For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the
writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the
University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former
University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.
Gary Geddes
has written and edited forty-six books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction,
criticism, translation and anthologies and won more than a dozen national and
international literary awards, including the National Magazine Gold Award, the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor’s Award for
Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize, awarded simultaneously by
the Government of Chile to Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael
Alberti and Mario Benedetti. He lives on Thetis Island, BC, with his wife the
novelist Ann Eriksson.
He was writer-in-residence at the University of
Alberta during the 1976-77 academic year.
Q: When you began
your residency, you’d only been publishing books for a couple of years. Where
did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: An attempt to get rid of me in 1974 by the
new chair of English at the University of Victoria—I’ll leave his motives to
your imagination—prompted me to fight back. Then, when I’d won my case as a
result of students marching on the administrative offices and letters of
support arriving from writers and academics around the country, I resigned, not
wanting to be associated with a colleague whose behaviour could be so toxic and
dishonest. I was nearing completion of my doctoral thesis on Joseph Conrad for
the University of Toronto and had published four books of poetry and edited two
poetry anthologies for Oxford University Press, 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics and 15 Canadian Poets, both of which were already widely used as
textbooks in universities and colleges. In that regard, I was fairly well
launched as a writer and teacher, though quite unemployed.
I had a Canadian Council grant for the first
year, during which I completed my thesis and published my fifth book of poems,
but had no idea what to expect the following year. That’s when I received a
communication from Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour asking if I’d like to be
their writer-in-residence, taking up the mantle of W.O. Mitchell. Talk about
serendipity. And luck. The great moral support of belief that such an offer
provided buoyed me up immensely. I felt extremely welcome in the department and
made a number of life-long friends amongst the students and faculty. This
mutual admiration resulted in my being offered a fulltime teaching position in
the department. I don’t know what prompted me to turn down such a generous
offer, perhaps the sting of my recent divorce from UVic. However, I did jump at
the opportunity to come back for a second year as a visiting assistant
professor.
Two incidents I recall especially are the
following. A graduate student by the name of Aritha Van Herk had written a
novel called When Pigs Fly, which she
asked me to read and to tell her whether I thought she should submit it to the
M&S First Novel Competition. I read the ms. and liked much of it, but told
her that it could use more work and that the title had already been made famous
by P.G. Wodehouse. Aritha, wise as always, ignored my advice, submitted Judith to the competition and won the
first prize of $5000. Another moment I recall with great amusement was telling
Rudy Wiebe that when I got to be his age I planned to dwindle into prose too.
This comment was made in connection with an ongoing, good-humoured debate
between him and Robert Kroestch on the relative merits of these two genres. I
don’t know if I’ve imagined this, but I seem to recall Rudy chasing me down the
corridor of the Humanities Centre with a glass of cold water not intended for
drinking purposes and my escaping avant
le déluge behind the door in my office.
During those two years at U. of A., 1976
to1978, I wrote “Sandra Lee Scheuer,” which Al Purdy would describe as “the
kind of poem most poets wait a lifetime for.” I also made a lot of progress on
a long narrative poem about the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of
Quebec, who became prisoners of war when defeated by the Japanese. Since I’d
been working hard, no one in the department complained when I put a sign on my
door, saying “Gone Fishing: in Hong Kong,” and disappeared for two weeks of
research in the Crown Colony. This work would eventually be published by Oberon
Press under the title Hong Kong Poems,
win the National Magazine Gold Award and be presented on stage by Per Brask at
the University of Winnipeg. I also worked with George Liang on a book of
English translations of the work of Li Bai and Du Fu, called I Didn’t Notice the Mountains Growing Dark.
So, I am immensely grateful to the University
of Alberta, especially the English Department, for their faith in me and
willingness to take me under their very protective wing for two exciting and
productive years.
Q: How does your experience
there compare to other residencies you’ve done?
A: Each of my residencies has had its own unique qualities.
The full-year term is often most memorable because you make a bigger investment
of time, energy and emotion and come away with more memories and a deeper
knowledge of and appreciation for the new community. This was especially
valuable to me as a young writer. Now, I prefer shorter residencies of 3-4
months, as I am less keen to spend long periods away from family and the
home-place. My recent four-month residency at the University of Missouri in St.
Louis had a certain depth and weightiness, the more so because I also taught
two courses as part of my contract, which meant I wrote little but made close
contact with a couple of dozen students.
Q: Given the fact
that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape,
or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your
sense of the literary community?
A: Landscapes dominated my first two books, Rivers Inlet and Snakeroot, the coast and the prairies respectively, both of which
left their mark on my psyche and senses during the teen and pre-teen years. I
think of those times as my Wordsworthian period, a time of healing after my
mother’s death when she was thirty-five and I was seven. So, the return to the
prairies in Alberta brought back a lot of memories and gave me a chance to dig
(literally and figuratively) deeper into the landscape, especially when I spent
a week or so on a bone-dig near Brooks, helping to retrieve the fully
articulated skeleton of a Centrasaurus, with its prominent nasal horn. This
experience resulted in a poetic meditation called “The Dream Bed.”
My deepest involvement with the prairie literary community
was with Saskatchewan writers, as a teacher at the Fort San residency, where I
worked with Tim Lilburn, Bruce Rice, Paul Wilson and Jerry Rush, all of whom
went on the write important work. During those years, I observed that there was
no star system in the prairies, that the writers were mutually supportive,
celebrating each other’s work and successes. I think this solidarity mirrored
Saskatchewan politics. Some of this cooperative element spilled over into
Alberta, where political and ethnic differences have sometimes had a tendency
to divide rather than bring together. Writers like Myrna Kostash and Rudy Wiebe
and Robert Kroetsch worked against this divisiveness, bringing us close
together while creating their own unique work on the page. Kroetsch was not
living in Alberta at the time, but his presence was felt by those of us who
knew his poetry and fiction.
By 1976, my attention was turning more and more towards
larger social and political realities. So, while landscape took second place in
my writing, I was always conscious that it played a significant role in the
lives of those historical figures I was writing about. While Mackenzie King
complained that we had too much geography and not enough history, I have always
found there is plenty of both, if you look carefully at the rich and ongoing
trail of Indigenous peoples in this land.
Q: How
did you engage with students during your residency? Were there any that stood
out?
A: My work with students at U. of A. was exciting. In
addition to meeting them individually in my office, I was able to arrange a
session to accommodate the overflow once a week in the evening. The one-on-one
exchanges were the most satisfying, but the group session provided a different
and exciting dynamic, especially as they included people like John Barton,
Stephen Hume and George Liang.
John Barton has gone on to do important cultural work, as a
fine poet and now as editor of The
Malahat Review. Stephen Hume, who did not need any advice at all from me,
is an exceptional journalist, non-fiction writer and poet, two of whose books I
published later, one at Quadrant Editions, another at Cormorant Books. George
Liang, whose English was limited, was a committed poet in the Chinese language.
I met with him regularly to translate the poems of Li Bai and Du Fu, which we
eventually published at Cormorant Books.
Q: What do you see as
your biggest accomplishment while there? What had you been hoping to achieve?
A: I did not have big expectations when I took up the
position as writer-in-residence at U. of A. I was honoured by the offer and
grateful to have an income, but uncertain of academia as a possible future. My
sense of self-worth was certainly heightened by the moral support from faculty
and the enthusiasm of students. I also made a few enduring friendships and
wrote a few good poems.
Perhaps my biggest accomplishment in Edmonton was coming to
the gradual realization that I could combine teaching and writing and might
have a modest success at both, but that I needed to settle down and give myself
and my family the kind of stability I’d not had as a child, during which the
family was quite peripatetic and I attended a dozen different schools. I came
to understand, too, that my writing would suffer if I kept constantly on the
move. Although this awareness came too late to accept the generous offer from
the University of Alberta, when another came from Concordia University, I
grabbed it.
