The Calgary Atlas Project has released its newest map charting the city’s surprising history – this one exploring the exuberant and little-known literary world of 1920s Calgary.

I’m thrilled to have my research and text interpreted by Calgary artist Eveline Kolijn. The magical art deco-inspired bookcase Eveline has created is a visual feast complete with local literary treasures.

Thanks to Jim Ellis, director of the University of Calgary’s Institute for the Humanities, who shepherded the project, and Glenn Mielke for his graphic design.

If you’d like to purchase a copy of the map, check the Calgary Atlas Project website for a list of local distributors.

In the meantime, here’s a taste of the map to whet your appetite…

“A captivating and diverse cast of literary personalities called 1920s Calgary home, including a Chinese-Canadian novelist who made her name masquerading as Japanese, a mixed-race writer from North Carolina who fashioned a Blackfoot identity, and an Icelandic-Canadian bent on literary fame. Here lived a crusading feminist fiction writer, a car-crazy war correspondent, a policeman-novelist, and a posse of pioneering female journalists pursuing success. Many of these characters and other city writers were enjoying international acclaim.

In an era of city building after a world war and pandemic, the literary scene was booming. Writers and others saw Calgary as a “City of Romance” — a storied landscape rich with literary inspiration. Novelist Winnifred Reeve noted in 1923: “something more valuable than oil may spring from our wells.” In a small city of sixty-five thousand far from the country’s cultural centre, writers were making a literary world here. Their enterprise took effort, optimism and bravado. This map tells that forgotten story.”

— City of Romance: The Literary World of 1920s Calgary

Here’s one of Eveline’s sketches… Onoto Watanna aka Winnifred Eaton Reeve, a real-life literary character living in 1920s Calgary.