Notes on writing, writing

Sarah Manguso: Exactly. Abstract arguments about genre are boring—and what’s more, those arguments reek of eugenics and fear. No pure forms exist. And I wish everyone would stop telling me about the “new” “hybrid” writing. Everything is already a hybrid. In any case, I think books belong to their authors, not to genres. Many writers get marketed in more than one genre, but readers just think, Look, here is another book by so-and-so, don’t they? (“David Shields in conversation with Sarah Manguso,” The Believer, June 2010)

Lately, I've been awash with questions. What is literature? Is it simply telling a story? Is it the language? Is it in the writer trying to showcase something different, shine a spotlight on something hidden, in a different way? Through reading and writing, I engage with literature in part to learn the world, to push myself further into what I do not yet understand. Picking up years worth of Granta issues, I prefer the non-fiction pieces I otherwise might never know, whether tales of the English fox-hunt, spinster sisters who love the opera and secretly smuggle Jews out of a WWII-era Europe to England, and America, or a journalist who disappears into darkest Africa, marrying a dictator and losing everything, only to lose yet again.

Is it the merging of lyric and fact? There is truth in fiction too; sometimes more, but I’d favour the lyric of essential pieces of information than long drawn-out narratives of incidentals. Who said that line I keep getting caught in my head, we fight laziness and lies in our search for the truth? Far too often I find myself skipping passages, wanting the novelist to get back, so to speak, to the point.

Still, I've been finding the engagement with the “McLennan, Alberta” and “Sleeping in Toronto” manuscripts extremely educational, helping to highlight just what the whole craft might really be about – point of view. Not just how we see the world, but how the world is, and its infinite nuance, its infinite variations. It extends to how we relate to each other as well, not just through these books, but socially, politically, interpersonally. We don't need to agree but it becomes essential to try to at least understand. What the hell am I talking about.

Fighting doesn't mean anything at all if we don't comprehend the arguments on both sides; what if, but for semantics, we actually agree? Is this all simply a matter of perspective? Digging around the internet for information on the A-Team, both original series and recent remake (don’t ask), I found this quote by Mr. T, slipped into the stubble of his IMDB page:

I think about my father being called 'boy', my uncle being called 'boy,' my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called 'boy.' So I questioned myself: 'What does a black man have to do before he's given the respect as a man?' So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybody's mouth is 'Mr.' That's a sign of respect that my father didn't get, that my brother didn't get, that my mother didn't get.

It reminds of old Cassius Clay, home from winning his Olympic gold, but still unable to eat at certain lunch counters, stay at certain hotels, finally tossing his gold in the river in frustration. Changing his name to Muhammad Ali. How can anyone else understand? In the new issue of Brick: A Literary Journal (#85), an interview Eleanor Wachtel did with British writer Zadie Smith, who said essentially the same. How does one understand?

I don't think it had really dawned on me what it was like to be a black woman—black as my mother is, not mixed as I am—in a white culture. She told me stories about her honeymoon. My parents went to two places, Morocco and Paris, and in Paris they couldn't get a hotel room—they had to come home. Everywhere they went, they were turned away. And even in the early days when they were trying to rent apartments, she said she would phone and ask for a room and be told it was free, and then up and be told it wasn't free. She kept experimenting and making the distance between those two events as short as possible, so she would phone from the end of the road and turn up two minutes later and it would never change: she was always told the room wasn't free.

I didn't grow up in an England that overtly racist so it was a surprise for me to hear those stories. And it made me better understand the connection she felt with black American writers. It seemed to me that we're English and they're American—the history of our communities is so diverse. But there was a connection for my mother in terms of history and, I suppose, humiliation.

And here are the details that flesh out a story, where character is built. How often, history like a stone that gets caught in the shoe, rubbing up against the present, and altering, informing. Refusing to leave. It relates, indirectly, to a short short story I wrote after a story Lainna told about her Beirut-born parents:

She tells a story of her parents, forced to emigrate in the late 1960s for the sake of their marriage, born to separate social classes in a Muslim country. How romantic, I think, how tragic, but I can’t entirely relate, not forced to relocate continents for love. On television, a documentary tells of the troubles there, generations of refugee camps to keep a whole people down. I begin to realize how little I know of the situation, and just how sheltered I’ve been.

More recently, Toronto social geographer and writer Amy Lavender Harris and I talked about identity, as she asked, how far away from point of origin does identity no longer have any claim to real meaning? Her Jewish husband generations-removed, or her own Mohawk grandfather, raised outside aboriginal culture. How faraway does culture and identity still hold, still compel? The comfort I have, knowing I’m Glengarry Scot, not pretending I’m full Scot (there is quite a difference).

Become essential, Brian Fawcett told, from his corner in the former Dooney’s Café. Write something no one else can. The further I explore and discover, the more I feel as though I have accomplished nothing, yet. Yet.

some toronto;

Lainna and I wandering a week of Toronto, seeing what sites there to see, before everything begins: her school (Ryerson), my whatever-else. Wanderings to Toronto Island, a party hosted by Broken Pencil magazine, St. Lawrence Market, etcetera.

My wandering the next few Toronto months working on third novel, and a creative non-fiction follow-up to my McLennan, Alberta, which was a manuscript of pieces working through my Edmonton period; what has changed now that I'm in the Big Smoke?

But still back and forth to Ottawa for various readings, launches, workshops, what-not; second novel out this fall with The Mercury Press, The Toronto Small Press Fair, the ottawa small press book fair and writers festival, so Greyhound, at least, will be getting as much benefit of my travel as anyone else.

here's a small piece I've been noodling, the past few days:

lake nothing (draft)

a skyline pure of sky; the water, lakes
a nervous lap

between envy & the moon, financial districts
the cn tower blooms

in light-show nocturnes; you woke,
discovered stomach cramps & this,

quick glances down one side

basaltic rock you mention, standing
the circle stain

three hundred passing passing ships,
sails like silver, flags

a threadbare ease, a base of trees

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.

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.

Further reading: Friday the thirteenth

1982 was the year when snow barely fell in Toronto. We were entranced by the lack of it.

On the night of December 3rd I was in my office on Markham Street tossing black olive pits out the wide open window into the matching black warmth. It was +20 Celsius. After the olives I ate sunripened dates. Then figs. Anything dark and warm against the thought of snow.

Snow fell on December 20th and melted by Christmas. Christmas eve was the warmest on record, and so was Christmas day. A six year old girl walked around in bare feet looking at Christmas lights.

That year I lived near Marshall McLuhan’s house, a big gray mansion next to a pond, where he dreamed up his ideas about hot and cool, or so I like to think. the house was in Wychwood Park, a hillside retreat founded in 1888 by a spice merchant who came home every night from his Pure Gold Manufacturing Company smelling of cinnamon and thinking of Cathay.

In Toronto we know about cold and long to be warm. McLuhan, for instance, fell in love with a southern accent.

‘Mississippi,’ the neighbour said. ‘I think she’s from Mississippi.’

Listening to his wife did McLuhan think about heat?

The hottest thought I had was New Orleans.

Porous is a word that keeps repeating through Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s first book, Crossing the Snow Line (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1989), a book I recently borrowed from the Ottawa Public Library, and I would similarly describe the book as a whole as the same, unable to specifically clarify it between stories (as the cover would tell us), novel or memoir, working through a lush and direct kind of liquid prose. Where are the divides we would usually expect? It’s part of what attracts me to Hay’s earlier writing, and I admire (and am envious of) the porous nature of this small collection, and the books that followed, from The Only Snow in Havana (1992; Toronto ON: Cormorant Books, 2008) and Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993).

Art should never shift for the sake of public taste, but I’ve always felt a deeper kinship with her earlier works where this porousness exists, before shifting her prose into more traditional fiction, following her first three books with her Governor General’s Award shortlisted collection of stories, Small Change (Erin ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1997), and the three novels that came after that. I even published one of those stories, originally, in Missing Jacket, a writing and visual art magazine I once produced, back in the mid-1990s. What is it about early Elizabeth Hay and the porousness of writing love, geography, Canadianness and snow?

Some people are porous, snow without a crust: everything sinks in, all the visitors, all the noise.

Porous, yet I absorb so little.

Last night I dreamt I was standing in a woods and a caribou with magnificent antlers stepped through the trees. A hunter followed the caribou. When I caught up with them the hunter had wound heavy wire around the caribou’s neck and pushed silver studs into its flesh.

This limbo of not belonging. Worse than not belonging – resistance to belonging. I buy a Spanish newspaper and don’t read it. I just don’t want to.

I told the Bolivians who came to visit about winter in Yellowknife – four hours of
daylight, frostbitten skin, white and hard. The way they listened! ‘Does anything grow?’ they wanted to know.

‘What do you miss?’ I asked them.

‘Intimacies,’ they answered. ‘Mexico City is a place that encourages many friendships, few intimacies. It’s so hard to get across the city to visit people.’

I’ve never seen them again.

Another Friday the thirteenth in the space of a month, and I spend most of the day reading, moving through Elizabeth Hay, moving through Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (New York NY: New Directions, 1986), The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover, ed. Bruce Stone (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 2004) and Travels with Virginia Woolf, ed. Jan Morris (London: Pimlico, 1997). Just what is it I’m looking for? Years ago, this was the day that my ex-wife and I had decided our anniversary, another Friday the thirteenth, and coming up faster than I can keep track.

The Woolf book, found second-hand a few days earlier, compiles essays, letters and journal entries into a book of what could otherwise be “travel writing,” thinking about my own journeys forth into further creative non-fiction (McLennan, Alberta), whether back to Edmonton in the bare space of weeks, or an extended upcoming Toronto stay. In a letter to Ethel Smyth from June 26, 1938 (three years to the day before my father was born), for example, Woolf wrote of visiting Hadrian’s Wall:

We were 2 days on the wall: lay on top of it the one hot day; and saw the landscape that to me is the loveliest in the world; miles and miles of lavender coloured loneliness, with one thread white path; dear me, were I a writer, how I could describe that: the immensity and tragedy and the sense of the Romans, and time, and eternity; and then the wild white hawthorn, and the sheep cropping, and 3 little white headed boys playing in a Roman camp.

How she says, were she a writer? As a bookmark, using a postcard the poet Phil Hall sent but a month ago from Bali, on a side-trip from Australia.

Now that I’ve got my second novel off to the publisher (waiting just on her edits), the past few days thinking more about Don Quixote, how my version might work how many other threads of the entire world; working in my own commentary on how cities are made, cities are built, and the city of Ottawa itself, writing:

Every city constructed out of a series of markers, of landmarks, but what happens to a city when it is constantly in danger of losing? What happens to memory when a city is constantly new? There is nothing to hold on to, there are no regulars to keep the rent in your restaurant. There is no heart, no soul, no loyalty. When a city is constantly new, it runs the risk of losing all meaning.

Why is it, no matter where I look, I can’t find a single copy of the original? I picked up the Rexroth because of what he wrote about Don Quixote, including this lovely ending to his little essay:

There are any number of editions of Don Quixote in paperback and hardcover. If the newcomer to the novel only had time and patience enough, he would be well advised to read and compare more than one translation, classic and modern.

There are, indicentally, a number of anthologies of the critical literature on Don Quixote that make fascinating reading, not least for their amazing disparity of interpretation. Were it not that my interpretation would then seem unduly flattering to myself, I would say that every man finds himself in Don Quixote, as Don Quixote finds himself in his adventures and as Sancho Panza is never lost.

I pick up the Rexroth for the same reason as I pick up Glover, working through further what he wrote about the novel himself, and the book-length essay on same I can’t find in my little apartment. Is this all about working to find one’s self, working back from the point of being lost? I am thinking about Toronto, I am thinking about travel. I am thinking about Edmonton. I am thinking about Don Quixote. Or, as Toronto writer Ken Sparling wrote in his For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers:

You can’t go home. I am home. You can’t go home even when you are home. You’re never home. When were you ever home? Home captured you one moment. Maybe when you were little. It got you. This idea of home. And now you know about it because you can’t go there. It’s that place you can’t go to. You can almost go there. You get closest when you’re furthest away. Like calculus. You get further and further close. The other side of the planet. The moon. Finally, the true reason for travelling to the moon. To go back home. To go back. Whatever is back. Maybe abuse is back. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s so much love it becomes abuse. You go back. Breaking free is considered something of an accomplishment. But then, accomplishment. Trap. You get the picture.

Alberta dispatch: the University of Alberta

A few years ago I read in the transcript of Sheila Watson's preamble to her first public reading from The Double Hook, that Professor Salter had been one of her best editors. That was news, but no surprise. He was no mean scholar, but he didn’t crawl into his speciality and stay there until retirement. His reward for recognizing that a first-rate writer had an office down the hall from him in the U of A Arts Building, was a share in making a beautiful book. The Bard, too, was always somebody's neighbour, somebody's friend. Professor Salter, twenty years too late, I'm ready to listen to you on Shakespeare.
— Stan Dragland, Journeys Through Bookland

In his first editorial to open the year he edited NeWest Review, "My Five Years at The NeWest Review" (Volume 6, No. 1, September, 1980), Monty Reid wrote:

I remember what began. I was a student at the University of Alberta, an unpublished poet, and wondering why there were almost no magazines in Western Canada that interested me, when I found the first issue of NeWest ReView at the bookstore in Hub Mall. What I remember most about the first issue was a short poem by Sid Marty, there in the middle of the front page. It was important to me because it had been given a significant context. The poem reverberated with the sound of the other voices around it; that front page was coming out of the country I lived in.

For years, I've wandered through Edmonton during my annual or semi-annual reading tours and being impressed by the University of Alberta's English (now English and Film Studies) Department. I would usually head through alongside friends, grad students and Edmonton poets Andy Weaver and Adam Dickinson, over to visit Douglas Barbour's office, perhaps, or check out the display case that featured recent literary titles by faculty and students. Why don't all universities have these? It certainly made the department look impressive as a place that helped foster writing, with graduates and faculty over the years including Thomas Wharton, kath macLean, Weaver, Dickinson, Monty Reid, Stephen Scobie, Sheila Watson, Rudy Wiebe, Greg Hollingshead, Kristjana Gunnars, Henry Kreisel, Stan Dragland, and Professor Frederick Salter, for whom the Salter Reading Room is named. If you wander through, you can even see the little desk that used to belong to Sheila Watson, author of The Double Hook.

It's hard not to think of the University of Alberta and Sheila Watson as intertwined. The annual Salter Tea in mid-May, held as their annual department awards ceremony, with chairs in a packed space and terrible acoustics. But why would they not have some kind of prominent award named after Watson herself? As though her own presence a particular absence. Writing of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, and how it has "One of the most famous openings of any Canadian novel," in his collection of essays, Signature Event Cantext (1989), Victoria, British Columbia poet and critic Stephen Scobie writes:

The Double Hook begins with this absence, and then, as Barthes comments, proceeds in its narration (its apocalyptic "unveiling of the truth") to the "staging" of that absent father. Every word of the novel stands in for the word that is not used on the first page. The male characters, especially James and Felix, are advanced (without much conviction) as substitute fathers; the female characters, not least "the old lady" herself, meet and challenge those God-like pretentions. Even, in her case, the God-like pretentions of God Himself […].

It's strange to think of just how far the University of Alberta has come, one hundred years old during my school year in residence. Originally, the University of Calgary was built as a branch-plant, the U of A's Calgary campus, which seems funny, when you think that at one corner of the University of Alberta, sitting at the bottom of Whyte (82nd) Avenue, there's a more recent branch plant of the University of Calgary. Has it come full circle? Even the Banff Centre, as John Robert Columbo writes in his Canadian Literary Landmarks (1984), "goes back to 1933 when it was organized as a summer extension program by the University of Alberta."

The University of Alberta, one of the original points of contention between Edmonton and Calgary, set up against each other now for decades, in everything from white vs. blue collar to competing NHL teams (“the battle for Alberta”), starting out when the province of Alberta was invented. At least, when strips of Athabasca turned into the province of Saskatchewan, the provincial government was smart enough to put the capital in one city, and the university in the other, for the sake of balance, and, dare I say it, fairness. When Alberta was finally invented, far more of the provincial decision-makers were Edmonton-based than were Calgary, so the city was able to take both. How could Calgary not respond? How could the two cities ever get along after? With only the neutral ground of Red Deer to come between them. As Calgary author Aritha van Herk wrote in her Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2001):

Edmonton and Calgary. Two circling huskies, equal in size and clout, 185 miles apart and connected by the north-south ribbon of Highway 2. Books and studies and reports discuss their rivalry, blue collar versus white collar, Redmonton versus Tory-blue Calgary, Oilers versus Flames. Edmonton hosts the legislature, the civil servants, the mandarins of the latest swept-in majority government. Calgary parties with oil men and bankers and corporate head offices, 204 of them, second only to Toronto.

I am writing out these images, this country of roughneck and rocky plains past. Is this simply me, being overcome by my own myths of Edmonton, of wild prose. A local reading series, run by T.L. Cowan and Thea Bowering, calls itself “wild prose country”? Why do I still allow myself to get caught up in the ideas of Kroetsch and van Herk, but not the lyric prose of Kristjana Gunnars, perhaps one of the finest prose stylists to come through this town, and someone who managed to publish at least half a dozen books of fiction, as well as numerous poetry collections? She now sits relatively silent on her British Columbia coast, painting in oil. Gunnars, apparently, only the second person to be hired full-time at the University to teach creative writing; why does she not figure more in my imagination? Why, even with new information, am I so slow to incorporate these into my old and over-worn ideas?

Professor Salter stood perhaps five foot five and had a rather weak chin. He might have looked like the pattern of a henpecked husband when he first walked into the classroom, if it hadn’t been for his smile. I remember his first words: 'Professor Orrell and I just flipped a coin to see who would take which section of Shakespeare. You lost.'

Ah, but the smile. It was another year, my third, before I got to know any of my fellow English majors, with their inside information, so I knew nothing of Professor Salter's reputation. And still that smile instantly told me that he wouldn’t have contradicted anybody who said we'd won. He knew what he was worth, but he never paraded it. Nor did he make anything of the fact that he was lecturing in pain, as we could tell whenever he winced involuntarily through his smile. There was only one allusion to the body that broke down over Christmas, so that Professor Orrell had to add our class to his in the new year: 'If I can carry my Shakespeare to class, surely to goodness you young people can manage to bring yours.'
— Stan Dragland, Journeys Through Bookland

Over the years, the English and Film Studies Department has been a strong example of how a university helps a writing community develop, from the creative writing classes themselves, the hiring of working writers as faculty, and the longest continuing writer-in-residence program left in Canada. My time in Edmonton coincided with the beginnings of a creative writing program at the University of Regina. The University of Ottawa and Carleton University, on the other hand, barely have individual fiction and poetry workshops, proving yet again the bare functionality of a government town, despite the fact that we are the nation’s capital. In the mid-1990s, Ottawa's high tech industry even made public complaints about Carleton getting rid of some of their arts programs, including the language programs. We don’t want to hire automatons, they said. We want potential hirees to be able to think for themselves.

During my time at the University of Alberta, one of the most common questions I got was, what exactly does a writer-in-residence do? Are you required to teach? Those in the system, whether already having done one or just wanting to, seem to have an idea of what the job requires, but most of the time, even folk within the department don’t seem to be entirely clear on what the position means.

My office sat in the English and Film Studies Department, just on the third floor of the Humanities Centre, a building erected in 1972, and decorated with coloured skylights, bright carpets, and fifty-two painted nylon banners by Vancouver artist Takao Tanabe. With each coloured banner 4 x 13 feet in size hanging from the interior ceilings all the way down past the third floor, I noticed quickly just how the light came in through the late morning along the south end of the building, streaming coloured sunlight through the interior, along the office windows of Ph.D. and post-doc alike, possibly too busy to notice it themselves.

Once head of the art department at the Banff School of Fine Arts, Tanabe was also publisher and designer of a number of early 1960s small press publications, including John Newlove's Grave Sirs (privately printed, 1962) and Elephants, Mothers & Others (Periwinkle Press, 1963), Anne Margaret Angus' Where I Have Been (Periwinkle Press, 1963) and Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems (Periwinkle Press, 1965). The linkage seemed appropriate, then, considering we launched John Newlove's selected poems, A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (2007), in January through the department, mere feet away from his former publisher's artwork. Before they had worked their collaboration, Newlove was part of a "downtown bohemian set" in Vancouver loosely connected with the Vancouver Art School, including the artists Stan Douglas and Roy K. Kiyooka, as well as Tanabe. It was around that time that Newlove, who died in 2003, his last decade my neighbour in Ottawa's Chinatown, wrote "A Letter to Larry Sealey, 1962," published in his collection Moving In Alone (1965):

Buying a pack for the clumsy bag,
zoomed to Edmonton, north, the Hostel, to beds,
to breakfast mush and supper, bummed cigarettes,
sitting dull-eyes day-long in the railway station.
Edmonton. November. Cold. Snow. I am sitting
on the edge of the bed, scribbling on paper towels,
afraid of the ostentation; broke, tired, happy.

The first few weeks, repeatedly telling me how I don’t have to be in there, I don’t have to sit in my office all day, we don’t expect you to come in but three hours a week, but where else would I end up? I’d have to work somewhere. Never office hours but whole office days, and a door that was never closed. What exactly, then, is the function of writer? What does it mean, to write, or even, to write as (seemingly) public function? American writer Joyce Carol Oates who, with her husband Raymond Joseph Smith, founded the Ontario Review during her time at the University of Windsor from 1967 to 1977, at which point they returned to the United States, taking the journal with them. Dorothy Livesay who started Contemporary Verse 2 in 1976 during her two year tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, 1974-76.

Started at the University of Alberta over thirty years before I arrived, the writer in residence program provides a living wage for a working literary writer so they can spend the bulk of their time working on their own writing projects, as well as being available for consultation for writers and other hopefuls both at the University and within the community. Part of this also involves doing readings at the University, Grant MacEwan College, at the University of Calgary (both universities traditionally invite the others writer in residence to read at their school), as well as various book clubs and other events around Edmonton. Wasn’t I built for such a position?

What will they remember of me, if they remember anything at all?

Alberta dispatch: The Banff Sessions

How to introduce suffering in a lemon?
How to ensure that allegory is not fatal?
If the lemon weeps, out of love
deny it. Begin to pray. Begin to feel
at home in the cosmos. If the lemon were a mountain species
accompanied by a very long profile – a window
or the origin of human sensation? Pain will define the outline
the heart, the mind, the soul will imitate this material inadequacy – will force
the human action? Ignore the waterline. Become pastoral
for the lemon. Territory
that knows itself – a finite tile
of yellow. And when the wind rose to fill an air there began
no other setbacks.
— Lynn Xu, from “Je vous attends,” The Walrus, May 2008

As Michael Holmes wrote in his “Notes Towards an Operational Poetics” in the anthology side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (2002), “When your spouse says they're going to Alberta to improve their writing what they're really saying is ‘Honey, I'm not satisfied; I'm going to have an affair.’” How many relationships have started or ended because of going off to the Banff? An old friend from high school, Franco-Ontarien director/playwright Patrick Leroux, returned to Ottawa in 1994 from the Banff Writing Studio and told us he’d met an English poet from Burnaby, eventually introducing us to Stephanie Bolster, whom he, years later, married.

As part of my residency at the University of Alberta, I spent a week at the Banff Centre for the Arts, given my own private space to get work done in one of the Leighton Studios. My own private writing retreat. For years, Canadian writers have been willing to give their eye-teeth for such an opportunity, whether for the writers studio itself, or simply for the solitude of work in such a breathtaking environment. A list of faculty and alumni reads almost as a CanLit who’s who, including Caroline Adderson, Ken Babstock, Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, Tom Pow, Marlene Cookshaw, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Fred Wah, Robert Kroetsch, Laura Lush, John Lent, Elise Levine, Stephen Heighton, Lisa Moore, Méira Cook and Sina Queyras. As Edna Alford, Associate Director of the Writing Studio wrote in her introduction to Rip Rap: Fiction and Poetry from The Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff AB: The Banff Centre Press, 1999):

For nearly seven decades, writers have been gathering in the shadow of these mountains to learn more from various masters. One of the first teachers was Hugh MacLennan and one of those early students was Robert Kroetsch.

In 1972, W.O. Mitchell became director of the Writing Program. It was, he insisted, to have no element of the creative writing programs being set up in universities, no formality. At Banff, writers were to write “without the pressure of performance.” Like a mediaeval scholar, he gathered writers around him and talked to them and showed them ways in which to free their captive ideas.

It was a summer program then and high-school students as well as mature writers came to sit at the feet of the master and to work their way into the craft and art of writing. Poetry and prose, drama and writing for radio, all had a place and all, with variations, continue to thrive in Banff.

Adele Wiseman agreed with W.O. Mitchell’s view of formal writing courses. When she took over as director in 1987, she brought her own distinct ideas and built onto what was already in place. Her vision was primarily to create a community of writers in what had become the May Studios. Working individually with editors, writers would be encouraged to be independent artists confident in their own voices. Adele had a sharp editorial eye and was often able to make invaluable suggestions to a writer but always with the admonition, Remember, this is your work.

I'd been to the town of Banff before, but not the Studios, nestled further up these mountains. I was there for an evening in 1999 at the beginning of a five day date (Banff, I suppose, still living up to its reputation). I barely remember a thing, but for the woman I was with, the mountains, and the first time seeing a digital countdown at a crosswalk (they seem to be everywhere, now). I remember her taking me through the Banff Springs Hotel, as we wandered the lobby and high-ceilinged rooms. I remember having a pint in a cowboy pub, staring lost in her deep blue eyes.

During the construction of the Banff Springs Hotel, the general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Cornelius Van Horn, arrived and realized that the kitchen overlooked the valley, and the guest rooms had a view made up of immediate trees. Who would have made such a plan? The construction was quickly halted and plans changed to correct it.

I am thinking about a woman in Edmonton, and these months of involvement. Does that make me the only writer here who doesn’t appreciate the enforced solitude? I am neither open for new love or escaping an old one. I am already in one; whatever I have, it will make or break unrelated to these mountain scenes. As Kingston poet Joanne Page wrote in her poem “How You Might Like Alberta,” “not a place to overwhelm / but be taken by,” and ending with the lines:

and I would stay forever if I could
within this blue, this a cappella.

It reminds me of a Maya Angelou quote I read recently, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has the answer, it sings because it has a song.” There is so much this has to do with singing.

Construction crew outside my writing studio at all hours, machine noise competing with the solitude of space this week was meant for, cutting into attention. It’s a compelling environment, but it wasn't meant for me. What I need for work is not a solitude as such but public spaces, human activity. I write long-hand in coffee shops, pubs and food courts, not in self-retreat clacking away on a computer. I left the farm when I was nineteen for a reason, to remove myself from such a series of solitary silences. I have spent enough of my time alone.

Every day I leave my writing studio for the sake of construction crews. Every day I abandon the solitude of my round log cabin for the sake of the cafeteria, the restaurant, the pub. Am I simply not meant for this? Myrna Kostash was at the Banff Centre as well, conducting a non-fiction workshop, with the workshop in the mornings, the one-on-one consultations in the afternoons and reading their materials during the evening. At lunch or at dinner, we would trade stories and she would introduce me to yet another, new young author. Where do they all come from?

They say the first inhabitants of Banff were the first nations people around 11,000 years ago, arriving in the Bow River Valley and eventually becoming the Cree, the Kootenay and the Blackfoot tribes, long before the Europeans and the rail pushed them back.

In his book Canadian Literary Landmarks (1984), I read John Robert Columbo's passage on some of the literary associations with Banff, mentioning Canada's best-selling author in 1900, Ralph Connor, penname for the Rev. Charles W. Gordon (1860 - 1937). He was known best for his novels about Glengarry County, where he too grew, not far away from where I did, and in the same church, built by his father, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland. As Columbo writes:

William Arthur Deacon asked him about these early years when he was researching A Literary Map of Canada. Gordon replied in a letter, September 21, 1936: "During my three years missionary experience in the Rocky Mountains my Headquarters were Banff. My own Field reached from Field on the west to the Gap on the east. I was Clerk of the Calgary Presbytery, then the largest presbytery in the world. It existed from Revelstoke in the west to Swift Current in the east and from Edmonton to the United States Borderline."

From the pub, another building undergoing renovation, I watch a family of deer stroll through the campus, munching on a patch of grass. They seem entirely comfortable with the human population. Back on the farm, the rare deer we saw wandering through more jittery, unused to such interaction. There is snow filtering through the air, the impressive peaks. In my studio, a list of things left here for me (“What You Should Know About”) that include “Signs of an Aggressive Elk,” “If You Encounter a Cougar,” “If You Encounter a Bear” and “If You are Attacked.”

If You Encounter a Cougar

Face the animal and retreat slowly. Ensure you leave an escape route for the cougar.

Do NOT run or play dead.

Try to appear bigger by holding your arms up or an object.

Shout! Wave your arms or a large stick back and forth.

Throwing rocks may deter an attack.

Am I risking my life simply by being here? If you encounter a bear, it says, stay calm and don’t alarm the bear with screams or sudden movement. Calm behavior will reassure the bear.

Lie face down with arms behind your neck and legs apart.

In 2000, the City of Banff had to organize a forced relocation for the elk population, wandering through the streets for food without the threat of natural predators (held back by the town limits), and the numerous reports of attacks on the human population. Was this an improvement for the animals or for the people?

How many Canadian writers have already written about their time at Banff? Doesn’t this become, already, a tired old Canadian standard? The poet Sina Queyras from her first poetry collection, Slip (2001), from the series “Postcards from Banff,” writing:

Where are you tonight? The phone rings and rings, I haven’t energy
to hang up, fall asleep to the possibility of you.

We trade phone calls and letters, we pine; I pine among the conifers, I write her, among the Lodgepole Pine, in this round cabin furthest back, designed by architect Douglas Cardinal. The Metis architect Cardinal, who also designed the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec, almost directly across the Ottawa River. In Banff, where everything connects. In Banff, my cabin in the woods with no corners.

In Banff, where my friend Laura Farina, a poet originally from Ottawa, says you can't even purchase a lamp, if you needed. She's been here since December, working for the Banff Centre Press, and we spent part of an evening re-acquainting at the pub. She was here, she said, to escape; what Banff seems best for. So much of this town tourist, she says, that to even live here, you have to drive out the twenty minutes to Canmore to pick up anything domestic.

In Canmore, just southeast of Banff, there is even a cairn that pays tribute to Connor, not far away from the Ralph Connor Memorial United Church, built in 1891. Does everything connect to everything else?
It was David Thompson and Duncan McGillvray who first explored the Bow Valley in 1880, wandering their way through what would someday be the town of Banff, a town within a national park, and the birthplace of the national parks system, but it wasn’t until 1886 that it became a real tourist destination, thanks to the advent of the Canadian Pacific working national rail. David Thompson of the North-West Company who named the Fraser River after his mentor, Simon Fraser, who lies buried in Eastern Ontario, near Cornwall.

Thompson, who would lose the 49th Parallel for four days in a blizzard, becoming the only man in history, perhaps, to misplace an entire country. Thompson, whose house in Glengarry County where he retired would become the county archive, with land deeds back into the 1770s.

The town of Banff, once remote, then not, and removed again, become the ultimate writing retreat for poets, fiction and creative non-fiction writers across Canada; becoming the legend of its own success. But what have I to retreat from?

In exile from my own exile. I am already in Edmonton, with a life behind me in Ottawa, on hold. Now I make notes among these Rocky Mountains, pining through the conifers at what I finally found in Edmonton, one more city behind.

In all of this, how I am supposed to be getting work done, getting writing, staring instead out the window at the mountains, the movement of clouds, birds and the distant highway. Everyone in the restaurant taking pictures of the peaks and river valley, as though they have not seen mountains before; there are enough pictures of mountains. Why not pictures of them too, to prove that they’d been?

Saskatchewan poet Eli Mandel even wrote of the same, when he was here, from his "Journal, Banff: The School of Fine Arts, 1976" collected in Life Sentence (1981). Here is a part of his entry for "July 20. Banff.":

The mountains still have nothing to say to me, other than touristy notions of the picturesque. Immense. What do they care? The slow thinking of mountains. For some reason, I look to the Andes with apprehension. They loom in my mind, dangerous forms. Threats to our family? myself? How does one live at 12,500 feet? How does one measure, take measure of, one's own humanity? Perhaps the mountains insisted that "Ghosts" be finished so that I could be free to meet their voices.

Day's routine, in a spectacular but by now familiar mountain setting, I have come here regularly since 1973. Walk to the road above Bow Falls facing the Banff Springs Hotel. Many shattered trees along the way. Strong sense of being on a mountain.

Later on in the same journal, writing "August 1. Banff.":

The politics of mountains. Not that they're high but elevated. A phenomenology of space. That explains why I am told not to go to Fort San next summer. It is a more demanding place, defining itself in particulars of prairie, not landscape but politics. Hence home to Wiebe and Kroetsch. To be at Banff is part of a high cultural setting. Elevated. Maybe the mountains do something to one's head. Curious though that Purdy, Marty, Suknaski focused here. All anecdotal. Low culture. And W.O., the raw western story-teller, though his poetics are Wordsworthian and not Coleridgean (as in Suknaski's haunted tales). Are these language differences? Vernacular as opposed to academic or literary. If so, an irony since I was not aware of my speech as high culture, though it obviously must be. There's something else too: not only need for drama, but, in story the character. Isn't it Bob K. who's always talking of western speech as story-talking. It's a story I haven’t told yet, though Out of Place has its story form and this one at Banff is pure paranoia. ("August 1. Banff.")

The politics of mountains. The politics of being an artist in these mountains, coming out as so culturally loaded. When they give them an "artist card," how can some of these kids not be affected, out the other end with first books, thinking it's all about them? Or, as poet and artist Roy Kiyooka wrote in his Transcanada Letters (1974; 2005) in a letter from Banff dated July 25, 1972:

as for the Banff School of Fine Arts it’s a summer re-
sort cum liberal arts school for rich N.A. kids with
the hugeness of the rocky terrain measuring their un-
flagging zeal. if i have learnt anything here its that
i dont need this kind of teaching gig nor do i need
these incomparable mountains.

I make notes, and spend hours staring out the windows. I sit in the coffee shop hours with notebooks, avoiding the backhoe and its constant machine noise. After couple of days I realize the disruption to my space, to my furthest Leighton Studio #7. Reading a copy of the Rocky Mountain Outlook (the Bow Valley daily newspaper), I discover that:

About 150 trees, including four Douglas fir trees, will be chopped down to make way for the relocation of an historic home, owned by hockey icon Glen Sather, to The Banff Centre.

About 50 trees will be removed along Buffalo Street so the house, built by renowned architect Walter S. Painter, can make its journey to The Banff Centre. Approximately 70 more trees will be cut down at the Centre’s Leighton Artists’ Colony.

Sather, general manager of the New York Rangers, has owned the home at 505 Buffalo Street since 1974, and is relocating it to make way for a new 5,000-square-foot home by the Bow River.

Town of Banff officials say that balancing the value of saving the historic 1913 Painter Residence against the environmental loss of several mature trees has proven challenging. […] The historic home is considered important because of its association with Painter, an American-born architect who designed the 1914 additions to the Banff Springs Hotel, the original Cave and Basin building and the Hotel Vancouver.

May, 2008
Alberta

Alberta dispatch: West Edmonton Mall

This most public of places, this marble mall
— Anne Swannell, Mall

Just how Edmonton became structured as a mall town is something I’ve been wondering about for years. Sitting at the Garneau Pub on 109th Street, I find two paragraphs in Linda Goyette and Carolina Jakeway Roemmich’s Edmonton In Our Own Words (2004) that explain a bit of the car/mall culture of the city of Edmonton. They talk about the creation of the interiority of the infamous West Edmonton Mall in the late 1970s, and the shifts in the construction of city that the mall might not have created, but was simply a part of.

Huge shopping malls were the consequence of rapid suburban growth in post-war Edmonton, not the cause of it. More than half of Edmonton’s residents lived in suburban neighbourhoods. Long before the Ghermezians arrived in town, Edmontonians had embraced Westmount Shopping Park, one of Canada’s first prototype shopping malls, and Southgate Mall, the largest mall west of Toronto when it opened in 1970. The city redesigned itself to serve drivers and their cars, not pedestrians or bus passengers. Public transit did not keep up with suburban growth. Suburban residents became impatient with Edmonton’s limited public transit to their neighbourhoods, not to mention winter waits at outdoor bus stops. They preferred to drive across a wide city to indoor shopping malls where they could park for free.

If you’ve never been here, you have to realize just how much the city is built for strip malls; strip malls, porn shops and liquor stores. There are far more here than in any other city I’ve been in the country; I’m still trying to figure out why that is. What makes a city? Is it population, construction (whether deliberate planning or accidents of movement), finances, cultural concerns, or all (or even none) of the above? Thinking, too, since Ontario was a creation of the Scots (and their dour moralism), it’s pretty much the only province you can’t purchase alcohol either in a convenience store or at the back of the bar to take home with you; what makes one geography have an idea and not another?

There is something about being in Edmonton that requires at least one visit to West Edmonton Mall. Mid-November, Lainna and I spent part of a Saturday wandering the Mall and watching roller coaster rides, the old-timey pioneer photo kiosk, the wavepool and skating rink; catching the movements and the human traffic and the coloured lights. As Alice Major suggested in an email, interesting for “how little use it makes of the traditional western décor or symbol. It tries to recreate Bourbon Street and beaches—places far away from here—not rodeos and wranglers.” I hadn’t been there in nine years, since the ottawa international writers festival’s Great Canadian Via Rail Tour back in 1998 with Sean Wilson, Kira Harris, David McGimpsey and Susan Musgrave, and going through as only tourists do—looking at everything, including participating in the shooting range, bowling alley and roller coaster—and buying (almost) nothing.

Years later, going through Elizabeth Smart’s journals [see my previous note on her here] from her own year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University, I listen to the anger that comes out in her voice. Why did she hate her experience so much? I mean, apart from the fact that her youngest child, Rose, had died of an overdose six months earlier; is she complaining about the provincialism of the city or using that as her target, unable to process Rose any other way? How does (or even, can) one process the death of a child? Here is part of her entry for September 12, 1982:

To think! I was going to enrich their lives & I find myself poverty-stricken. A desert within, a desert without. Needing them—if only they’d take pity on—where can I find it—where is it hiding—the passion & the life.

Instead of the garden, what? (I’d hoped for the Wild)

Instead of friends? (Kind acquaintance? very different)

Instead of big resolving tension drinks? ( a civilized sip, stopped before one gets anywhere?)

Why is this Hell—& how shall I get out of it?

These terrible high-rises & fearsome geometry—not the breathtaking arrogance of N.Y. skyscrapers—& the muddy (but dried mud) parking lots—& the dominance of cars & the endless flat pavements, wide uneventful roads.

It stands to reason, there must be a pulsing human life somewhere, here as elsewhere, there must be. Does it take place in their homes—visiting back & forth, tiny exchanges, boring each other for a purpose?

O where for me shall my salvation come, from whence arise?

Twenty seven years beyond her, I can look into this passage and see shades of familiarity but I do not feel her obvious grief. Kind acquaintance? Am I simply too naïve, too polite (too “Canadian,” perhaps) and can see nothing else? Or is the difference itself in the city, the provincial aspect of Edmonton in the 1980s, highlighting the severe shifts from her many years in England and Ireland? How different this passage reads from her By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, despite being another book rife with heartbreak and disappointment. For Elizabeth Smart and Edmonton, there was certainly no love, or love lost. She might not have had anything left.

I can’t imagine she would have had any reason to go even near the mall, then bare a year old; the stories still float through the English department of her time here, unhappy, unkempt and worn out from drink. I only wish that more of her journals from this period were put into print; or was it simply more of the same? So much of the mall is certainly circus sideshow, yet so much is simply the same as almost any other mall, but one that continues, on and on with each turn of a hallway. With most of its space taken up on two levels, there are smaller malls that have spaces that seem much larger; the mirrored ceiling in the food court that allows the illusion of space, despite the lower ceilings.

West Edmonton Mall opened September 15, 1981, expanding further with three more phases of construction in 1983, 1985 and 1998. The mall was officially the largest shopping mall in the world until 2004, when the Jin Yuan, or Golden Resources Shopping Mall, also known as the “Great Mall of China” in Beijing, with over a thousand stores and a total area of 680,000 square metres. West Edmonton Mall might still be the largest in North America, but the current largest, constructed in 2005, is the South China Mall in Dongguan, with 1500 stores and a total area of 892,000 square metres. Edmonton’s almost seems puny in comparison, with only eight hundred stores, and a total area of 570,000 square metres.

Why did it take nearly a decade to get someone to take me back to the mall? In 2001, suggesting the same to a group of friends on Whyte Avenue, grad students at the University including poets Adam Dickinson and Andy Weaver, they looked at me and my obvious lack of better judgment without saying a word. I mean, how could I?

Nine years since I had wandered the mall, where we went bowling and for Budweisers (when in Rome, as they say) at the Hooters, simply because we thought it was funny (I think Canadians are far too subtle for Hooters, a family restaurant in the southern United States; over the past decade, three have opened and closed in Ottawa in quick succession). I won’t tell which author (I was told later) screamed like a little girl during that ’98 trip on the roller coaster. Edmonton in 1998, where we arrived by train, and somehow our hotel was out by the airport. At breakfast, seeing the sign that told of the daily special, eggnog paralyzers, preparing for the Christmas rush, perhaps? What, we asked, is in an eggnog paralyzer? The waiter slowly checked his 11am watch, looked at us disparagingly, and told us it was exactly what was in a regular paralyzer, except with eggnog. As though every school-child in Alberta had already been taught what we had yet to learn.

Even before I arrived, I knew: there is the mythological Alberta, and, even, the mythological Edmonton, holding on still to the myths of frontier. Robert Kroetsch wrote wild horses set loose over the High Level Bridge in What the Crow Said (1978), and wrote about the land he grew up on near Leduc in his first collection, his “Stone Hammer Poem” that now opens up Completed Field Notes (2002); the land his father and his grandfather owned; the land near where Alberta first struck oil, writing:

This paperweight on my desk

where I began
this poem was

found in a wheatfield
lost (this hammer,
this poem).

Cut to a function,
this stone was
(the hand is gone ―

There are the neighbourhoods, and then the city itself. In Strathcona, it’s still a walking neighbourhood, but no where else in Edmonton, it seems. What Donald Alexander Smith, Lord Strathcona (later, first Baron Strathcona) saw when he train travelled west, creating hotels and neighbourhoods in the wake of his rail. A section of what became Vancouver was built speculatively, waiting for what the advent of rail would bring; they say, for every mile of track, a dead Chinese labourer. Just what are these legacies built on? The Rideau Canal back in Ottawa, built on the blood and the bones of the Irish and French, brought in for the work and then abandoned, when work finally finished.

Former Edmonton resident George Melnyk, long moved to Calgary, also talked about the differences in Alberta of the provincial mythologies against those of the two major cities from his New Moon at Batoche (2000), writing:

My western Canadian identity has come to me through city life. I’m used to concrete towers, brick buildings, asphalt streets with long rows of houses, traffic jams and crowded malls. I’m not the only one. This is the way the majority of Westerners see the region every single day and yet that experience is viewed as incompatible with the agrarian myth of the region. The experience of city life from childhood to adulthood has moulded millions of Western Canadians but it is considered inauthentic compared to the genuineness of rural existence. The continuing self-image of the region is one of endless prairie fields or grasslands with their icons of farmers and cowboys holding us in its sway. The reason for this is obvious. The wheat farmer and cattle rancher are icons because they reflect the distinguishing feature of the region—its prairie geography and a livelihood tied to it—while the Western Canadian urban reality is viewed as the same as that of other cities. If you want a regional identity you have to take it from the land and not from the city. The land is distinguishing while the city is not.

Later on in the same essay, he writes:

Our culture has set landscape above the city. The city and the land are opposites in which the city is negative and the land is positive. That’s the myth we live by. Historical fact is a little different.
[…]
Where is Calgary’s mythical archetype? The glorification of the ranching life in the Calgary Stampede is the city’s association with the landscape, not Calgary itself. Edmonton’s archetype is Klondike Days and the heroic trek of gold miners to the Yukon.

But why, over my first Alberta weeks, did I keep returning to Kroetsch, to what I already knew? Why do these myths overshadow, and overtake, even against the weight of such otherwise fact? Editor Srdja Pavlovic encountered the same thing, writing the introduction to Threshold: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing from Alberta (1999):

I first encountered Alberta literature through Seed Catalogue, a collection of poems by Robert Kroetsch. The book was a present for my eighteenth birthday from my uncle, a sailor, who had just returned from one of his frequent exotic viaggi across the ocean. At the time, because of my limited English, I was not able to make out much of Kroetsch’s poetry. The verses sounded distant and complicated. But the book sat on my shelf for years and its dream-prints helped me imagine a distant place and wonder about the people living there. I was young and dreamed the symmetry of the world.

The dream-like Alberta, the imaginary Alberta; that urban prairie versus the rural prairie, and how, as far as the European settlers knew it, developed at the same rate. Writing about Alberta literary journals, Linda Goyette titled her piece in the same anthology “Imagining Alberta.” Flipping through pages of the first issue of filling Station magazine from Calgary, she writes:

I begin to wonder about the differences in perception between Alberta’s creative writers and journalists. Both are interpreters of place, but they see, hear, and tell stories differently. What are the poets and short-story writers discovering this year as they sift through life in a harsher province? Do they even live in the same Alberta? Do they like it better?

Further on, she offers an answer to her own speculations, some sort of conclusion:

Journalism is always about now. This imaginative Alberta has a past and a future, not just a present. Ghosts stick around.

There is the Mall, and then there is the myth of the Mall. There is the myth of the Mall imposed on the landscape but nearly invisible, unlike the century before, as railway hotels imposed themselves on the landscape from one coast to the other. As Edmonton poet Alice Major writes in the preface to her collection Tales for an Urban Sky (1999):

Mythologies are large things, continuous across the generations, marrying humanity to the earth and the sky. But it seems to me that myth-making is more local – a magpie impulse that catches sight of glittery things from the corner of its eye and builds them into some home structure. Myth is made up. It makes do with what it finds nearby.

When talking about Alberta or about Edmonton and any kind of deliberate or accidental mythos, why does it always keep coming back to Kroetsch? Why is one and not the other? Writing specifically of Edmonton and the myth-making of the annual July Klondike Days in his book Alberta, he explains that:

The image succeeds because it has a kernel of truth. The father who gets a gold-embroidered vest and a stovepipe hat for Christmas, the teenage boy studying his young beard in the locker room in January, the ladies, after bridge on a bitter February afternoon, looking at patterns and buying warm-coloured cloth by the bolt: they are part of a past that goes back to the erection of Fort Augustus in 1794, to the erection of its rival, Fort Edmonton, in 1795 – and in Alberta that ain’t history, it’s archaeology.

It is as simple as the difference between home and the dream of home? What if it was never your home to begin with? In the Strathcona Public Library, Myrna Kostach [see my previous note on her here and another here] explained the streetcar tracks down 104th Street to me from a photograph on the second floor wall, the days when they ran two-laned, across 82nd Avenue. A series of black and white photographs of historical buildings, and a group of bearded men. Why wouldn’t any of these framed portraits be labeled? Without even a year or address to place them?

Does West Edmonton Mall belong to the dream of Edmonton, the myth of Edmonton, or the harsh reality? It seems to be all of the above; it seems to be all of this and the nightmare too, as most of the local residents I’ve met wouldn’t be caught dead in the building, calling it Maul.

There is something very Canadian, one might claim, in the humble notions of self punctuated by the scattering of proud and remarkably (and often ironically) big, whether the giant Nickle outside of Sudbury, Ontario, the Big Apple along the 401 Highway near Coburg, Ontario, or the (now extinct) World’s Largest Lobster Trap that sat in Cheticamp, Nova Scotia, finally dismantled for parts by the owner in 1998. Kostash even responded to something out of her own Ukrainian background in her piece “Baba Was a Bohunk” (reprinted in The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs, 2001), writing of the large Easter egg in Vegreville, not far from Edmonton:

So, in Vegreville, in 1975, I, second-generation Ukrainian-Canadian, socialized Anglo-American, English-French bilingualist, confronted a festival organized from the consciousness of the first generation. I was amazed. It was obvious that the first generation had grown more self-confident, not to say boastful, and was now assuming that the Ukrainian-Canadian “fact” was of interest to all Albertans. No more church basements for them; the festival was held at the exhibition grounds. It was this generation which had erected last summer a monstrous, aluminum pysanka (decorated Easter egg) near the Yellowhead Highway in Vegreville, and dedicated it to the RCMP. (How short their memories are: it was the police who had broken up their hunger marches in the 1930s, closed down their Ukrainian-language concerts, spied on them in their Labour-Farmer Temples.) It was these same people who had scattered throughout Vegreville signs in shop windows saying “Vitayemo,” meaning “Welcome,” and innumerable plastic and china knick-knacks decorated with Ukrainian motifs. They operated concession booths at the festival selling kubassa-on-a-stick and T-shirts emblazoned with “Drink Molson’s Ukrainian” and “Kiss me, I’m Ukrainian.” The message seemed to be that anybody could be a Ukrainian; it was implicit that somebody would want to.

This is not about size, but identifying with a group; still, the marker is certainly there. There is gaudy big and then there is just gaudy; and then there is just big (again, with the associations often with kitch). What is this with our obsession with size?

In March, finding the Mall not big enough for a store from which I might find myself a pork-pie hat (think of Buster Keaton). Maybe had we been in Beijing, I said, which Lainna didn’t appreciate. In the end, it was easier to drive and find all of your stores in one place than to have them all scatterd, and still have to walk. In the end, Lainna and I using the Mall as a whole as a kind of exhibition space, parkland entertainment, taking pictures of the roller coaster I still won’t ride with her, the fake blue whale, the dragon in the movie theatre. Doesn’t it only become a carnival of commerce if you actually buy something?