered”—strengthens her role as intercessor and enforces the boy’s distress. And yet, is not her death deflected to near inconsequence, its acknowledgment almost obliterated in a smother of narrative and trivial detail?

Why does the narrative of the mother’s death and burial so immediately follow the story of the fall and why does it itself occur so obliquely The boy’s attention, in telling about the funeral, is directed to a distant and distracting narrative, the World Series. The reality of the heavy rain and the mired road, emblems of a mourning son, also register emphatically with him, as does the painful memory of the horse. All this the narrator reports before he includes the mother’s words of invitation:

This is what happened—at my mother’s wake. This is a fact—the World Series was in progress. The Cincinnati Reds were playing the Detroit Tigers.
It was raining. The road to the graveyard was barely passable. The horse was standing still. Bring me
the radish seeds, my mother whispered.

The voice opens in reportorial style—“This is what happened”—as if recounting without emotion some event to which it is not attached. We might hear then an almost willful obliviousness: “—at my mother’s wake.” The section turns then to an insistent voice sounding almost distrustful of its own credibility: “This is a fact—the World Series was in progress.” The sentences begin with “This is,” “This is”—oral in rhythm, certainly, but almost limp, evasive.

And then, across the reach of that distancing, the mother’s voice surfaces, not in command saying, “Get m,e the radish seeds,” as once in the manuscript it did, nor calling loudly from the corner of the garden, as in the archival material it once did; but in a whisper. It is now less peremptory, closer, more encouraging, offering permission, we might say: “Bring me the radish seeds.” The mother’s words, almost confiding even as they invite, evidently would offer some shelter to her distressed son and rescue him from the men’s disallowings. They hover too in the stark memory of a world, in its irrevocable events, commingled in death and graves and rain and mud and seeds, the raw details haunting us with an unadorned and unrefusable scene of the most primal experience of death, and in the whispered call for the most ordinary of seeds, that smallest hint of promise.

And yet the mother remains such a small part of Seed Catalogue—small at least in quantity and in emphasis, emerging only once more, toward the end of the poem:

Your sweet peas
. . . .
taught me the smell
of morning, the grace
of your tired
hands, the strength of a noon sun, the
color of prairie grass

This entry appears after chunks of rambunctious anecdotes. In them the narrator lurches across trajectories of bravado in search of words and in hopes of muses. Then, at the end, the speaker allows himself this quiet moment of recall and tribute.

Years later, “Sounding the Name,” an excruciatingly tender series of mother poems shows up. The poems are remarkably accomplished, and confident, right from their first drafts, and they undergo very little revision. Kroetsch spoke of them in a remarkable conversation published in Labyrinths, 22 not long after Seed Catalogue appeared: “After my mother died I had aunts who looked after me, I had sisters; I wasn’t doing a lot of the male work. I was living in this world of the garden quite often. And it’s funny how I kept that silent. I told you about finding a picture of my mother when she was 16 years old and about how my erotic relationship to this woman has shocked me—my sense of desiring the woman in that photograph. It denounced all my silence to me.”

The sequence of eight closely related poems, in breathtaking redirection, lifts away the reticence, the misdirection we might say, that has lain like a wet sack over Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue. In these poems is an almost unbearable love and pain we’d never before seen in his writing. Here is one, “I’m Getting Old Now,” to give you some sense of the series:

I’m getting old now, I can tell. I dream
a lot of my mother. In my dream last night she was in the garden, over the hill,
behind our house. She was standing. I was

playing in the pea vines. We were both happy.
Neither of us would move, in the dream. Perhaps
I wasn’t playing, I was kneeling to pick peas.
My mother held in her apron the peas

we had picked together. She was standing still.
I knew she was watching me. She was
watching me grow. Like a bad weed, she liked
to say. That pleased her.

I’m getting old now. I wouldn’t say I’m happy.
Serene is an adequate word. Death is not quite
the enemy it was. It is a kind of watching.

Death begins to seem a friend that one has almost
forgotten, then remembers again. In my dream—
last night, I was playing in the garden.

In this “Sounding” poem, a young mother watches over a small boy. Kroetsch’s simple, quiet words—last night, the poet writes, “I was playing in the garden” —come with the full force of the garden poem in our culture. The time of permission,  the incomparable sense of rightness, the site of restoration in dream—these emerge with a special stirring. “Sounding the Name” addresses mother as muse, (shockingly) as lover, most of all (most poignantly) as mother. In them the poet speaks, lyrically, emotionally, of wanting her return, the return to a lost life with his mother.

In Seed Catalogue we hear the mother’s whisper. To whom do we whisper And under what circumstances We whisper out of courtesy, so as not to bother others with our conversations. We whisper in hiding, so as not to be found. We whisper in intimacy, our words that close to another. We whisper to befuddle and to intimidate: what are they saying about me about her We whisper in connivance and tenderness. But what of the mother’s words: “‘Bring me the radish seeds,’ my mother whispered” Clearly they are meant to be protective and absolving. It’s all right, it’s all right, the words say; let’s see what we can do about this, the mother in love of son says. They do that, true enough. But is that all—all, that is, if we read Seed Catalogue within our knowledge of the poet’s biography?

A boy fallen in the garden is a symbol of transition into adulthood. Our protagonist falls from innocence. He is 13 when he falls—a boy entering manhood. The boy must face the recoil of the two male adults, their disappointed sense that he has failed somehow to do what he must, perhaps not succeeded in entering maleness as they would understand it. In his inability to ride he remains unreceived into their world. At that moment of jeopardized manhood the boy is bidden into a complicitous act with his mother. Would it be going too far to say she takes over the initiatory scene The boy and his mother will presumably turn to gardening and find solace in their shared work. In that gesture the concerned mother offers reassurance. And yet what of the fact that the mother, almost secretively, calls the boy into an act of seeding Only she, in Seed Catalogue, is described as a figure with a bodily presence and a bodily apprehension of the world: the grace of her tired hands; her teachings of morning smells, the colour of grass, the force of the prairie sun, the smell of the speaker’s own sweating body. Could we hear in the scene of fall and comfort—this moment when the young male, teetering on the verge of self-definition, is offered a whispered closeness, an almost inaudible call, repeated (in the boy’s mind) at the edge of the mother’s grave—a version of what emerges so forcefully in “Sounding the Name”—that final line when the poet writes of the ghostly mother: “I become her approaching lover” Eros and Thanatos.

What of the fact that the mother, almost secretively, calls the boy into an act of seeding Only she, in Seed Catalogue, is described as a figure with a bodily presence and a bodily apprehension of the world.

Before writing “Sounding the Name,” Kroetsch confessed to the force of her memory and the weight of her loss: “I kept the mother figures especially, very silent at the centre of the writing, partly because my own relationship with my mother was so painful that I’ve only recently even put it into print at all. And I think part of my move to autobiography was daring to say that my mother died when I was so young and I was very close to her.”

In that same interview Kroetsch says he was marked as something close to a failed male: “I grew up on a big farm, and there was a high definition of male and female activity, and lots of hired help working. I had allergies so that I couldn’t do a lot of the male work in buildings. I would do out-of-doors work but I couldn’t work in the barn or anything like that. But I couldn’t work in the house either, because that was the sphere of female activity—and I was the only son and the oldest, and all those privileged things. And the one place where I found a kind of open field was the garden because a garden is ambiguous on a farm. It involves women’s work, but often the men help. And so I ended up with a huge garden.”

The death of his mother, whose role as keeper of the garden the archives show and whose work Kroetsch took over the spring after she died, shook him deeply. As he was working on Seed Catalogue, he recalled the neighbours’ attempts to comfort his father and him. “Sunday, March 9, 1974” the heading says. “Binghamton, New York: And in bed, alone, after, I remembered the death of my mother. I remembered the wake, the crowds of people arriving over muddy roads, the body in the coffin in my parents’ bedroom. And I remembered the men who came to my father and tried to tell him of the sorrow they felt: and even at the age of 13 I saw the failure of language, the faltering connection between those spoken words and what it was I knew my father felt, what I felt.”

A son nearly overwhelmed by his father’s power as narrator, virtually silenced by his mother’s death – how is he to come into words, how is he to speak, about this, the unspeakable sorrow he would have felt?

A son nearly overwhelmed by his father’s power as narrator, virtually silenced by his mother’s death—how is he to come into words, how is he to speak, about this, the unspeakable sorrow he would have felt “The play between the possibilities of revelation and concealment, with a revealed inclination toward concealment, becomes the trope by which Canadian literature speaks itself and questions itself.” So writes Kroetsch. Evasions, feints, guises, false clues, dodges, coverings-up. Canadian literature is a literature of secrets, then.

The drafts in the archives show the boy’s fall is the result of distraction. A sensitive kid, given to daydreaming and role- playing, he lets his mind wander so far that he loses track of where he is and what he is doing. Here is one account: “One day, riding back from the potato patch to the yard, not watching what I was doing, not watching the rhythm, I fell off. The horse was walking, pulling the cultivator. I was sitting on the horse, my legs crossed, I fell off.” In other versions the boy is thinking of winter, he is dreaming of the circus, he is practising to ride cross-legged, he is “not watching what I / was doing.” He is deeply bemused and his fall occurs not on grounds of incompetence but for reasons of preoccupation. These accounts, abandoned in the end, would have presented the boy more gently. His falling off the horse hardly would have been the cause for laughter, at least not of the kind or degree accorded the kid in the final version. Kroetsch goes so far in his eventual conception as to halt the horse’s motion—the horse was actually moving in all the earlier versions—and, further, to assign a near wilfulness to the kid’s falling. In an earlier stage of the writing the hired man asks how the kid “could” fall off a stationary horse, but Kroetsch rewrites the speech in such a way that the kid apparently “manages” to fall off, as if making it happen himself. The boy would seem to be perversely or unfathomably willing his own mortification.

Another difference. The kid’s misery over the fall and the wake was rendered forthrightly in the evolving manuscript. There, he is brought to tears by the hired man’s ridicule, and in related passages he weeps inconsolably over his mother’s death. Both responses are fully expunged, and the boy’s emotional vulnerability is excised from the version we get.

In one account the mother’s death prompts the bereaved son into gardening, into emulation of her as presiding spirit of the place, to some degree supplanting her, I suppose:

do you grow a garden?
How did I become the gardener?

My mother died. That’s how.
My mother died. I grew
the garden the next year. 1941.
1941. I was fourteen.
I was desolate. In January
I read the seed catalogues.
In May I planted

In the drafts the other parent, the father, is a less perplexed character. In early versions the father appears sympathetic to the magpie, which in the published book the father sees as a disposable and comic scourge. The father is gentle with his son. In one part of the manuscript the father “tried to lift me / back onto the horse.” In another spot the father is named as a mystery, but as one who shelters wisdom in his unreachable silence: “What / was it he knew that he never / told me // What planting did he know / that tall, silent man?” This is the figure who in the book spins outrageous stories full of mischief and who at times shows himself to be thrown into consternation by the kid’s literary inclinations. The father in the drafts is a private, unknowable figure beyond the reach of comedy.

Seed Catalogue circles its own greatest traumas, deflects and almost effaces its deepest concerns—the loss of the quiet mother and the father’s dismay at the son’s literary temptations, such that the son himself can find little room to speak. The son’s deepest feelings for his parents remain in Seed Catalogue largely unspoken. The poem evades itself by suppressing emotional, confessional or “poetic” material and by pushing its narrative toward the comedic and the ribald—toward parody, we might say. In its “play between the possibilities of revelation and concealment,” it is a secret text and inside of it is a hidden grief waiting to get out.

Dennis Cooley is a poet, critic and English professor at the University of Manitoba. Prairie Fire ran a special issue on his work in 1998.

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Robert Kroetsch was asking how a new land, like Alberta, nurtures literary creativity, what a colonial society needs to do to grow its own stories. Kroetsch asked the question because he wanted to write those stories. In 1945, just a kid out of Heisler, Alberta, he signed up for a course in creative writing at the University of Alberta. It was taught by F.M. Salter, easily the most influential figure in creative writing in Alberta. Salter was committed to helping his students become successful writers. Single- handedly, he coaxed two generations of writers out of the Alberta soil.

In his memoir, A Likely Story: The Writing Life, Kroetsch recounts how he felt out of place on the first day of Salter’s class; returning war veterans were talking about their very adult war experiences and he felt completely inexperienced as a kid fresh out of high school. “I had been nowhere, I felt. I had done nothing, I felt. After class, I went and dropped the course and registered in a course called Victorian poetry.” Kroetsch preferred to use the province as a psychic reservoir for his writing rather than a place to live. After graduating from the U of A, he chose to go north to gain the experience he felt he needed to be- come a writer. It was 20 years before his first novel, But We Are Exiles, the story of his northern adventures, was published. With works such as The Studhorse Man, which earned him the Governor General’s Award in 1969, he went on to an illustrious literary career; but what if he had stayed in Salter’s class?

Frederick Millet Salter (1895-1962) first came to the U of A in the 1920s to lecture in the English department, returning at the end of the 1930s. Originally from Chatham, New Brunswick, he helped shape a department whose context was primarily British literature, part of Canada’s colonial heritage. But Salter, himself an early English scholar, challenged this emphasis on the old country by launching in 1939 the first creative writing course offered by any Canadian university. He was able to get it approved by calling it English 65 or composition.

Salter grew writers the way gardeners grow roses. A short, stocky man with a distinctive little moustache, Salter enjoyed reading Shakespeare aloud as he paced around his office. He loved the English language, the very sound of it, as well as its writing. “He had a wonderful reading voice,” Rudy Wiebe, one of Salter’s students, remembers.

“In the classroom he read to us from our own work or from other sources either good or bad, and through comparison and example he passed on to us his love of the right word and accurate detail, his ear for apt expression, his impatience with anything shoddy,” says Robert Blackburn, another of Salter’s students. “He used to say that our university on the northern frontier was the last which could enrol some students who had never before seen electric lights; he knew that most of us had never seen palaces or pirates or skylarks or maple trees or many other exotic things we had read about, and he taught us that the most important things to wonder at and write about were those within our own experience.” Salter knew how to motivate students. If they wrote something excellent he read it over the university radio station — the forerunner of CKUA. The work was brought alive by that impressive voice for all the world to hear. Salter was instrumental in launching the career of Alberta’s pre-eminent postwar novelist, the late W.O. Mitchell. Originally from Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Mitchell had enrolled at the U of A in 1940 to become a teacher. His future wife, Merna, was then a member of the original group of CKUA Players who did radio dramatizations. Salter took an interest in the work of local dramatists performed by the CKUA Players, and it was through Merna he met Bill, who had been working on his writing since the late 1930s.

After reading some of Mitchell’s short stories, Salter was convinced the young writer had tremendous potential. He wrote to Jack Patterson, fiction editor of Maclean’s, encouraging him to publish this outstanding new western talent. In the fall of 1941, Patterson wrote to Mitchell accepting one of his stories (he was paid $85) and ended the letter with “best regards to yourself and your sponsor, Mr. Salter.” You Gotta Teeter appeared in Maclean’s August, 15, 1942, the very day of Bill and Merna’s wedding, at which Salter gave the toast to the bride. Next, Salter wrote to Edward Weeks, the editor of Atlantic Monthly, to suggest that the stories being published by the illustrious gentleman were of a lower quality than those being written by his students. The editor wrote back asking to see this work and subsequently published Mitchell’s Owl and the Bens in April, 1945.

Mitchell acknowledged his indebtedness to Salter’s promotional efforts when he wrote to Weeks that he appreciated the confidence Atlantic Monthly showed in his work and “in Mr. Salter’s judgement, which I have never questioned for the five years that he has helped me.” The closeness generated by the mentoring role Salter played was evident July 11, 1943. “That night,” Merna Mitchell recalls, “Bill was sleeping on a couch in Salter’s home not far from the University Hospital, and Salter woke him to tell him that he had a son.”

Mitchell’s venerated classic, Who Has Seen the Wind, was published in 1947. With its combination of humour and insight, its ear for the spoken word, and its embracing of the essential drama of human life, Who Has Seen the Wind is one of the great works of Canadian literature, the male equivalent of Anne of Green Gables. Mitchell valued the close protégé/mentor relation- ship he had with Salter, and he used that model in his own career as a writing teacher. In the 1970s, Mitchell taught creative writing at the Banff School of Fine Arts, where he introduced Mitchell’s Messy Method of Writing, or freefall in which writers mine their memory for landscape, images, stories, characters and situations.

Salter died in 1962, while only in his 60s. His book on writing, The Way of the Makers, was published by The Friends of the University of Alberta in 1967, followed by a trade edition, The Art of Writing, in 1971. The book was dedicated to his creative writing students. “If I really have blazed a new path toward excellence in writing, others will be able to make the path easy and straight,” Salter wrote in the preface. It was not only Mitchell who carried Salter’s legacy forward, but the equally distinguished novelist, Rudy Wiebe.

Wiebe is the winner of two Governor General’s awards for fiction and a professor emeritus of Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at the U of A. As a student of Salter’s in the mid-50s, he wrote a short story that won a national contest and was published in Liberty magazine. Wiebe was furious when the story was published. “The title was changed from Eight and the Present to The Midnight Ride of an Alberta Boy, he recalls. “It wasn’ t even set in Alberta as far as I was concerned, it was set in Saskatchewan. Anyway, Salter said: ‘Just calm down. Take the $100 you got paid and buy a Canada Savings Bond.’ I did buy the bond because I listened to him a lot in those days.”

Wiebe listened to Salter in many ways. For his master’s, he talked to Salter about doing a thesis on Shakespeare. “You could probably do a good thesis on Shakespeare, but so could many others,” Salter replied. “Only you could write a good novel about Mennonites.”

“That made a lot of sense to me,” Wiebe says. So he wrote Peace Shall Destroy Many. Salter was sufficiently impressed by the novel that he told the young student to send it to “the very best publisher in the country.” Along with the manuscript, Salter sent a letter to publisher Jack McClelland, of McClelland & Stewart, praising the work. Peace Shall Destroy Many, the first novel about Mennonites in Canada, was published in 1962. The more conservative element in the Mennonite community was unhappy with the book’s frank discussion of community conflicts, but this didn’ t stop Wiebe from embarking on an illustrious literary career. His 1973 novel, The Temptations of Big Bear, which dealt with the second Riel Rebellion and the tragic figure of the Cree chief, Big Bear, won a well- deserved Governor General’s award.

Wiebe’s achievement as a writer is based on the view that writing is a hard slog. “You end up struggling with one thing at a time, one story at a time,” he says. Without Salter, “a guy like me living out in the boonies would never have had the nerve to do this.”

Wiebe began teaching Canadian literature and creative writing at the U of A in 1967, inheriting the mantle bequeathed by Salter. Numerous students went on to literary success under Wiebe’s tough guidance. In 1977, NeWest Press published its first fiction title, Getting Here, an anthology of women’s fiction edited by Wiebe. Most of the contributors were or had been students in his classes. Among them were Caterina Edwards, Helen Rosta, and Aritha van Herk whose lead story was A Woman of Moderate Temperament. “Often you can’ t tell if a person sitting in a class with you may turn out to be, in the long run, a much better writer than you are,” Wiebe says.

If Salter launched Mitchell and Wiebe on a trajectory to the pantheon of CanLit, then Wiebe in turn launched van Herk, the first woman writer in the Salter tradition to make it to the top of the Can- Lit charts. Under the supervision of Wiebe, van Herk’s creative writing thesis, Judith, won the Seal First Novel Award in 1978. The prize was $50,000, at the time the most valuable literary prize in Canada. The novel was published in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Set in rural Alberta, Judith is a powerful expression of the feminist consciousness that captured women in the 1970s. At age 23, van Herk became an instant celebrity. She drove about in a white Porsche bought with the prize money, Judith on its vanity licence plate.

Looking back to 1978, when her career took off as fast as Donovan Bailey in a 100-metre dash, she realizes that, as a young woman and writer, she was sitting on a volcano. “In some ways it was the best thing that could happen to a writer and in other ways it was the worst thing that could happen. Everyone looked at the money and the fame and thought I was becoming a spoiled little ingenue. All I had really done was to be a studious kid who read everything I could and wrote a novel under Rudy’s guidance.” In 1983, van Herk joined the English department at the University of Calgary as a professor of creative writing, replacing W.P. Kinsella, who had decided the academic life wasn’ t for him. As the mover and shaker behind Canada’s first PhD in creative writing, she committed herself to the Salter tradition. She has worked tirelessly on be- half of new writers, especially in the area of publishing. In the 1980s, she and Wiebe edited two anthologies of stories from Western Canada. In the 1990s, she edited three further collections of fiction — Alberta ReBound, Boundless Alberta, and Due West. “We have responsibilities as writers,” van Herk explains. “I’m not just a writer out to write books and be famous and make money. I have a responsibility to my colleagues and to my readers and to my culture. I owe something to this community.”

That sense of obligation and sharing is evident in the number of new writers she has shepherded since she began teaching at the university — Joan Crate, Rosemary Nixon, Suzette Mayr and Hiromi Goto. Looking back on her apprenticeship with Wiebe, she realizes that mentoring is not always a gentle process. “Rudy was my teacher and he was wonderful to me. He was an excellent supervisor but I had incredible fights with him. You have to fight with Rudy. That’s the only way to have a relationship with him. He won’ t respect you if you don’ t fight with him.” Although Wiebe was her de facto mentor since he was her official supervisor, she considers Robert Kroetsch, the writer who fled Salter’s class, to be her “spiritual mentor.”

While acknowledging the influence of Wiebe and Kroetsch on her, van Herk is modest in her assessment of her own influence on the younger generation of writers. Younger writers, she says, are not going “to see me in the same kind of power as my generation saw Rudy and Robert.” Her modesty may be endearing but not accurate. In the past decade, she has nurtured a whole new generation of Alberta writers, including the acclaimed Calgary novelist, Hiromi Goto.

A Canadian of Japanese descent, Hiromi Goto won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1995 for the best first book in the Caribbean and Canada region. Her novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, went on to win a second international prize, The Canada- Japan Book Award, the following year. The jury described Chorus of Mushrooms as conveying “an authentic sense of the difficulty experienced by a young Japanese-Canadian woman caught between the pull of assimilation and the hunger to come to terms with her Japanese heritage.” Born in Chiba-ken Japan in 1966, Goto immigrated to British Columbia with her family at the age of three. They later settled in southern Alberta, where her father operated a mush- room farm. After taking her bachelor of arts at the U of C, she began taking creative writing classes, first with Fred Wah and then with van Herk. Goto considers this a time when her writing became politicized in terms of racial and feminist politics. “Taking those courses was a big influence,” she says, “because suddenly I was working in a group and a community of writers.”

Goto began Chorus of Mushrooms in the last fiction writing class she took with van Herk. Like Judith, it reflects the formative experiences of the novelist in which place, cultural identity and gender intertwine in a psychological drama. Like Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many, Goto’s first book has the author’s ethnic background as its subject. And just as Salter helped Wiebe get published, van Herk was there for Goto. “I ended up with about 50 pages that I could actually keep from the manuscript when Aritha’s class was over,” Goto says. “Then I was talking to her outside of class and she said there was a deadline for NeWest coming up and why don’t I hurry and finish it and hand it in. So I did, and they liked it.”

In Salter’s day, promising writers had to turn to Toronto for their first step on the road to fame, but now Alberta writers can garner international recognition right here at home. A case in point is Thomas Wharton, who studied writing at the U of A and is now a PhD student at the U of C. Wharton’s 1995 novel, Icefields, about a turn-of-the-century mountaineering expedition, won a bevy of honours: the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada Region; the Writers Guild of Alberta Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book; two awards at the Banff Mountain Book Festival; and a 1997 nomination for the Boardman-Tasker Award for mountain literature. Icefields sold well in Canada, the U.S., and Britain. As a native Albertan raised in the Rockies, Wharton’s writing represents the Mitchell side of Salter’s legacy in the same way that Goto’s work and Wiebe’s are symbolic of the ethnic and immigrant identity. Salter looked to both polarities for creative energy and literary achievement. In this sense, he was very much a Canadian seeking to define the distinctness of our character.

The nurturing of Alberta writers in university creative writing classes that Salter started in 1939 is still going strong nearly 60 years later. The U of A and the U of C have nationally renowned programs that pro- duce talented writers. Both universities have writer-in- residence programs which bring nationally and internationally known writers to Alberta, enabling the tradition to be continually refreshed with new perspectives. The university’s association with creative writing may bring the theoretical and ideological concerns of academia to bear on the writing. But this may also be a way of keeping the writing current and con- temporary. The large number of award-winning writers to come out of both universities are a sign of the excellence of the work done there. The fundamental vision of how to grow writers through university programs — brought to Alberta by F.M. Salter — re- mains unchanged. The seeds that Salter sowed have grown into tall trees that continue to bear magnificent fruit generation after generation. Salter believed passionately that enthusiasm and good work went hand in hand. That his own enthusiasm for the written word continues to resonate after so many years is a tribute to his passion and the literary achievements of his students, their students, and students to come.

George Melnyk is the author of The Literary History of Alberta, the first volume of which has just been published by the University of Alberta Press. The second volume is scheduled for publication in 1999.

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