by Myrna Kostash
ATHABASCA UNIVERSITY PRESS
2024/$17.99/48 pp.
Flipping through old diaries filled with youthful thoughts can be nerve-wracking. Yet acclaimed Alberta author Myrna Kostash took on an even braver task. In Writing Ukraine, a long essay based on her writer-in-residence lecture at Athabasca University in 2022, Kostash revisits nearly five decades of writing and reflects on how her understanding of her Ukrainian heritage has evolved and matured over time.
She reserves her harshest criticism for All of Baba’s Children, the book that launched her career in 1977 as one of Canada’s leading non-fiction writers. Although a third-generation Ukrainian-Canadian, Kostash viewed herself as an outsider. To connect with her roots, she embarked on a cultural immersion journey, spending three months in Two Hills—a predominantly Ukrainian settlement at the time. She eavesdropped on café conversations, rummaged through dusty boxes and interviewed locals. “I passed judgment on it all,” she notes wryly, marvelling at the youthful audacity that defined her debut work.
After that book, Kostash made two trips to Ukraine—one before and one during Gorbachev’s perestroika. The quaint calendar images of thatched-roof cottages she had grown up seeing were replaced by the stark reality of village life. Her relatives lived without plumbing, with only one paved street, and exhaustion etched the faces of people waiting in line for the meagre goods available in shops. The brutality of Russian domination was painfully evident in signs that ordered Ukrainians to “speak human,” which meant speaking Russian. These trips also deepened her empathy for her family’s tumultuous past, shedding light on political views Kostash had once dismissed. She captured these revelations in her book Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe (1993).
As the essay unfolds, Kostash shows how her later works cast ever wider nets around her heritage. An inspiring church service she attends soon after the thaw of perestroika foreshadows Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium (2010)—a travel diary exploring the roots of Ukrainian Orthodox traditions. In Canada, a visit to a mass grave of Indigenous warriors near Fort Battleford leads to her recent book, Ghosts in a Photograph (2022), in which she grapples with her settler family history and the colonial policies that secured their place on the land.
Ultimately Writing Ukraine paints a sweeping panorama of an author’s evolution. From this bird’s-eye view, Kostash’s reflections trace a gradual transformation: youthful certainty—what she often calls “swagger”—gives way to nuance, wisdom shaped by context, and a deep embrace of the multifaceted richness of the Ukrainian-Canadian experience.
Agnieszka Matejko is an artist and writer in Edmonton.
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