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

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

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

            Henry Kreisel, “Sheila Watson in Edmonton”

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

                In the folds of the hills

            under Coyote’s eye

                        lived

            the old lady, mother of William

                    of James and of Greta

            lived James and Greta

            lived William and Ara his wife

            lived the Widow Wagner

            the Widow’s girl Lenhen

            the Widow’s boy

            lived Felix Prosper and Angel

            lived Theophil

            and Kip

                        until one morning in July

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

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

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

            When and where does a book begin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept:

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

They say, As we grow older we embrace resignation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brief note on (reading, writing) short fiction,

Thirty-two years old, she managed the impossible: an unbroken length of apple peel, fit for the shoulder toss. She remembered the chorus her grandmother sang, trilling peel, peel, please reveal. She tossed, and once it touched tile she turned, less a letter than line, with ambient twirl. Years earlier, she remembered high school-era gifts from her favourite aunt including a Michael Ondaatje signature, an autographed copy of The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems and his novel, The English Patient. The film had resonated, deep in her bones. And now, this red delicious signature apple-inked on her floor. The cinnamon-spice blush on her blue jeans.

I've been working on a collection of short stories for nearly three years, carving little narratives down as sharp as I can. I cut my fingers. Blood mixes in with my lines.

During my high school years, I attempted similarly-short stories, continuing for a couple more years after I arrived in the city. There was even an entertainment bi-weekly that published a few of them, until it folded in 1994. The last four months of Ottawa's Metro magazine included one of my stories in every second issue. By the end, I was composing new short fiction just to see if they'd appear.

There are a few ways I have come to these conclusions. In my early twenties, reading short stories and the accumulations of Richard Brautigan novels. Canadian writers such as Sheila Watson, Elizabeth Smart, Michael Ondaatje. That pointed brevity. I'm more attracted to stories that stop just before they end. Is it fair or reductive to suggest this comes from years of writing poems? I want no wasted words. Is this from years of composing reviews? When exactly to do you get to the point?

Just how much does a story require to contain a story? I continue to send mine out, only to have them rejected. I never exactly know why, although I have a number of theories that are only theories. I don't know where to send them.

The current project of short stories triggered when I read the short, sharp stories of Sarah Manguso [see my piece on her here], her Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (San Francisco CA: McSweeney's Books, 2007). Part of the appeal of her stories was in the construction of the collection of untitled short pieces; was this a straight collection of short stories, or a loose and abstract narrative built as an accumulation into a novel? Through Manguso, I became fascinated by the blur, and the distinction.

From Manguso, furthering to some lovely prose experiments in sentence: a journal of prose poetics to New York City writer Deb Olin Unferth, and finally tracking some of Unferth and Manguso's influences back over the past few weeks to another American writer, Lydia Davis, through her seven hundred plus page The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Picador, 2009), which includes this little gem:

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:

that Scotland has so few trees.

What did I tell you? Do stories require long, complicated narratives? Do we even need to know such extraneous bits as hair colour, clothes, cities, gender, the colour of their skin? Only when essential, only if the story requires. What do we know of Samuel Johnson? Is that important? Where the hell is she sending her stories? What exactly am I here to tell you?

Apart from discovering Davis, more recently I've been introduced to the work of Israeli writer Etgar Keret, through his collection of short stories, The Girl on the Fridge (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). How enviable, to be this damned sharp. To say so much in so little.

In my fiction, I am working on writing big stories in small spaces. Small novels, even smaller stories, and all written in dense, packed prose. Patience, breathing. Carve, slowly. Carve further, even slower. Pause. Listen.

Asthma Attack

When you have an asthma attack, you can't breathe. When you can't breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn't much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones--those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says, "I love you," and when an asthmatic says, "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.

As any artist knows, your art should move only and exactly where your interest does, which can, theoretically, lead anywhere and everywhere. Some things can't be forced, and false roads quickly identify themselves. But one is constantly forced to ask, to reassess, is it even working?

He refers to it as his collected wisdom, all the shards of information he’s picked up, collated, held in trust to punctuate conversation so as to appear more interesting than he really is. Catherine the Great’s love of horses, conjoined twins from the 1890s concurrently pregnant from their physician, the air speed ratio of an unladen swallow.

Sheila Watson conference, University of Toronto, Oct 23-24, 2009

Registration is now open for a two day event at the University of St. Michael’s at the University of Toronto, celebrating the life and writing of Sheila Watson. The event includes a reception, the opening of Watson's Archives, a dramatic rendering of her classic The Double Hook, a formal lunch with a toast by George Bowering, as well as three panels, one of which consists of George Bowering, Elizabeth Hay (moderator), Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, and Jane Urquhart who will discuss Watson’s influence and legacy. Join us for what promises to be a not-to-be missed event for anyone interested in Canadian literature and the arts.The cost is $125.00 and space is limited to 160 guests. We expect this event to sell out. Register early!

For more details and to register online, see: http://asp01.med.utoronto.ca/celebratingsheilaW/default.aspx

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?

P-QUEUE Vol. 5: C A R E

A sapling in a circle, roots buried
In air. Moon spinning time the sun denies.
The earth a body the monster turned
Inside out. Darkness began in the mouth
Of the hut the old men built on the edge
Of our story. Once upon a time it began
There was a queen in a clock by the sea.
The old men know their old story by heart.
The old men hold in their hands her hands
Broken at the wrist, five-fingered branch,
Ocean-sound of circle scratched slow in dust.
Bring me my coronet of rotating gears.
Contrive me a throne from coiled spring.
The hands of this clock point nowhere but now. (dan beachy-quick and srikanth reddy)

I've always been partial to the annual P-QUEUE issues out of SUNY-Buffalo, comparable somewhat to Concordia's headlight anthology, a showcase of the school and community at large. A couple of pages after the image of "…the pelican in her piety…" as attributed to St. Epiphanius from the 1500s, Andrew Rippeon writes in his "Editor's Note":

Pelican appears in English usage first as a term for an unidentifiable bird—any unidentifiable bird, but especially the sort found in wild places. One imagines standing at the edge of such a place, pointing to birds circling in the hot distance: "Pelicans." Standing with the known at her back, her feet on the border, and her face to the unknown, while groping vaguely toward shapes rising and falling on far-off thermals, one becomes the word she uses for what she sees. Pelicans as we now know them (genus pelecanus) then unknown in Great Britain, "pelican" was simply the sound in English of the Hellenic-Latinate root—the word without target in translation thus identical to the gesture of an arm pointing.

Was this where Sheila Watson got her own title, White Pelican, for her early 1970s Edmonton journal of writing and visual art?

This is the "CARE" issue, subtitled "how to care, that one does care" and section headers "To," "Between," "For" and "Together," crafting a whole issue from such scattered parts, including eric elshtain's compelling essay "Gnoetry0.2 and the Continuing Effort to Make Poetry Mean," and Dan Waber's piece on notation, "Regular Expressions as a System of Poetic Notation," that begins with a bpNichol quote, and writes:

Words fail. Words fail even for poets, or, more accurately, especially for poets. The motivational force behind all acts of creation is dissatisfaction—I put forth the effort required to make this thing because I am sufficiently dissatisfied with a world in which it does not exist. I continue my attempts to make other, in the view of my early optimism, better things because I have grown dissatisfied with my earlier attempts, or, because I have found some new dissatisfaction I need to right, to write, two rate, too wrought. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

How often has someone written so well on the subject of meaning and failure in contemporary poetry? Even Beckett wrote "Fail again. Fail better."

The next issue is on the theme of "S P A C E," and copies of this current issue can be purchased for $12/copy (US; includes shipping); this and submission guidelines can be found at http://www.p-queue.org/ or by writing c/o Andrew Rippeon, 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo NY 14260.

That it can't w/properly feeling be expressed privately, w/us or
in between us

How can I grow a location that isn’t a picture

That, in growing, it posits a spine as part of a reading, here

How naturally as they arrived and were received, amiable or
not, where multiple likings

That makes reading inhabit it (partly lovingly)

How is a disposition held, as geographic knowledge

That is a shining part, these are documents, 'light is in it'

How is habitual learning, a doll shiny and double

That song you can love with your heart (don’t say it wasn’t
musical)

How hardly images instances is adding gilding but not as
elaborate record

That was 'donut vending in Cork'

How importantly did they get it there (c.j. martin)

the ottawa international writers festival; endnotes & the festival book-club

Well, I only spent a few days at the festival this time around (like last as well, unfortunately) through other commitments going on, including the west, but, among a number of other events from Wednesday night to the final poetry reading on Saturday, I was able to catch the other two festival book club events during the week. New as an idea at the festival, organizers Sean and Neil Wilson came up with the festival book club as a way for some of the festival's "favourite authors" (their words) to talk about "essential works" in the author's own history, and I think it's an extremely interesting idea. It brings out a new element of reading and writing as well as the concerns of the writers themselves. Starting on Wednesday evening, Ottawa francophone writer Daniel Poliquin talked about Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter (1976), and on Friday, Toronto playwrite and novelist Sean Dixon talked about The Epic of Gilgamesh, both to appreciative and responsive crowds. Apart from my own talk on Thursday evening on Sheila Watson's The Double Hook (1959) and Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) (the full text of which will be available soon online at The Danforth Review), there was one more talk scheduled earlier in the week, Ottawa writer Brian Doyle to talk about a Woody Allen book, but Doyle ended up cancelling due to illness.

When Daniel Poliquin talked on Michael Ondaatje's novel Coming Through Slaughter (1976), he talked about the idea of greatness, and, as a kid, about reading the Illustrated Classics versions of Les Miserables and MacBeth. He gave a magnificent talk on the rigors of being an artist in Canada, and how we couldn’t be snobbish in Canada about art, given how "we are all the same here, we have to fight the same snow and the same mosquitoes." He talked about how great works "entice you to write better," and about how Canadians have managed an advantage of being able to write "durable works" (he gave the foreign example of the story of Pinocchio as a durable work by an "unknown" author) while at the same time, remaining completely unknown.

Instead of coming through from the classics, I came to reading from other comic books, Marvel superhero books. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens when the eventual mother of my child would start throwing books at me, telling me that if I was going to try to write, I needed to read. It just happened to be that she was going through her Canadian Literature kick at the time, and introduced me to the fiction of George Bowering [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Robertson Davies, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt [see her 12 or 20 questions here] and Alice Munro, as well as Sheila Watson and Elizabeth Smart [see my recent note on her here], all of which I devoured before I had even left high school.

Sean Dixon, talking on Gilgamesh, managed to tie all three talks together (accidentally) by mentioning that Michael Ondaatje (who I had also mentioned in passing in my talk, being very influenced by Sheila Watson, and had produced a documentary on Elizabeth Smart in 1991) titled his novel In the Skin of a Lion (1986) from a line from Gilgamesh [see my last fall post on Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Sheila Watson here]. How do these things tie up together so well, for such disparate authors such as myself, Dixon and Poliquin? Dixon talked about a Star Trek episode that triggered his interest (or re-interest) in the old epic, as Picard was trapped on a planet with an alien who came from a race that spoke in ideograms, and Picard tells the alien ship captain the story of Gilgamesh; Dixon asked himself at the boiling down version of two friends, is that what the story is about? Talking about Alberto Manguel's The City of Words [see my note on such here] which has a chapter on Gilgamesh, he suggested the story even further than the story of two brothers, but a tale ending in the fear of death.

I am hoping that the festival keeps up this new element, and am interested to hear what other authors end up talking about; is it worth collecting the texts of such and putting them somewhere? Other parts of the festival included strong readings by Nathaniel G. Moore [see his 12 or 20 questions here], RM Vaughan [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Kevin Connolly, Steve Venright [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Elizabeth Hay [see her 12 or 20 questions here], and a bunch of events that I unfortunately missed, earlier in the week (but I won't dwell on such).

[me answering questions post-talk, with work-shirt & bottle of Steam Whistle, photo courtesy of Pearl Pirie]

related notes: other festival reports by Amanda Earl here and here and here and here, Pearl Pirie here and here and here and here and here, Nathaniel G. Moore here, John W. MacDonald here and here and here and here, and photos by Charles Earl here and here and here and here. Marcus McCann even posted the RM Vaughan reading to YouTube for Capital Xtra;

White Pelican: year one

I don’t know if say Edmonton is further away than another place. I don’t think it matters, now. I’ve lived in every province except the Maritimes and I’ve lived in most of the big cities in them and I’ve never felt that I couldn’t be at home…to be at the centre is to be where the ideas are, that is, in your own head, wherever you are. Right now, I’m in Vancouver and that feels like the centre. One of the useful things about art is that you literally take it with you wherever you go…you don’t have any choice—you can’t choose to leave it all behind. (interview with Roy Kiyooka, volume 1, issue 1)

Since I’m in Edmonton, I’ve taken it upon myself to make at least some attempt to read the entire eighteen issue run of Sheila Watson’s White Pelican, the magazine she produced during her last few years at the University of Alberta. With its first issue in 1971, two years after Henry Beissel’s Edmonton/Montreal journal EDGE published its ninth and final issue (Beissel moved from the University of Alberta to Concordia, where he helped form the first parts of the creative writing department there), the editorial board of White Pelican consisted of Sheila Watson, Stephen Scobie, Douglas Barbour, John Orrell, Norman Yates and Dorothy Livesay. As F.T. Flahiff writes in his biography of Watson [see my review of such here], always someone to kill the doves: A Life of Sheila Watson (2005):

At the heart of White Pelican lay Sheila’s sense of community and the nature of the English department at Edmonton as it had developed through the sixties. This “little magazine” had been hatched in the living room at Windsor Road one evening in 1970. Those who were to become its editors were present, and Sheila and Wilfred proposed to underwrite the cost of the venture. In light of this offer, one bit of policy was agreed upon: the magazine would accept no government grants and no advertising. The editors wished to remain accountable only to their contributors, to their subscribers, and to themselves.

It was a daring and, by any standard, a remarkably successful venture. Reviews and essays, fiction and documentary prose and photographs and drawings mixed with what was its mainstay—poetry. Edmonton poets, such as Wilfred, Miriam Mandel, Ted Blodgett, Stephen Scobie, and Douglas Barbour, were well represented, as were poets from other parts of the country, such as bpNichol and Michael Ondaatje. There were new voices (the first pages of the first issue were devoted to poems by Elizabeth McLuhan) and there were voices in French as well as in English. Some issues had a specific focus: one edited by Dorothy Livesay and Rude Wiebe, on the North; another on Gertrude Stein, edited by Sheila, for example. Sheila contributed an essay to this last, one of three she wrote for different numbers of White Pelican. She took particular interest in their publication of excerpts from the diary Henry Kreisel had kept while he was interned in Canada as an enemy alien during the Second World War, and in an illustrated article by the Alberta architect Douglas Cardinal.

That Watson was bringing in some of the younger writers, Barbour and Scobie, being new faculty at the University says very good things about her openness to new ideas and new writing. As she wrote in the first pages of the first issue under the title “ABOUT PELICANS”:

Perhaps I should begin by saying that I speak here as a person not as a group. When the six editors of White Pelican decided to act they were drawn together by proximity not by policy, by concern not by consensus. The fideicommissum was there. Person by person or person with person, each would bear witness to the fact. It would be absurd then for any one of us to assume Coriolanus’s napless vesture of humility or the speak in the neutered voice of the uni-form, the uni-sexed, or the uni-what-you-will. As it happens we are de facto a multiple of three. Under the sign of the white pelican, le pelican blanc, pelecanus erthrorhynchos, we find it possible to co-exist.

Still, what else was happening in Edmonton at the time, including other publishing in the city, province or prairie? No publishing venture lives in a vacuum, and at least the University of Alberta Press would have been publishing, but I wouldn’t offhand know what (this would have been before George Melnyk would have helped invent NeWest Press, and before Longspoon). I’m frustrated that the journal existed without author bios, thus diminishing a sense of context; I know Douglas Barbour, know he is and what he’s done, but what would he have called himself then? New faculty, author of a first poetry collection the year before, perhaps; instead, the work exists well before the biography, the way Sheila herself (according to her biographer) would have preferred it.

ARCTIC

Under this white shadow we have made
our home: salt, snow, hunger moon.
The whale’s belly, the harpoons glisten.
We will die clean in our cold garden.
It is ours, we claim it: this sleep,
this waking with the white bears, the
ice, the gods. (John Thompson, volume 1, issue 4)

Some of the most interesting parts of the first year have to be the interviews with Roy Kiyooka (September 16, 1970) and Michael Ondaatje (March 3, 1971), both conducted by Barbour and Scobie, and corresponding with readings each were giving in Edmonton. Both interviews make me think [see my two previous notes concerning Ondaatje here, including about another older interview] about the series Guernica Editions produces; have interviews with either of these authors ever been collected? There are some extremely interesting parts of both, including Ondaatje talking about his The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), and about the film he’d produced on bpNichol, Sons of Captain Poetry (1970):

M: I think this is one of the problems with the movie. Simply by editing a one and a half hour interview down to 8 minutes, you make someone much more articulate and confident than he really is. That’s why I wanted to have the emphasis on quietness at the end. There’s very little silence in the film, which I think is a serious mistake.

D: And Barrie is in some ways very interested in silence; in his poems.

M: He is. Very Much so. But then you’ve got the problem of how you can make silence symbolic in a movie … Barrie originally wanted to call it I DREAMED I SAW HUGO BALL after that song he sings at the end. But this other title, SONS OF CAPTAIN POETRY suggests an era which is kind of post-Pop really. You see, I don’t see Barrie as a Pop poet, or a camp poet. Comic books are so much in fashion these days, it’s really sad, because people see it in that camp way. Cohen, I find, is very much part of the Pop-camp system, and he uses it imperialistically. For Barrie the Pop figures, like Green Lantern, are his saints. They’re much more human figures, they’re very human, very identifiable, like lost brothers and things like that. I think THE MARTYROLOGY is the best thing he’s done. I think it’s the most private things he’s done so I don’t know what kind of reaction it will get. It’s coming out sometime this year with Coach House. I think most of Barrie is in that book. It’s a kind of autobiography with these strange relations emerging, people left over from this pop world, threading through this very sad world with false icons all over the place. Victor Coleman says one of the best things about Barrie in the film. Roughly, he says of THE MARTYROLOGY that it’s important enough that Barrie’s not quite sure of where it’s taking him, he’s not quite sure what he’s up to! Which I think is a beautiful thing to say about anything that is really important to a person. It is so important to him that he hasn’t got the confidence in it. Travelling blind.

Another entertaining part is just seeing work by now-well known writers and their works, including the first part of what later became the late Jon Whyte’s poetry collection/long poem Homage, Henry Kelsey (since collected in the 2000 collection Mind Over Mountains: Selected and Collected Poems, published by Red Deer Press), and pieces by the poets John Thompson (d. 1974) and Pat Lowther (d. 1976), as well as pieces by bpNichol even before the first book of The Martyrology (1972) had seen print.

AGAINST EXPLANATION

oh the a be
an or and and
c

c d q o p
stops

whistle up gorge leg
laughter m l steep
la lune la lune

low l t s z
v v o b q r
la tigre i y w

moon

june

spoon (bpNichol, volume 1, issue 2)

year one:

issue #1: edited by Sheila Watson

poem by Elizabeth McLuhan
photo of Roy Kiyooka by Bernie Bloom
interview with Roy Kiyooka
letters from Roy Kiyooka
poems by Miriam Mandel
drawing by Norman Yates
poems by Wilfred Watson
essay by Wilfred Watson: Towards A Canadian Theatre
poems by E.D. Blodgett
Gordon Peacock: A Plethora of Playwrights?
book reviews by Dianne Bessai and Douglas Barbour

issue #2: edited by Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie

two poems by Michael Ondaatje
A Conversation with Michael Ondaatje (Barbour, Scobie)
various selections by bpNichol
Prairie Poems by P.K. Page
four poems by Steve McCaffery
three poems by Stephen Scobie
Song by John Lent
two poems by George Chambers
Summer Elephants: Ian Hamilton Finlay

issue #3: edited by John Orrell and Norman Yates

Postures of Survival: July 1, 1935
P.O.S. by Pierre Falcon
artwork by Frederick Candelaria
P.O.S. World Arena
P.O.S. by Jon Whyte
poems by Christopher Wiseman
poems by Leona Gom
P.O.S. University Arena

issue #4: edited by Dorothy Livesay with Rudy Wiebe

Poems by John Thompson
Poem by Pat Lowther
Dream of Sky People by Isabella Foord
Poem by Duncan Pryde
Poems by P.S. Barry
Poem by Floris McLaren
Poems by Eleanor Crowe
Poem by Skyros Bruce
The Fish Caught in the Battle River by Rudy Wiebe
Poems by D.M. Price
Poem by Mick Burrs
The Rhetoric of the North by R.J. Merrett
Poem by William Aide
An Earnest Recalling by Chuck Carlson
Poems by Mary Vida
Poem by Peter Stevens
Poem by Tom Ezzy
Poems by Brett
A Clutch of Books by Rudy Wiebe

Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter & Sheila Watson

“What a scene about nothing,” he said. “The individual unconscious scorns such
complications.”
He sat down by the rose bushes.
-- Sheila Watson, “Brother Oedipus,” Sheila Watson: A Collection

Thursday night the Garneau Pub on 109th Street, getting most of the way through Michael Ondaatje’s novel Coming Through Slaughter (Anansi, 1976); after reading that interview with him recently in The Power To Bend Spoons [see my review/note about it here], it made me pull the book off my office shelf, one of the books I brought west with me to read, or reread. A list of them on my shelf that get longer even as it gets shorter, too. The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangoes by Anne Carson (Vintage, 2001), Sheila Watson, A Collection (Open Letter, Third Series, #1, Winter 1974-5), IN VISIBLE INK: crypto-fictions by Aritha Van Herk (NeWest Press/writer as critic: III, 1991), The Doomed Bridegroom by Myrna Kostash [see my previous note on her here](NeWest Press, 1998), Icefields by Thomas Wharton (NeWest, 1995) and The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser (Black Sparrow Press, 1989); there is never enough time in the world. All my whats and little wherefores.

I press myself into her belly. Her breath into my white shirt. Her cool breath against my sweating forehead so I can feel the bubbles evaporate. I lift her arms and leave them empty above us and bend and pull the brown dress up to her stomach and then up into her arms. Step back and watch her against the corner of my room her hands above her holding the brown dress she has lifted over her head in a ball. Turns her back to me and leans her face now against the dress she brings down to her face. Cool brown back. Till I attack her into the wall my cock cushioned my hands at the front of the thigh pulling her at me we are hardly breathing her crazy flesh twisted into corners me slipping out from the move and our hands meet as we put it in quick christ quickly back in again. In. Breathing towards the final liquid of the body, the liquid snap, till we slow and slow and freeze in this corner. As if this is the last entrance of air into the room that was a vacuum that is now empty of the other histories. (p 61)

Thinking more and more about the lyric novel and what I want to do with it, or even as a way of re-entering the mindframe of writing fiction, I’m brought continually back to Michael Ondaatje, which in hindsight, surprises me a little. Why had I been gone for so long? I hadn’t read any of his fiction since 1992, when The English Patient came out; I had read everything he had done up to that point, and nothing more. Coming Through Slaughter, Ondaatje’s novel about the jazz musician, Buddy Bolden.

He was the best and the loudest and most loved jazzman of his time, but never professional in the brain. Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour. (p 14)

It is the sense of the fragment merged with the obvious lyric that I love, prose and poetry merging and twirling into each other like dna strands; the combination could only be stronger. Rereading parts of the Sheila Watson biography by F.T. Flahiff, always someone to kill the doves: A Life of Sheila Watson (NeWest Press, 2005), the following evening [see my review of such here], and finding this fragment about her influence:

In 1985, aside from Seventy-One Poems, he [George Bowering] edited and published a collection of essays on The Double Hook, including one by himself in which he hailed the novel as “the watershed of contemporary Canadian fiction.” And in Bowering’s B.C., he speaks of The Double Hook as “the best novel to come out of the province,” concluding the section he devotes to her with the claim that “more than any other Canadian novel, it is loved and referred to by the innovative poets and fiction writers who have arrived on the Canadian scene since 1959.” “I call the interesting stuff written since 1959 the ‘Sheila Watson canon,’” he wrote in Craft Slices. He includes Robert Kroetsch among those who, in his words, “have followed on Watson’s break-through,” along with the Leonard Cohen of Beautiful Losers, “Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol, Victor Levy-Beaulieu, Nicole Brossard, and Louky Bersianik.” Bowering was even more succinct at the close of a letter he had written to her in 1982:

On Thursday I got a phone call from Coach House Press, talked with Frank Davey, Michael [Ondaatje], and bp[Nichol]. Wonderful age we’re in.

& it’s yrs (p 287)