Post-glacial: The Poetry of Robert Kroetsch, selected with an introduction by David Eso

 

            Kroetsch’s errant career in poetry is characterized by slow-moving divergences and a focus on place (shaped and shaping). For these reasons, I suggest “post-glacial” as an alternative to the classification “postmodern.” A term borrowed from geography, post-glacial refers to the Holocene (the past ten thousand years and counting), the present moment (despite the continued presence of high-altitude glaciers), and equally to an indeterminate future period (a possible future wherein no glaciers remain). Post-glacial refigures in spatiotemporal terms postmodern concepts such as trace, spectre, or the presence of absence—concepts promoted by Jacques Derrida and others. “Trace,” in its postmodern sense, means that the past is never past. Drumlins, erratics, eskers, and even the flatness of the great plains are the visible work of Pleistocene ice sheets. That past haunts the present through the presence of year-round ice high up in the Rocky Mountains. These are post-glacial times we live in, although some glaciers remain. Past is now. Future arrives ahead of time. Glaciers do not melt. Ice melts. Glaciers retreat, recreating the land that remains always subject to revision. Similarly, the voices of the poet’s parents recur with increasing clarity, posthumously. Another parallel: the great literary traditions of history survive in Kroetsch’s work—quest, romance, satire—through subversive response to the weight of those inherited items. (David Eso, “Introduction”)

Given the pre-pandemic and pandemic distractions around these parts, I’m only just now seeing Post-glacial: The Poetry of Robert Kroetsch, selected with an introduction by David Eso and an afterword by Aritha van Herk (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019), produced as part of the series of critical selected poem volumes in the Laurier Poetry Series. It is important that a poet such as the late Robert Kroetsch is assessed and reassessed, not only through his work but our relationship to such, given he is and was such a large presence across Canadian literature, and for so many years. Over the past few years alone, we’ve seen broad reassessments of Kroetsch’s work, thanks to Dennis Cooley’s book-length critical work, The Home Place: Essays on Robert Kroetsch's Poetry (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2016) as well as the collection Robert Kroetsch: Essays on His Works, edited by Nicole Markotić (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2017), as now Victoria, British Columbia poet and critic David Eso has put together this new critical selected that focuses on the “poet” aspect of Kroetsch’s work, examining the late tall tale theorist and storyteller through the lens of his poetic output. As Eso’s introduction offers, writing on Kroetsch’s engagement with the long poem: “A broadening identification with Western Canadian geography and dialect had combined productively with a deepening understanding of deconstructive poetics vis-à-vis the international postmodernism explored by Foucault, Said, and Spanos. Through these paired phenomenological and theoretical influences, Kroetsch uncovered the endlessly expansive form in which he would excel—the long poem.” There is an irony to examining Kroetsch as the poet of the long poem through such as small assemblage of pieces, and yet, Kroetsch was the master of a “long poem” that was, in many ways, less a singular, extended unit than an assemblage of multiple, moving and even constantly-newly-incorporated parts. The further he wrote, the larger the shape of what would become his life-long poem would seem. Readers would ask: Is that it? Is there no more? And Kroetsch would answer that the project was complete, and there would be no more. And then there would be more. Wasn’t that the wry joke of “Completed,” through his Completed Field Notes (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2000)?

As well as selecting from his more formal collections of poems, there are more than a couple of wayward Kroetsch offerings included here, including from his 2009 Wrinkle Press chapbook, The Lost Narrative of Mrs. David Thompson / Ten Simple Questions for David Thompson, his long out-of-print disOrientation chapbook, Revisions of Letters Already Sent (1993) and his 2011 Greenboathouse Press chapbook, Writer’s Block [see my review of such here], although neither his above/ground press title, Further to Our Conversation (2011), nor his The New World And Finding It (Salt Spring Island BC : mother tongue press, 1999) see mentions here. I’ve long thought that these assembled chapbook titles, none of which fell into any of his other published collections, would have made (and still can) an interesting stand-alone poetry title, as all easily fit into the container of Kroetsch’s “Field Notes.” Eso also includes a few other “lost” poems, such as a poem that appeared in The Rocky Mountain Outlook on June 30, 2011, and another, “Tourist from Toronto,” from an issue of James Reaney’s alphabet (1967); Eso’s engagement with the outliers make for an interesting perspective, not solely focused on Kroetsch’s singular, life-long poem that eventually formed as Completed Field Notes and subsequent titles, The Hornbooks of Rita K. (University of Alberta Press, 2001), The Snowbird Poems (University of Alberta Press, 2004) and Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait (University of Alberta Press, 2010). Elsewhere, I’ve argued that The Hornbooks of Rita K. was Kroetsch’s first overt expansion beyond the boundaries of what seemed to be a catch-all of his ongoing “Field Notes,” and it was only the structure of his subsequent collection, The Snowbird Poems, that brought The Hornbooks, as well as itself, into the structure of those “Field Notes.” As Eso examines Kroetsch’s approach, and argues the ways in which Kroetsch’s poetry and poetics were formed, shaped and evolved, it does seem, as much, that Eso has provided verification that everything Kroetsch wrote, at least through his poetry, fall within the bounds of that endless, boundless shape of “Field Notes.” Would a subsequent volume of poetry, containing everything Kroetsch wrote and published, be called, therefore, Absolute Field Notes? Infinite Field Notes? What is more complete than complete?

Sounding the Name

In this poem my mother is not dead.
The phone does not ring that October
morning of my fourteenth year.
The anonymous voice on the phone

does not say, Call Arthur to the phone.
our hired man, a neighbour’s son, quiet,
unpretentious, a man from the river hills
near our farm, does not turn from phone,

he does not say, seeming to stress the time,
Your mother died at ten o’clock. My sister and I
do not look at each other, do not smile,
assuring each other (forever) that words are
                                                            pretenders. 

In this poem my mother is not dead,
she is in the kitchen, finishing the October
canning. I am helping in the kitchen. 

I wash the cucumbers. My mother asks me
to go pick some dill. The ducks are migrating.
I forget to close the garden gate.

 

m a n y _ g e n d e r e d _ m o t h e r s : f i v e _ r e c e n t _ e s s a y s

many gendered mothers is a project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.

This project is directly inspired by the American website Literary Mothers, created by editor Nadxieli Nieto and managing editor Nina Puro. While we hope that Literary Mothers might eventually return to posting new pieces, our site was created as an extension and furthering of their project (in homage, if you will), and not meant as any kind of replacement.

We've now twenty-one essays posted! Our most recent include:

A.H. Reaume on Virginia Woolf

Julie Morrissy on Eavan Boland

Dawn Promislow on Nadine Gordimer

Theresa Smalec on Aritha van Herk

Dorothy Palmer on Stella Young

Please check out our submissions page for more information. We've even a Facebook page!

Forthcoming essays include: Terry Abrahams on Anne Carson, Sue Rainsford on Cixous, McBride, Kapil and Yuknavitch, Lorin Medley on H.D., and Suzi Banks Baum on Willa Cather, among others.

We are also still accepting signed books for our upcoming fundraiser! and check out our new Patreon page! All donations will be going directly toward paying contributors.

fwd: CALL FOR PAPERS: Speaking Her Mind: Canadian Women and Public Presence

CALL FOR PAPERS
Speaking Her Mind: Canadian Women and Public Presence
20-22 October 2016
University of Calgary
http://speakinghermind.ca/

How are women engaging with public discussion and debate in Canada?

Speaking Her Mind: Canadian Women and Public Presence is the follow-up conference to Discourse and Dynamics: Canadian Women as Public Intellectuals, which took place at Mount Allison University in October 2014 (see http://discoursedynamics.ca/). As Discourse and Dynamics made clear, “public intellectual” remains an unsatisfactory term for many women who have contributed to and continue to engage in public discussion and debate in Canada. Speaking Her Mind aims to take that investigation to the next level.

Proposals are invited for presentations that explore Canadian women’s public presence on questions of concern related to social, political, cultural, economic, literary, artistic, linguistic, diplomatic, and environmental issues. A wide range of participation is invited, from individual papers to panels, performances, or other forms of discussion. The following are suggestions but all proposals for individual or collaborative presentations are welcome.

• Women’s right to speak
• Public presences that have made a difference
• When the body speaks
• Speaking about violence, poverty, racism, health
• Politics and its Discontents
• Entering/leaving the public sphere
• Opinions and their backlash
• Forms of speaking: literature, art, music, dance, photography

Proposals should include:
1. title (up to 150 characters)
2. abstract (100-150 words)
3. description (300 words)
& on a separate page a short biographical note and full contact information
Proposals may be submitted electronically by September 28, 2015 to speakinghermind@ucalgary.ca
-----------------
ORGANIZERS:

Aritha van Herk            Professor, Department of English   
2500 University Dr. N.W.       
University of Calgary           
Calgary, Alberta           
T2N 1N4    

Christl VerduynDirector, Centre for Canadian Studies
Professor, Department of English
Mount Allison University
Sackville, New Brunswick
E4L 1G9

Ali Smith, Artful

We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than writers; they’re a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives. You can’t step into the same story twice—or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’ this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order.

Originally produced “as four lectures given for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in January and February 2012” is Scottish writer Ali Smith’s hybrid Artful (Penguin, 2013). Part novel and part essay, I always wonder when reading such magnificent books as these: how many hybrids must be produced before they are seen as their very own species? I think of works by W.G.Sebald, Michael Turner, or the prose of Susan Howe, for example. Hybrid works are less the exception; so why is there still such resistance?

Composed in four sections – “On time,” “On form,” “On edge” and “On offer and on reflection,” as well as the endnote “Some sources” – Artful moves through the story of a narrator in mourning, while going through her dead partner’s papers, from which much of the essay-thread of the book is built, a combination of the pieces themselves and the narrator’s own reading. Beyond that, the dead lover manages to reappear at her desk, speaking in a language that the narrator doesn’t understand, causing the narrator to rethink her own sanity. A book on loss and love and death, how does one return from the dead? Smith weaves brilliantly her fiction-as-lectures on grieving and the nature of storytelling and art, and the impossibly known and unknown.

I’ve only read two of her books previously, but there are shades here of the returned dead from Hotel World (2002), a book I admittedly had difficulty entering, and the reworkings of Ovid, as in her brilliant myth-retelling Girl Meets Boy (2007) [see my little note on such here]. The two sides of this work – a heartbreaking story of loss, grief and revitalization, and an exploration on literary creation – blend perfectly, neither side outweighing the other. Each lecture is patterned with an opening that leans more on the side of fiction, with three sections presented as papers (again, through the eyes of our grieving narrator). The essay-fiction form reminds me slightly of the essays of Alberta writer Aritha Van Herk, from whom we’ve heard so little of over the past decade or so. (A part of me tethers the two together, that she might be the ghost Ali Smith’s narrator speaks to, but I know this not to be true.) There is the series of through-lines that hold the entirety of the work together, the abstracts of her tangible arguments, the narrator’s evolution of grief, as well as Charles Dickens, both Oliver Twist and the musical Oliver!, the works of numerous poets and Greek, as language, histories and literatures.

How lost, how deeply felt these pieces are; how might they have been received as lectures? Oh, I write in my notebook, how I wish I could have been there in that lecture hall, three rows from the back, listening. I would have been happy, and mystified.

ACSUS Conference, November 2011, Ottawa: Ten Canadian Novels You Should Be Teaching (and Reading): a collaborative paper between rob mclennan and Steven Hayward

On Thursday afternoon, I presented a co-written paper between myself and writer Steven Hayward at the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States’ bi-annual conference at Ottawa’s Westin Hotel. It was a strange event, one Hayward couldn’t attend himself due to other conflicts, corralling me into participation but two weeks prior. I was to present a paper while on a panel with another presenter, and moderate the whole; maybe we should, Hayward suggested, co-write the paper as well? I said sure, fine, okay. I haven’t much experience presenting papers, but for the paper I wrote on Camille Martin’s Sonnets for Margaret Christakos’ Influency a few months back [see the note I wrote on such here; and the paper itself], and a panel I moderated at a conference at Grant MacEwen College back in spring 2008, during my Alberta period.

The presentation went well enough, despite the small crowd [see them here, clapping: including Peter Midgley from the University of Alberta, and Cynthia Sugars from the University of Ottawa], despite a paper I didn’t feel entirely finished yet, despite the other presenter cancelling her appearance earlier in the day. Toni Holland, from the University of Alberta, was to present a paper on “US and Canadian Poets Laureate: A Literary and Cultural History.” I wanted to hear this paper for a number of reasons, not only for the fact that I’ve been arguing for years that Ottawa should bring back the position (we were, possibly, the first in Canada to host the position back in 1980, and are now possibly one of the rare few without) but for the fact that I was on the League of Canadian Poets national council when we first came up with the idea for a National Laureate and started pressuring the Federal Government.

Since announcing that I was presenting such a paper, more than a few have asked for my list (our lists), so I thought I should at least present those. We’re planning on cleaning up the paper for publication, so hopefully a larger version of such, including our explanations for our respective choices, for the sake of increased clarity, but for now, you get only the barest list. I’m shocked, one woman offered, that neither of you have Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro on your lists. Another asked, does Hayward teach his list in Colorado? It’s one thing to think a book great, but another to be able to teach it. A worthy point, and one I couldn’t answer. I’m interested to see where this conversation might further.

Steven Hayward’s list:

Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion.

Toews, Miriam. A Complicated Kindness.

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. A Good Man.

Chariandy, David. Soucouyant.

Ricci, Nino. Origin of Species..

Bezmozgis, David. Natasha and Other Stories.

Bellow, Saul. Herzog.

Eliott Clarke, George. Execution Poems.

Quarrington, Paul. Home Game.

rob mclennan’s list:

Dany Laferrière, How to Make Love to a Negro (without getting tired).

John Lavery, Sandra Beck.

Aritha van Herk, Restlessness.

André Alexis, Despair, And Other Stories of Ottawa.

Ken Sparling, Hush up and listen stinky poo butt.

Lisa Moore, February.

Thomas Wharton, Salamander.

Matthew Remski. Dying for Veronica.

Lynn Crosbie. Paul’s Case.

Marianne Apostolides’ Swim: a novel.

Martha Baillie, The Incident Report

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?