Calgary & the GG Literary Awards

This week, Calgary poet Richard Harrison joined a cadre of writers with connections to the city who have been honoured with a Governor General’s Literary Award . (Many more have been finalists -- the subject of a future post!) 

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1939: Laura Salverson’s Confessions of An Immigrant’s Daughter (nonfiction)

In the 1930s, Manitoba-born author Laura Salverson lived in this Bankview house at 2111 14A Street SW. She likely wrote much of her award-winning memoir in her studio at the Lougheed Block on Stephen Avenue (now the Belvedere restaurant).  

 

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1969: George Bowering’s Rocky Mountain Foot (poetry)

Early in his career, George Bowering (Canada's first Parliamentary Poet Laureate) taught English at the U of C (1963-1966). His time in the city feature in Rocky Mountain Foot. 1960s Calgary was not Bowering's favourite place, but it offered the poet prize-winning material.

 

 

 

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1981: Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations (drama)

1986: Sharon Pollock’s Doc (drama)

Sharon Pollock moved to Calgary in 1966 and has called the city home ever since. Her GG-winning plays weren’t about Calgary, but her latest, Blow Wind High Water (2017) is set during the 2013 flood. Pollock's play Whiskey Six Cadenza was a GG finalist in 1987.

 

 

 

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1985: Fred Wah's Waiting for Saskatchewan (poetry)

Fred Wah was a mentor to many Calgary poets during his tenure as a professor at the University of Calgary from 1989 to 2003. He was appointed Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate in 2011.

 

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1988: Erín Moure’s Furious (poetry)

Erín Moure was born and grew up in the city, later relocating to Montreal. Her 1989 collection, WSW (West South West) features a few Calgary poems including “South-West, or Altadore” and “Tucker Drugs.” In addition to her GG in 1988, Moure has been a finalist for the GG award for poetry three times.

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1993: Karen Connelly’s Touch the Dragon (nonfiction)

Born and raised in Calgary, at 17 Karen Connelly spent a year in Thailand on a Rotary exchange. Her GG-winning memoir brought her once again into the national literary spotlight. Connelly’s first book – a collection of poems published in 1990 when she was 21 – won the prestigious Pat Lowther award.

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1993: Nancy Huston’s Cantique des Plaines (romans et nouvelles)

Nancy Huston left Calgary in 1968 when she was fifteen and eventually settled in Paris. She won the GG for her 10th book – her first about her native Alberta (much of it set in Calgary). Originally written and published in English as Plainsong, the novel won a GG award for the French-language fiction prize – and became a cause célèbre in literary circles (you can read more in George Melnyk’s The Literary History of Alberta).

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1994: Robert Hilles’s Cantos from a Small Room (poetry)

Robert Hilles moved to Calgary in 1974 from Kenora to study at U of C. In the 1980s, he served as an editor at Dandelion magazine and, along with the poet Claire Harris, launched blue buffalo, a magazine that featured Alberta writers. 

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2002: Gloria Sawai's A Song For Nettie Johnson (fiction)

Edmonton's Gloria Sawai (1932-2011) lived in Calgary in the early 1970s and studied writing with the poet Christopher Wiseman at the University of Calgary. Her classmates were Edna Alford and Joan Clark, the founders of Dandelion magazine. Local literary legend has it that Gloria Sawai read her famous story, "The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts" in Calgary. The story is included in her GG-winning collection. 

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2002: Andrew Nikiforuk’s Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil (nonfiction)

Andrew Nikiforuk has lived in Calgary for many years. Over the course of his career as a prolific author and investigative journalist, he has found grist for his nonfiction in the city and its resource economy. Nikiforuk's Empire of the Beetle was a GG finalist for nonfiction in 2011.

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2009: Susan Ouriou’s translation of Pieces of Me (translation from French to English)

An award-winning translator and Calgary resident, Susan Ouriou is also an author. Her young adult novel Nathan (2016) is set in Haysboro. In addition to her 2009 GG, Ouriou has been a finalist for the GG Literary Awards three times. In 2015, she and Calgarian Christelle Morelli were finalists for the French to English translation prize.

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2013: Sandra Djwa’s Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page (nonfiction)

P. K. Page (1916-2010) spent formative years of her childhood in 1920s Calgary. In this biography, Sandra Djwa details Page’s early years in the city.

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2016: Martine Leavitt's Calvin (young people's literature -- text)

Alberta-based author Martine Leavitt served as Author-in-Residence at the Calgary Public Library in 2000. Her young adult novel Tom Finder (2003) tells the story of a 15-year-old boy living on the streets of downtown Calgary.

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2017: Richard Harrison’s On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood (2017)

Richard Harrison moved from Ontario to Calgary in 1995 to serve as writer-in-residence in the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program, and continues to call Calgary home. Harrison's Big Breath of A Wish was a finalist for the GG poetry award in 1999.

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And, one last bit of Calgary GG trivia: my program from the 1988 Governor General's Literary Awards ceremony held at Jack Singer Hall. In February 1988, two days before the Winter Olympics opened at McMahon Stadium, Canadian literature was in the Calgary spotlight. There must have been champagne.

On Mary Poppins and Calgary sidewalks

“Think – wink – double wink – close your eyes and jump!”

WordFest's Shelley Youngblut spraying a passage from Norman Ravvin's 1991 Calgary novel, Café des Westens, in front of the Central Library.

That’s Bert, the chimneysweep, trying to work his magic on the drawings he’s chalked on a London sidewalk. Of course, Mary Poppins is the one who has the right words, and poof! She, Bert and the children slide into an imaginary universe beyond the pavement.

I was thinking of Mary Poppins as I helped choose and lay down the words of writers on a few sidewalks around Calgary this fall.

The project was inspired by similar ventures in Seattle and Boston. The spray paint? A special recipe designed to protect cellphones from moisture. When you spray it on sidewalk cement, the image or words you spray disappear, only to become visible when the surface is wet.

Aritha van Herk unveiling her passage at the 8th Avenue entrance to the Glenbow Museum. "Late at night, under a stalking moon, our history sings behind closed doors." In This Place (Frontenac House, 2011)

The Calgary Public Library and Wordfest teamed up to bring the idea to Calgary, and kicked off #YYCLiterarySidewalks on Alberta Culture Days. Four passages from Calgary writers were sprayed around town. Since then, six more have been added.

You can find a list at the Calgary Public Library website, along with author bios and sidewalk locations.

Next time the sidewalks are wet, go on a literary treasure hunt around town. You might think of Mary Poppins and the way, through art, you can be in the real, and the imagined city, at the same time.

Calgary's literature on city sidewalks? It’s magic.

(And, because now that Mary Poppins is in your head, you might just need a fix. The sidewalk scene.)

A few more pictures:

Rosemary Griebel (Calgary Public Library) sprays a quote from Yasmin Ladha's Blue Sunflower in front of the Crowfoot Library. 

In front of Cadence Coffee in Bowness: the first line of Cheryl Foggo's 1990 Calgary memoir, Pourin' Down Rain.

At the entrance to Sien Lok Park in Chinatown: Weyman Chan's poem, "Small hands."

In front of the old Shamrock Hotel in East Calgary, a line from a Kirk Miles poem.

Outside the Louise Riley library, Will Ferguson's 419. 

In front of Pages bookstore on Kensington Road, derke beaulieu's concrete poem, "kern."

At the Fourth Street entrance to Knox United Church: a passage from Don Gillmor's 2015 novel Long Change. (Note: safety vests are required when handling literary works.)

On launch day, a few members of the #YYCLiterarySidewalks team: Shelley Youngblut (WordFest), Bill Ptacek and Rosemary Griebel (Calgary Public Library), me, and Aritha van Herk (author). Missing: Micheline Maylor (Calgary Poet Laureate), and all the swell WordFest staff and Library people who helped bring this project to the streets.

Notes toward a Calgary literary canon

I had great fun preparing this Calgary reading list for CBC's Calgary at a Crossroads series. I'm honoured to participate in this timely and engaging series about the city. 

Pictures from a literary Jane's Walk, 2016

Does Calgary have a literature? That's the question we set out to answer in the affirmative on Jane's Walk weekend. On a summery Saturday, a crowd of 50 explored a few blocks of downtown Calgary through the eyes of writers. This was the second edition of my literary Jane's Walk: you can check out last year's walk here.

I've posted a reading list of the works referred to on the route.

Thanks to Reg Tiangha, Yanmei Fei and Blair Carbert for sharing these photos -- and to Calgary writer Rea Tarvydas who shepherded the crowd with a sense of calm and good humour.

Harley Hotchkiss Gardens next to the old court house on 7th Avenue SW: a quick primer on Calgary literature, Alberta's Odysseus Robert Kroetsch, and a selection of oil patch novels. (Photo: Reg Tiangha)

Scotia Centre: Way up, on the 36th floor, the site of a storied 1983 meeting between Calgary author John Ballem and Toronto writer Barry Callaghan. (Photo: Blair Carbert)

Across from the Devonian Gardens: connecting the dots between Barry Callaghan, John Ballem, and Calgary-born novelist Norman Ravvin. Ravvin's novel, Café des Westens evokes two long-ago demolished city landmarks nearby: the Wales Hotel and the Robin Hood Flour Mill. Calgary author Cecelia Frey (centre) reviewed Ravvin's novel for the Herald in 1991. (Photo: Yanmei Fei)

The Alberta Hotel: tall tales, Bob Edwards, and Katherine Govier's 1987 novel, Between Men. (Photo: Reg Tiangha)

Stephen Avenue: A Jane's Walk parade down what was the 1912 Stampede parade route. Novelist Nancy Huston (Plainsong) and poet Yvonne Trainer (Tom Three Persons) capture two different aspects of Guy Weadick's first Stampede. (Photo: Reg Tiangha)

The Grain Exchange: remembering two homegrown Calgary artists, Maxwell Bates and P. K. Page. Both spent their formative childhood years in the city -- and what we now call the Memorial Park Library -- in the early 20th century. (Photo: Blair Carbert)

The Palliser Hotel: the grand dame of Calgary hotels teems with literary connections, including Aritha van Herk's novel, Restlessness. Just east of the hotel once stood Calgary Station, which found its way into a 1922 poem by Isabel Ecclestone MacKay and a just-published novel about Ukrainian immigrants to Alberta, Kalyna by Calgary's Pam Clark. (Photo: Yanmei Fei)

Stephen Avenue: a look at Calgary's early bookstores, Thomson Bros Bookstore (namesake of the restaurant) and Linton's Bookstore circa 1890. The avenue was also home to several theatres, including the Starland, which Marina Endicott uses as one of the Calgary settings in her 2012 vaudeville novel, The Little Shadows. (Photo: Blair Carbert)

Near the site of the Calgarian Hotel on 7th Ave East: author Lori Hahnel reads a passage from her 2008 novel, Love Minus Zero. The scene takes us into the Calgarian Hotel, the epicentre of the city's punk rock era between 1979-82. (Photo: Reg Tiangha)

Olympic Plaza:  the changing streetscape of Stephen Avenue has been evoked by writers across the decades.  (Photo: Yanmei Fei)

That's a wrap! Thanks to all of you who joined me for this year's Writing the City Jane's Walk -- on foot or on the world wide web. See you on Calgary's storied streets for next year's #janeswalkyyc.

Life is good when you get to wear a headset, stand on a bench and tell Calgary stories in the sun. (Photo: Reg Tiangha)