Rereading Sheila Watson and Elizabeth Smart at the Garneau Pub, Edmonton

[I originally presented this piece as a talk at the ottawa international writers festival in April, 2008, and it soon after appeared online at The Danforth Review. Considering the journal is no longer online, and with Smart’s 100^th birthday coming up next year, I thought this was worth repeating.]

In the winter, on very cold days, you can see her small figure, wrapped up in a huge, yellowish fur coat of indeterminate ancestry, walking across the snow-covered campus of the University of Alberta. She seems vulnerable, fragile almost. A strong gust of wind might blow her away. But that’s an illusion. The small figure creates a space of its own, asserts itself, and yet seems an integral part of the landscape. So also in her house, where she and Wilfred have created spaces in which both, strong individuals, can function separately and together. Paintings, pieces of pottery, Eskimo carvings, Indian masks create the stillness in which these two figures move.

            Henry Kreisel, “Sheila Watson in Edmonton”

I’m already off-topic, wanting to talk about two essential novels but already outside, wandering the dusty grey streets of the Alberta capital. How is it my day-to-day experience of Edmonton, after my first three months, became immersed in Sheila Watson and Elizabeth Smart? How is it that the ghosts that haunt my wandering the city streets became women writers from away who, for whatever reason, ended up being known, forgotten and known again for writing they had done so much earlier? Two women, too, who might have wanted more from themselves than these singular novels, each producing a lyrical prose masterpiece, but somehow the rest of their writing lives could never get out from under the shadow of their earlier, and difficult, pieces. For west coast Watson, it was her novel of the British Columbia interior, The Double Hook (1959), and for Smart, Ottawa born and bred, it was By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945). For either writers, it wouldn’t be until the 1960s and even later that they would develop a reputation at all, and by then they held a near-cult status. In the end, how did either of them relate to the city of Edmonton? In the end, does it even matter when reading their books?

                In the folds of the hills

            under Coyote’s eye

                        lived

            the old lady, mother of William

                    of James and of Greta

            lived James and Greta

            lived William and Ara his wife

            lived the Widow Wagner

            the Widow’s girl Lenhen

            the Widow’s boy

            lived Felix Prosper and Angel

            lived Theophil

            and Kip

                        until one morning in July

Sitting in the Garneau Pub on 109^th Street in the Strathcona neighbourhood, in part of what once called “new Edmonton” until the forced amalgamation in 1904 with downtown, the sports bar with three televisions on sports, often two on one game, and part of the geography Edmonton author Todd Babiak wrote about in his third novel, The Garneau Block (2007). In a review of the book the Globe and Mail, Cynthia MacDonald opened her commentary with:

The city of Edmonton has received harsh treatment from many of the famous writers who've passed through it. Mordecai Richler called it "Canada's boiler room." Margaret Atwood offered her opinion in poetic form: "only more/ nothing than I've ever seen." Passing through some 25 years ago, Jan Morris was even more blunt. "The longer I stayed in the place," she wrote, "the more I wondered why on earth anyone would want to live there." It made her think of Beirut.

But still, these are novels started, finished and published well before either author had even arrived in this highway boom town. “When and where does a book begin?” It’s one of the lines friend, critic and later biographer of Sheila Watson, F.T. Flahtiff, wrote in the first line of his afterward to the paperback edition of The Double Hook. As Watson herself wrote of her character Ara, “It’s not for fish she fishes […].” When I was seventeen years old, one of the books that the eventual mother of my child would hand me to read was a copy of Sheila Watson’s infamous novel, The Double Hook, a small edition published by McClelland and Stewart as a New Canadian Library paperback. The first part of his introduction reads:

            When and where does a book begin?

On its first page, of course, with each reader and each new reading; with its recovery – or its discovery: here and everywhere, now and always.

Reading coyote and the interior of British Columbia, when I initially read Watson’s first published novel, I missed completely the murder on the first page, enjoying but not understanding what it was I was taking in. By page fifty or so, seeing the mention of Mrs. Potter’s death, I had to return to the first page, to read over again what I had missed. When the hell did that happen? Where or how does a book begin? From the wheres and the when of biography, Watson’s life when the construction of the book would have started, or very simply from the opening line of the first part, “In the folds of the hills // under coyote’s eye…” Or this section, beginning at the bottom of the same paperback page, that reads:

Still the old lady fished. If the reeds had dried up and the banks folded and crumbled down she would have fished still. If God had come into the valley, come holding out the long finger of salvation, moaning in the darkness, thundering down the gap at the lake head, skimming across the water, drying up the blue signature like blotting-paper, asking where, asking why, defying an answer, she would have thrown her line against the rebuke; she would have caught a piece of mud and looked it over; she would have drawn a line with the barb when the fire of righteousness baked the bottom.

What brought me back to Watson, and Smart as well, was as much geographical as anything else, my nine months in Edmonton at the University of Alberta, where Sheila Watson taught from 1961 until retiring in 1975; how could I not see her in my future, taking copies of what little I had with me west? Another part of my return, a hopeful return to fiction, with two incomplete novels that had been set aside for eighteen months while I completed a number of other projects, including a few editorial projects, a collection of literary essays and a travel book about Ottawa. By the time Watson got to Edmonton, she was still writing, but somehow nearly done; she was nearly done but for pieces in the journal she’d founded, White Pelican. What effect did Edmonton have? Edmonton, where after some twenty years of marriage, the first house she and her husband, Wilfred Watson, owned, just west of the campus, on Windsor Road. Edmonton, where she taught for fourteen years, and oversaw more theses than anyone else on faculty.

What are you saying? Greta asked. You don’t even know. You don’t know a thing. You don’t know what a person knows. You don’t know what a person feels. You’ve burned and spilled enough oil to light up the whole country, she said. It’s easy enough to see if you make a bonfire and walk around in the light of it.

In the Garneau neighbourhood of Strathcona, one of the neighbourhoods Watson would have known, just the other side of the campus from the house where they lived in Windsor, at 8918 Windsor Road. Part of the appeal of Watson, is the internalization of region, of place; not the problem of place but taking it deeper. Given that Watson sent a draft to University of Alberta professor Frederick M. Salter, an early champion of the novel while still in manuscript, it seems appropriate that her writing desk sits in the reading room named for him at the University of Alberta. How does one book or one author or a series of same hold on so to the imagination?

Elizabeth Smart, born in Ottawa to a prominent family, is known predominantly for the heartbreaking lyric prose of her By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, originally published in England in 1945. Her infamous first novel was misunderstood, dismissed and unseen by readers in her home country, and finally went out of print for twenty years, only to be rediscovered in the 1960s in a reissue finally available to Canadian audiences (it, along with a later title, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, remain in print). No matter what else she wrote or produced throughout the rest of her life (she began publishing again after decades of silence in the late 1970s), it’s for her first novel she’s known, both for the writing itself, and the situation of what the novel came out of, namely the doomed love affair she had with the married British poet George Barker, with whom she had four children, and received not a speck of support (he eventually had fifteen children with five different women, and never, through the process, left his wife). For Elizabeth Smart, it is very easy to let her work be overshadowed by her biography, but to hear the prose of her heart does away with all else, just as much as it reinforces, as the beginning of the final chapter, part ten, begins:

            By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept:

I will not be placated by the mechanical motions of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow. But I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone: it leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces: everyone compromises.

They say, As we grow older we embrace resignation.

But O, they totter into it blind and unprotesting. And from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there is no redemption. It is the sin of damnation.

It certainly didn’t help that her mother her harshest critic, interfering whenever she could, from as far a distance as possible, including having all the copies of the 1945 edition of her novel that made it into Canada seized and destroyed, with the help of family friend Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Even when the novel was subsequently reprinted, her mother only responded with a similar ugliness. But still, Smart’s return to Canada in 1982 to become writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta (at the invitation of the previous writer-in-residence, poet Patrick Lane), was frought with its own peril, including the fact that it was mere months after the death of Smart’s youngest daughter, Rose, from an overdose, as author Kim Echlin writes in her magnificent Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity (2004):

In 1982, a few months after Rose died, Elizabeth returned to Canada for the last time. She went to Edmonton as a writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta and then stayed on in Toronto for a second year, spending time reacquainting herself with the country of her birth. Although she met Alice Van Wart, who edited her final prose collections and her journals, Elizabeth found Canada “stifling” and was generally disillusioned with the “poor caged Canadians.” She found nothing in Canada worth staying for, and finally returned to her family, The Dell, and Soho.

What is it about these solitary, determined women that appeals so? What is it about those solitary masterpieces of lyric prose, pared down to the bone? When I walk the cold, winter streets of Garneau, I don’t think of Robert Kroetsch writing wild horses loose across the High Level Bridge in The Studhorse Man or even any part of Todd Babiak’s Garneau Block, but instead the reams of unwritten between two women who gave their time to Edmonton and the University of Alberta very close to each other but not meeting there, as Watson was long gone by the time Smart arrived in 1982. Recounting the Toronto introduction of Watson and Smart in his biography of Sheila Watson, F.T. Flahiff writes:

I remember on one of her last visits—in the summer of 1983—she [Watson] read at Harbourfront in connection with the publication of an anthology of Canadian literature edited by Donna Bennett and Russell Brown. It was an afternoon reading followed by a reception, and I remember that Sheila read “Antigone,” and P.K. Page, who also read, said to Sheila that she would have given all her own work to have written “Antigone.” After the readings, as we drank wine and ate cheese among large cardboard advertisements for the anthology, Elizabeth Smart, accompanied by an Antigone-like granddaughter, made her determined way to Sheila—they had never met—and attempted to kneel in homage before her. Sheila was startled and perplexed, as were bpNichol and Philip Marchand who were talking with her at the time. bp fell back, taking one of the advertisements with him. I remember Sheila and I remember Elizabeth Smart’s determination and her grand-daughter’s poise in the midst of this slapstick and strangely moving scene.

For both novels, there is the lyric as opposed to a more straightforward line. For Watson, it was the passionate stripped down matter-of-fact prose writing the trickster Coyote, and a prose later emulated by writers such as Ondaatje, Bowering and even Elizabeth Smart herself. For Smart, it was the heartbreaking and classically dense prose of lyric heartbreak that fish-hooked her insides out of her, and a novel that competes only with British writer Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey as the book most quoted in song lyrics by pop singer Morrissey, former front-man of The Smiths. How does a book by an Ottawa-born former socialite become such an influence? But I will leave the last words to Smart herself, from an earlier part of her novel:

And so, returning to Canada through the fall sunshine, I look homeward now and melt, for though I am crowned and anointed with love and have obtained from life all I asked, what am I as I enter my parents’ house but another prodigal daughter? I see their faces at which I shall never be free to look dispassionately. They gaze out of the window with eyes harassed by what they continually fear they see, like premature ghosts, straggling homeward over the plain.

The Garneau Review: issue one (finally) on-line!

The first issue of The Garneau Review, a pdf Edmonton poetry journal, is now on-line at www.ottawater.com/garneaureview, featuring poetry by Douglas Barbour, Jenna Butler, Trisia Eddy, Lainna Lane, Alice Major, rob mclennan, Ben Murray, Catherine Owen, Paul Pearson and Christine Stewart, as well as an essay by Shawna Lemay, and an interview with Christine Stewart, conducted by rob mclennan.

Future issues will each be edited by different Edmonton-based writers, including the second issue, edited by Trisia Eddy and Lainna Lane El Jabi, due in fall 2009.

For comments, questions or queries, email rob mclennan at az421 (at) freenet (dot) carleton (dot) ca

Broken Arrow: Why must a Scottish Presbyterian Canadian write about sex?

Was that how I wanted to end up, I asked myself. The question was a variation of the one that still nagged at me: Why did I come to New York? In one of my somber, soul-searching talks with Paul Goodman, I phrased it still another way: “I don’t know what I want to do with my life.” This made him pull on his pipe. “That is one of the most beautiful problems you can have,” he said, portentiously. Easy for him to say, I thought, since it was a problem he doubtless never had...
— Joe LeSeur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara

I sit on the airplane to Edmonton, toward a woman I’ve seen but twice in the space of ten months. Third time the charm. A bag filled with paper, optimism, quiet desperation. The beginnings of one thing. In my carry-on, Elizabeth Smart’s The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, Dany Laferrière’s Why must a black writer write about sex? Two completely different novels, writing the lyric from real experience, writing novels that weren’t novels. Novels that were other kinds of books in disguise. Essays, each a treatise on how we treat each other, how exactly we should.

Both writing books about sex, the halting essentialness of coupling, physical and emotional. How does the Presbyterian “I” manage to keep self together through such talk?

Walking from my daybreak empty street to the bus stop, a grey hush illuminating downtown Ottawa. This part of the city is barely awake, array of crows and pigeons and Canada geese criss-crossing sky between here and what clouds. The steps of my waiting, longing, my hurt. My restraint.

This is a story that keeps telling. I originally began in Edmonton with Elizabeth Smart and I end here, with her. Ending one journey by starting another. If there were endings. There seem only beginnings. This woman of breeding, good grace and refinement from my same certain capital, some six decades before me, who came to resent and revile the provincialism of her home country. Making good her escape. How can one run away from what is bred in the bone? Did she ever manage it? Still. This is a woman who knew about borders. She was constantly fighting to cross them. Returning finally a senior to Canada, a country she was still so ahead of.

To keep, what is held. To hold what is kept, saved. A continued vision of restraint. How to explain what is best kept, only comes through release, through letting go? My own parents, as I used to joke, that I had no evidence they had even consummated their marriage, my sister and I adopted. The unthinkable. We never want to admit that our parents, or even our children, have sex. Perhaps less so our friends. What our house never discussed. My own daughter, old enough now to drink in Quebec and to vote, and I, still waiting for my father to give me “the talk.” Good thing I’m no longer waiting.

Reading Dany Laferrière and Elizabeth Smart, flipping through pages and paragraphs as I wait to board, expectantly. How do I read two at once? Practice. “Let’s each write down what we’d like to do,” Smart writes in her piece, “and draw lots out of a hat.”

A ripple of festivity went round.

We all wrote down what we wanted most to do.

‘Go to a nightclub.’

‘Drive to the next town.’

‘Go to the casino.’

‘Dance.’

‘Bathe.’

Then, there was a pause. The one who was drawing the papers out of the hat blushed, and handed it on. No one knew where to look. What is it? What is it? Uncle Amos reached across and looked. He turned away. The little bit of love was drained from his cardboard face. He got up and went out. The doctors paid the bill. It was all hushed and strained.

Haven’t I talked enough about these myths of the west? Perhaps this has nothing to do with that. How the west was won and, as Michael Stipe sang, where it got us. Where did it get us? At least not like the Americans, we tell ourselves, who stood facing west from the thirteen colonies with rifles, firing as they walked a straight line. Manifest destiny. Not as bad, we tell ourselves. I’m sure there are those who would beg to differ. Plead, and insist. Myths of the west and the north, and these tales we would tell to abscond, pillage, plunder. Trading manifest destiny for family compact.

I head west to see her again, my lover who waits for me, weeks before our Toronto begins, preparing herself for a Master’s Degree in Literature at Ryerson. Where are the myths she might hold? The oldest daughter of Lebanese immigrants who escaped into Ontario just in time for her arrival. As she emerged, head first, in factory-laden Windsor, far away from her new father, working to provide them a home and a future, Toronto. What were the stories they told themselves as her parents left behind origins, their home country, and moved another continent, into Trudeau’s multicultural dream? As John Ralston Saul wrote, multicultural stories coming out of the stories that had long formed by the beginnings of European occupation, our Canada made out a Metis foundation. They myths of the two founding cultures since appended, corrected, pointing out English and French and Aboriginal, writing Canada at the source a Metis nation.

No sex please, we’re Canadian. A country they tell as invented by Scots. Scotland’s revenge on the English. There are stories we tell ourselves and keep telling, and go no further. In the United States under Bush, the best defence a head buried in sand, teaching abstinence and the dangers of condoms, and the new slate of teen pregnancies that quickly respond. How could they think that informing a population is therefore allowing permission for wild, wanton ways? The bunkers we hide ourselves in, hide ourselves under.

Mirimachi novelist David Adams Richards, who once wrote an essay referencing his son, then a year old. That he’d rather his son watch adult movies when old enough, than the Canadian classic Porky’s. How sex shouldn’t be hidden, or stolen. An open, shared experience, and not something tricked through a hole in the wall of the girl’s showers.

Sex as hidden, furtive. What my house never discussed. The “talk” my father never gave. In my grandmother’s house, the Playboy calendar all the boys snuck upstairs to our uncle’s bedroom to peek, Dorothy Stratten, 1980. What month was she? I remember Dorothy Stratten, the beautiful blonde model from Vancouver, brutally murdered by her jealous boyfriend. Where did that Hemingway woman fit in?

Elizabeth Smart, who wrote her mother and her father and her Canadian childhood behind her from England. She, who could never completely leave. And Laferrière, who could never completely enter. Laferrière, who knows of and writes his America, but is better suited to Canadianism.

There is the Ottawa Valley, and what I learned while back on the farm. There is Ottawa, where the naive farm boy adapted, and became something else. Learned a few things. And then there is Edmonton, where the layers of eastern Ontario self melted back and furthered. And then there was her.

When I was twenty-six, it was my first foreign destination, leaving Ottawa Valley for the wilds of Toronto. Do I even count the day I spent there at eighteen, a failed exam writing for Ryerson in the computer department? What was I thinking? Our American city, they say, although Calgary could be that close second, more Americans per capita than anywhere in the country. What does it matter now, in these days of bled borders, and cultural internationalism. The man on the airplane beside me watching Slumdog Millionaire, with time enough on this flight to add Baz Luhrmann’s Australia as well. Here we are, made up of us and of them; here they are, made up of themselves and of everyone else.

I have begun to leave my own books in airports. I wonder what might happen to them there. In Toronto, where I used to leave poems on the subway, on the seat just beside. Do they ever get picked up, or do they fall to the floor, tramped on and swept up at the end of another long endless commuter day?

Dany Laferrière, perpetual outsider. A journalist who escaped Haiti during Papa Doc’s brutal regime, twenty-four hours after a friend of his murdered, to end up in Montreal. His first novel, How to make love to a negro (without getting tired), was so brilliant because everyone in Montreal feels an outsider, whether English, French, Cree, Haitian, Mohawk, European, black, white. The Jewish population. Everyone is a minority. There is no majority in Montreal, even if there is. How perfect, for him to emigrate to a country where so many feel lost, as though they don’t even belong, the 1970s and 80s of Trudeau’s multiculturalism, the echoes of the same simple (yet complicated) question, of just who we are. Who are we? Laferrière writing the same “America” that Don Delillo does in his Underworld, the abject wealth of an expanding myth, the overwhelmingness of such, but writing out of that essential same question.

Everyone who read that first novel (if they read it at all, able to get past the provocative title) could see themselves reflected, there. How are the rest of us to compete? Not that this is a competition, one might say. No, it isn’t. Not when you’re winning. Not that anyone would mistake this for winning.

I am no longer here, I have already entered her Toronto. Ours.

In an hour or so I will land. I will tell her the books I am reading.

A more recent note about Leonard Cohen

Everyone writes about Leonard Cohen, it seems, eventually. Every poet, every novelist, every journalist, at least a bare reference hidden, between lines. Those who arrived at Cohen in our teens or twenties and have never left. Of all the positions to take, he has various. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, everybody has done it [see my Cohen note from last fall, coincidentally also written in Myrna Kostash’s house]. You weren’t the only one pining for a run-in, Nancy White, but I never needed help with groceries. A word or two, perhaps. I keep the two letters he wrote for me by the bed, close to access if I ever need to see them, show them off, attempting charm through Cohen’s own, in my late twenties and early thirties not yet confident enough to know that if a woman was already in my room, I no longer needed the same hard-sell. For years, Saturday Night magazine seemed to be profiling Cohen a few times a decade, as though any of us would forget. As though any of us wouldn’t be hoarding our back issues featuring our favourite Montreal poet alongside that issue that featured those tastefully-nude photographs of Susan Musgrave. Just admit it. You know you’ll feel better.
Sifting through books and magazines on Kostash’s shelf, I find an issue of Border Crossings on her coffee table (no. 104, 2007) that features an interview and profile by Robert Enright, published to coincide with an exhibition of Cohen’s drawings, “Drawn in Words: Visual works from 40 years,” which premiered at the Drabinsky Gallery in Toronto on June 3, 2007.

The Book of Longing, a collection of poetry and prose Leonard Cohen published in 2006, is about wisdom. Composed by a man who has lived much in the world, and who has come to understand what all that living has been about, it also knows enough to take its wisdom with a grain of salt. While his ability to write remains undiminished, what he writes about has undergone some adjustments. As the poet himself laments, he now aches in the places where he used to play, and his candor in addressing those moments of pain is no less compelling than it was when he articulated his moments of passion. Cohen, in his 73rd year to heaven, remains our most satisfying poet on the complications of love and the loving body.

What is it about Cohen that keeps us so fascinated? Anyone with a guitar has attempted to play his songs, and the list of covers grows and grows. He is the poet our teenagers swoon over, girls and boys both, for various reasons, and with a depth that one grows to further appreciate as his audience ages, causing many to remain. CBC recently showed the hour-long “Live in London” concert, displaying the expected charm and intimate appeal special of Cohen covering his own long list of memorable songs, his own long list of memory. But still, at least one newspaper columnist asked the apprpriate question, wasn’t there a Canadian concert as worthy to show? But they have always loved him better over there, in Europe. Far more than here, even. And certainly far more and far longer than in the United States.

In the new issue of Geist (no. 72, spring 2009), Montreal writer Ann Diamond writes her own peice about Cohen, “Stranger Song: How I (finally) met Leonard Cohen,” writing out her teenage and twentysomething dreams and accidental run-ins around Montreal streets. Her piece moves gracefully between the adolescent swoon and self-questioning love, which perhaps, might also come originally from adolescence, in a memoir that wraps herself around him as a thread through her own history and coming-of-age, writing time after time they didn’t actually meet, or almost, or should have and didn’t, before arriving to tea.

Seven years later, at his kitchen table, I would ask him if he remembered our first encounter. He would not. Right now, though, I’d had enough for one night’s glimpse of the future. And I’d learned an important lesson: one poet leads to another. The universe provides for the pure in heart. On a street corner I’d had a flickering encounter with a mythical figure whose novel Beautiful Losers was one of the sacred texts of the day.

Part of a larger work-in-progress, I’m intrigued at this work; where is Diamond leading? As she writes near the end:

There are times—mainly in youth—when we believe ourselves deserving of exceptional blessings. Times when fate reaches a hand down into the aquarium where we’ve been circling, and offers us a glimpse of a world beyond. Are we really meant to breathe air? Or to end up gasping on the floor?

The title essay in the late Vancouver writer Bruce Serafin’s posthumous Stardust (New Star Books, 2007) also moves through an experience of Cohen, but without the immediacy of Cohen himself, through his own experiences growing up in West Vancouver from 1965 to 1970. Writing about a time just before Diamond’s own begins, Serafin's is a more general generational piece about the 1960s, threading his own reading of Cohen through the growing up that he needed to leave behind him. Writing about the “glamour” of a particular generation that, for him, Leonard Cohen’s work embodied.

Cohen’s poems ‘The Music Crept By Us’, ‘What I’m Doing Here’ (from Flowers for Hitler), ‘The Genius’ and ‘Angels’ (from The Spice-Box of Earth) show this trick at work. The heroic pose, the lyrics using the language of love to evoke grotesque subject matter, the narcissism, the coy glamorization of failure and terror – all this hit home to me and my teenage friends. Of course we didn’t have any real understanding of the severity and pain of failure. But in Cohen’s poems, just as in songs like “Desolation Row,” we found a romantic mode of writing that provided an access to a realm of experience that might otherwise have proved overpowering and beyond our ability to assimilate. [...]

So why did I stop reading him? Well, as with e.e. cummings, another poet I admired, the very intoxication I felt marks the point at which Cohen’s weaknesses can be observed: the playing to an audience, the easy stylization of experience. Vanity was Cohen’s element, just as a black leather sportscoat was his favoured dress, and the consequent staging of the personality that I now sense everywhere in his work meant that an infatuated intelligence instead of an alert one was the order of the day so far as his readers were concerned.

Later on, he writes that “[t]he truth is, experiencing Cohen was uncannily like experiencing infatuated love.” Is this the difference? Is this what Diamond gets, able to work through her love and engage with it, whereas Serafin falls out of his altogether? Or did Serafin fall too hard too far to do anything else than leave it all behind?

Some Edmonton, thus;

[Lainna] I’ve been here since Thursday, April 9; what have I been up to? My Talonbooks launch next week, so hopefully a good crowd for that, lovingly hosted by Trisia Eddy and Lainna Lane El Jabi and their current incarnation of The Factory (West) Reading Series. A reading there before heading back to Ottawa for the writers festival, but unfortunately missing out on the entire Edmonton Poetry Festival happening here the same time. The same day I flew in there was a day-long conference at the University of Alberta, predominantly made up of English and Film Studies department grad students, apparently to give them practice at presenting at conferences, including readings of creative works by Heather Simeny McLeod, Rebecca Frederickson and Joel Katelnikoff that I would have enjoyed witnessing, but unfortunatly the timing didn’t quite work out. I heard most of a paper on the McClelland & Stewart New Canadian Library paperback series that I would have liked to have heard more of. Being a mini-conference, though, I doubt there will be a post-event publication to go along with it, which is a bit disappointing.

Much of my days have been distracted, in a particular direction. Other parts included a visit to NeWest Press last week to see Lou Morin, a visit to the University of Alberta Press to hand in my signed contract (I’ve a poetry collection out with them soon, wild horses, written while I was writer-in-residence in 2007-8), and Trisia Eddy and Michael Gravel’s combined Olive reading on Tuesday. I heard both of them read last May as part of Eddy’s Red Nettle Press launch, two days before I moved back to Ottawa, and was very impressed by both of them (I have actually heard Eddy read a couple of times now). She has a manuscript ready, but so far, I don’t think she’s sent it anywhere. Gravel, on the other hand, is part of the Raving Poets, doing a more personal and narrative kind of writing that doesn’t necessarily fall into my interest, but he’s one of the better readers I’ve heard in some time. A number of the poems he read from his 2008 Red Nettle Press chapbook came out of the fact that in December 2007, he nearly died of a blood clot in his heart and spent weeks in hospital, so his work certainly is memorable.

Fast Heart

Comes across the beat
like chest wire
face drained to paper
neck bulging a pump.
Fingers to wrist,
do the math.
160 at rest.
A dead short somewhere
on the grid.
The heart –
that old electro-mech
stopwatch sump,
swishing the juice,
jamming the pipes.
It could explode,
blow muscle to the lungs.
At 160 I find a chair
send my eyes back
and wait for the sirens. (Michael Gravel, “Further No Theories”)

[Lainna (centre) and I visiting U of A Press; marketing guru Cathie Crooks on left, Jeff Carpenter on right] It would have been nice to hear Lainna read in the open set, but she had read in the previous two, so didn’t. I still haven’t heard her read. There’s a video of her reading a poem or two on YouTube (although I can't, for the life of me, find it right now), one of which will be appearing in the next issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, once all the contributors actually get around to contributing. Saw poet Marita Dachsel as well, partner of current playwrite-in-residence Kevin Kerr (a two-year term recently extended to three) whom I’ve only met once before, and that when she extremely pregnant in fall 2007 with their second child, when she helped us launch the first Edmonton issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club. Have you seen the fantastic interview series she's been doing on her blog lately? Meeting her twice, despite having published her poetry chapbook back in 1996 through above/ground press. Just how big is this country that I see someone only twice, having known them that long?

[Myrna Kostash's little front balcony] An already Edmonton week and a bit, wandering the town, quietly through the University of Alberta, along Whyte Avenue (where I picked up a birthday card for my sister’s 33rd birthday), to that West Edmonton Mall we love so much; returned today to Myrna Kostash’s lovely condo [see what I wrote when here last]. Strange to be here again, after nearly six months; good that, after a shared house some distance, I have some singular space to breathe in a downtown condo near shopping, coffee, otherwise. It was early November when I left here last, two Edmonton weeks, to see her after five long months. Another five long months of distance, and so much has changed since then, is different since. So many workable and positive things. Friday night, Lainna and I with Myrna and a bottle of wine, the night before she drove off in her red car to Banff, bags and laptop in tow. Did you know that Myrna has work coming out over the next year or so with both NeWest Press and the University of Alberta Press?

Today, who knows; a quiet laptop day with the spring door open, breeze coming through. The night before, a bottle of wine with Vancouver-returned Catherine Owen and her over-excited dog, jumping around as though she’d never seen human beings before; did you know that Owen has a collection of literary essays out with Wolsak & Wynn in another two years?

Did you know, according to Myrna, Prince George BC writer Sarah De Leeuw won the CBC Literary Award this past year, moons after her first and only book [see my piece on such here] came out with NeWest Press [see my note on such here]. Much of what I’m otherwise up to, preparing a new slate of “12 or 20 questions” to start posting June first (already interviews with Jason Dewinetz, Stephen Henighan, Michelle Berry, Janice Williamson, Ray Hsu, and plenty of others) to correspond with the time I (roughly) begin a Toronto year, following my attractive young lady to the big city. I’m working a whole new list of authors, not wanting any overlap with the previous series. Tomorrow, interviewed by Stephanie Hall for Other Voices, an Edmonton-based literary journal, on these new books I seem to have out.

[waiting for her with books, writing, at HUB, University of Alberta] Otherwise, working (slowly) final final edits to this poetry collection for NeWest Press, twice-edited by poet, pal and clever lad (and current Toronto resident) Andy Weaver,who used to make this E-town sing. Scribbling poems, reading Bruce Serafin’s Stardust, Joe LeSueur’s Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, all after rereading Elizabeth Smart’s The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, Dany Laferriere’s Why must a black writer write about sex?

Writing an essay about being here, being in these moments of post-Edmonton Edmonton and the beginnings of something else, the beginnings of will hopefully be a creative non-fiction book on Toronto, a follow-up (of sorts) to the “McLennan, Alberta” book I worked while in this town (currently making the rounds with readers, friends, editors and publishers before revisiting such sometime this summer). Edmonton before Ottawa; Ottawa before Toronto. The current plans that hold, and certainly hold.

rob mclennan + various other Edmonton writer-in-residences reading!
presented by The Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine Program

Wednesday, May 21, 2008
4-5:30pm, Upper Crust Restaurant, 10909 86 Avenue [see map]

As a celebration of its first year, The Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine Program presents a reading by the Writers in Residence located at the University of Alberta this past year. Readers include Writer in Residence rob mclennan (Department of English and Film Studies), Lee Playwright in Residence Kevin Kerr (Department of Drama), Writer in Exile Jalal Barzanji, Writer in Residence Gail Sidonie Sobat (Canadian Authors Association & U. of A. Bookstore) and Writers in Medicine Reinekke Lengelle and Shirley Serviss (Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry). The reading will be held at Upper Crust Restaurant, 10909 86 Avenue on Wednesday, May 21 from 4:00-5:30 PM.

Free admission. Refreshments will be served.
info: sserviss@telus.net

emm + m. (mayday)

Here's a photo my lovely friend emm gryner took of me (you can see her in the background; look at me doing my University of Alberta promo + everything!) in her dressing room after opening for Josh Ritter at U of Alberta's Myer Horowitz Theatre way back on February 28th [you can find the photo on her website here]. Did you see how close the 2008 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere stuff was? Amazing, really. Even though I didn't win, I was honoured to be nominated, and deeply touched and humbled by all the efforts of others to get my numbers up; thanks to everyone who voted! I guess this means I should start reading Tony Brown's blog... Otherwise, today begins the final month of my Alberta stay (mostly). Today also marks Winnipeg poet Ariel Gordon's fourth annual May Day Poems project, including my first post on same. It will be happening all month...

Edmonton on Location: River City Chronicles, edited by Heather Zwicker
As part of my wanting to know just what is going on around me, lately I’ve been reading Edmonton on Location: River City Chronicles, edited by Heather Zwicker (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005). Predominantly made up of engaging non-fiction pieces, part of what makes this collection is the sheer range of material, whether a piece on the Macdonald Hotel by Ted Bishop, poetry by Erin Knight [see my previous note on her here], Edmonton as “city of my groin” by Lynne Van Luven, the question of what a river is for by Myrna Kostash, and a north side story by Ian McGillis (who now lives in Montreal and runs the Montreal Review of Books).

prelude to a city

The first of the upturned stones, city
marker. The airport shuttle, Yellow cab & Remus’s
wife’s minivan carry visitors through the swollen Gateway;
they’ve heard that from the Edmonton International
you can see the curve of the earth.
A heeled rumour commutes Highway 2, merges
between CKUA’s pledge drive and the insulated furnace
of Ed’s new Explorer in the frosted AM rush: a theatre
with screens that’ll be as wide as the prairies,
seats like La-Z-Boy recliners, a royal
blue fortress borne by the flexed tricep of that empty
field off Ellerslie (it’s true—those seats will be to die for). (Erin Knight)

There is an awful lot of history in this town, including a section of the city that has evidence of human activity going back eight thousand years, making it the earliest evidence of such in the province. As Michael Phair writes in the introduction, “Chronicles uncovers little-known facts as well as personal memories of this multi-layered city called Edmonton. For example, although I have been told about the former Club 70, the first bar for “our kind” in Edmonton, Brenda Mann’s “Places of Refuge” is a personal memoir that poignantly recalls how this refuge, the Club 70 bar, was for her both a place of safety that she savoured yet also a painful reminder of the necessity of living two lives in Edmonton thirty years ago.” (Although it does seem odd that Phair writes this last sentence as though I know everything about him, already, and his “kind.”)

It’s difficult to imagine now, how geographically confined was the life I led in Edmonton in the early ‘80s. I had no car, but then, who needed to cross the High Level Bridge to investigate the fleshpots of downtown Edmonton or to check out the Stroll on 97th Street? Even though West Edmonton Mall, in its embryo form of only 220 stores, had opened its doors for the first time in September 1981, it was at least two city bus rides away. Besides, I didn’t have the money for such glitzy temptations. We had our own commercial and cultural hub along Whyte Avenue and environs: Greenwoods’ Bookshoppe for all the crisp new volumes we could salivate over but not afford to buy; the Garneau Theatre for the movies we needed to argue over; the Highlevel Diner for Sunday brunches and late-night coffees; the Strathcona Hotel for a chance to drink cheap beer and gawk at bikers on Saturday afternoons; Zoryana’s for that new second-hand outfit to lift our spirits. The Whyte Avenue of yore seems more diverse and interesting than today’s version, even though it had fewer bars and a less rowdy night life—or is that just my memory, romanticizing events? Only rarely did we venture south or north or west to the shopping malls and assorted emporiums of greed and distraction. We had our own snug world, thank you, our own Groinich Village. (Lynne Van Luwen, “City of My Groin”)

This is exactly the kind of book that any publisher truly engaged with the community around them should be making, and there are publishers such as Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press, Montreal’s Vehicule Press and Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press have been doing for years, as well as the (now 35 year old) NeWest Press. One of the more outstanding pieces in the collection has to be Naomi McIlwraith’s impassioned “Why is Squaw Such a Bad Word?,” based upon her experiences as being a “historical interpreter at Ford Edmonton Park.”

According to American Indian theorist and activist Ward Churchill, the word “squaw” arose from the inability of European men, in New England, to say the word “sunksquaw” in the Narragansett language. They corrupted it to “squaw.” I described the similarity between the Cree word for woman, “iskwew,” and the word squaw. For Cree, like Narragansett, is an Algonquin language. In my personal research to enhance my work as a historical interpreter, I have read a number of inspiring books on Native—White relations and women’s economic roles in the fur trade, including Ward Churchill’s book A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (1998), Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870 (1981), and Jennifer Brown’s Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (1980). Until very recently the chronicle of my maternal ancestors has been neglected, and my own understanding of this vital social history necessitates such scholarly investigation.

She continues, writing “Sometimes we act in ignorance of what a word means, ignorance meaning both ‘unknowing’ and ‘demeaning.’” Something I’ve noticed about this city is just how much it has in common with Ottawa (a working-class town and a government town) in terms of a kind of self-dismissal, and just how little outsiders know of what happens within its borders (and just how little they want to know). The big difference for Edmonton is in just how many books are produced about the area (I am trying to correct this for my own city, with, among other things, the newly-published Ottawa: The Unknown City), and just how many references there are to the city. As Robert Kroetsch said to Margaret Lawrence in “A Conversation” from Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1986), “In a sense, we haven’t got a real identity until somebody tells our story.” Or, as Aritha van Herk wrote in A Frozen Tongue (Sydney NSW: Dangaroo Press, 1992):

I lived in a small flat near the University of Alberta in Edmonton. It is important to understand that Edmonton is a city of landscape, divided by the North Saskatchewan river into two halves. The river is large, and in a geographical sense, it is recent: the valley that it traces through is narrow and steep, almost cliff-like. This physical fact necessitates several bridges that reach, not just across the river, but from one side of the valley to the other. The oldest and most impressive of these is the High Level Bridge, a narrow lack lattice that is both aloof and sinister, a landmark that hangs above the valley like a sign. It is the bridge that suicides jump from, it connects the city’s dueling halves of commerce and learning. Although I lived almost on top of it, I never thought of it, that black bridge. We looked at it, made love under it, even dared, drunk of course, to cross its upper tier over open railway ties. But I never thought about it. Until The Studhorse Man.

The Studhorse Man is unquestionably one of the finest picaresque novels ever written. It is no accident that I have written a picaresque novel, or that Robert Kroetsch and I grew up not twenty-three kilometres from each other, across the Battle River, but that does not matter. Then I had written nothing. What does matter is that The Studhorse Man takes place in Alberta, in Edmonton, and in one insane scene, the hero, Hazard Lepage, chases a thousand horses through a howling prairie blizzard and across the High Level bridge. It is an hilarious scene because the horse stampede wrecks havoc with an already snow-bound city; it is written to make the reader choke with laughter.

But I did not laugh. I walked to the window of my cheap flat and I looked out and I saw the same bridge that had just been drawn in black ink on the page in the book I still held in my hand. I stared at it for a long time, holding that paperback book and not daring to blink for fear somewhere would vanish. Someone had dared to write about a place I knew, about me. I finally had a map.

This is Edmonton telling its own story, which can only add to the same of anyone else who comes from this town, or currently lives here. As editor Zwicker writes in her own “Afterword”:

Our conversations are not uncontentious, and there is no single voice for these multiple perspectives. Taken together, the contributions offer a montage of images by turns jarring, moving, comforting, familiar, titillating, amusing, and startling. Above all, the pieces here resoundingly insist that as long as we continue to experience the city viscerally, we cannot die.

For anyone interested in learning Edmonton, another recent book I would recommend is the massive Edmonton: In Our Own Words by Linda Goyette and Carolina Jakeway Roemmich (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004).

The Factory (West) Reading Series

a reading series lovingly hosted by rob mclennan during his tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta (2007-8); the name "Factory (West)" refers to the fact that I have been running readings for years in Ottawa since 1995 that now exist under the title The Factory Reading Series, held regularly(ish) at the Ottawa Art Gallery;

a variety of poetry and fiction (etcetera) presented on the third Tuesday of every month from January to May, 2008 in the Underdog (downstairs) at The Black Dog Freehouse, 10425-82 Avenue, Edmonton AB;

doors 7pm; readings 7:30pm

The first reading will be happening on Tuesday, January 15

with readings by:

Trisia Eddy
Joel Katelnikoff
Jenna Butler
+ Thomas Wharton

author bios:

Trisia Eddy lives and writes near farms, train-yards, refineries, and the North Saskatchewan River. Her work has been broadcast on radio, published both in print and online, most recently with Existere, fait accomplit,and ditchpoetry, and is forthcoming in cahoots magazine. She is the founding editor/publisher of red nettle press, which released her chapbook, what if there's no weather, in 2007, with more poets to follow in 2008.

Joel Katelnikoff is a PhD student and king of suplexes. When he isn't busy bodyslamming nonbelievers through wooden tables, he writes fiction and educates the masses. Joel's first collection of short stories will be released in 2009, provided that he can find someone to publish it.

Jenna Butler was born in Norwich, England in 1980. She is an educator, book reviewer, editor and poet who currently makes her home in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work has received a number of awards and has been published both in Canada and internationally in literary magazines, anthologies, and journals. She is the founding editor of Rubicon Press and is currently working toward a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK. Her newest collection of poems, Forcing Bloom, is scheduled for release in 2007 from Mercutio Press.

Thomas Wharton was born in Grande Prairie, Alberta, an agriculture and oil city located near the BC border. By the time his second novel was released, Wharton had developed a following of rapt and loyal readers. Salamander (McClelland & Stewart, 2001) won the 2002 Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction (Alberta Book Awards), was a finalist for the 2001 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was short-listed for the 2001 Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Fantasy, and the 2002 Grant MacEwan Author’s Award. A collection of short stories soon followed. The Logogryph (Gaspereau Press, 2004) was named winner of the 2005 Writers’ Guild of Alberta Award for Short Fiction, nominated for the Sunburst Award for Canadian Fantasy, and short-listed for the IMPAC-Dublin Prize in 2006. Thomas Wharton lives in Edmonton with his wife and three children. An assistant professor of English at the University of Alberta, he’s currently hard at work on The Shadow of Malabron, the first in a fantasy trilogy (The Perilous Realm) for younger readers, to be published by Doubleday Canada and Candlewick/Walker US/UK in the fall of 2008. Thomas Wharton's first novel, Icefields (1995), was recently selected for Canada Reads 2008. [see his 12 or 20 interview (with a million links) here]

For further information, email rob mclennan at az421(at)freenet(dot)ca

further readings:
February 19; readings by Diane Cameron + tba
March 18; readers tba
April 15; readings by Kim Minkus (Vancouver) + tba
May 20; readings by Myrna Kostash + tba

readings in Edmonton; the past few days (again);

Wednesday, November 28; New Faculty Colloquium, with Liz Czach, Don Perkins + Christine Stewart

I think everyone should have to go through this, every year. Until I showed up and saw what this was, I had no idea what I’d be in for. Basically, three new faculty of the English and Film Studies Department talked about what they’re currently working on now that they’re here at the University of Alberta; it was extremely interesting! Liz Czach talked about arriving here in the faculty after working for years at the Toronto International Film Festival, which was pretty interesting, and Don Perkins (I call him “new guy” now) talking about where he considers himself after finally getting full-time work, after twenty years of working sessionally!

Listening to Christine Stewart talk about working deliberately on Canadian avant-garde women poets, focusing on the works of Catriona Strang, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak, Lisa Robertson and a couple of others, was utterly magnificent; she talked about working her own poetic project of the detritus of Mill Creek Ravine, as she commutes under the bridge twice daily on her bike, and seeing what gets lost, thrown out or simply left behind. The two ideas were bridged through deliberate forgetting, how people and items are under the bridge, and how more progressive works in Canadian writing somehow get forgotten, even as the same writers get larger amounts of ongoing attention in the United States and England. What is it about Canadian literature that wants to forget that these writers existed or exist?

Christine Stewart is my new favourite super-hero.

I won’t tell you about going up to RATT (the grad lounge) afterwards, where the bartender wouldn’t let me pay for drinks, or that he and his pals invited me to join their band; I won’t tell you about the karaoke that followed, or what muscles I pulled during the process. It just isn’t worth it…

Thursday, November 29; Catherine Owen’s 44th Ave Troubadour Series


(rob, Paul + Catherine)

It took a while to find the place, but it was a nice, intimate venue, being Edmonton poet Catherine Owen’s living room. Musician (and new mom) Michelle Boudreau has the most lovely and compelling singing voice, and a real skill on guitar; she talked a bit about sustaining the long note, and even how, during childbirth (her Aria is 3 months old) she sustained a single note for five full minutes, making all of the nurses suddenly pay much more attention to her. I got a copy of her this room cd (2005), by her “michell boudreau band.” Photographer Paul Saturley had some very interesting work, including not just photography but digital imagery that he’s been playing with since the technology first came out around 1990, making him one of the first in the field; even cooler that of his two “slide show” presentations, both had music by his son, with one by Paul’s son’s metal band.

Friday, November 30; Thomas Wharton in Canada Reads!

Friday afternoon, a reception hosted by NeWest Press and the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta at Leva Cappuccino Bar to celebrate Thomas Wharton’s first novel, Icefields (NeWest Press, 1995), being selected for the CBC Canada Reads 2008 line-up! Wharton’s novel was selected by Steve MacLean, Chief Astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency (I was trying to convince NeWest to put on “as read by astronauts” on the cover of the book), and was the first book by Alberta to be picked for the entire series. NeWest Press board member Douglas Barbour said a few words, and so did Rudy Wiebe, who was Wharton’s creative writing prof during the beginnings of the novel, as well as later editor of the book, and new(ish) NeWest Press general manager Lou Morin presented Wharton with a small bag of gifts, including dehydrated foods (perfect for space travel!). The event itself had a good group of friends, supporters, writers and other well-wishers, including Greg Hollingshead, Christine Stewart, Don Perkins, Jonathan Meakin, Peter Midgley (from UAP) and a whole slew of others. There was no way he wouldn’t have felt the love.
photos courtesy Lainna El Jabi

coming up: my novel launch on Tuesday; Christine Stewart reading on December 11 at Hulbert’s as the next edition of the Olive Reading Series; the Ottawa launch of my novel on December 13 at the Ottawa Art Gallery; the Ottawa launch of The Peter F. Yacht Club at the Carleton Tavern on December 22!