Snapshots from a Literary Walk

The first Sunday in May, the air in Calgary was damp and brisk. The sky threatened more snow. Undeterred, a crowd gathered in the lobby of the Palliser Hotel. Gloved, toqued and layered, we set off into the streets for the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society's first literary walk.

These photos capture some of the magic we stirred up that day in the city's chilly shadows.

Across the street from the Palliser Hotel, I talk about the Alberta expressionist painter, poet and essayist, Maxwell Bates (1906-1980). His father designed the Grain Exchange Building, Calgary's first skyscraper, located kitty-corner to the hotel. Maxwell Bates's unfinished manuscript Vermicelli – an experimental mosaic of ideas and stories – was what we would now call creative nonfiction.

Photo: Ben Gibbard

Novelist Fred Stenson sketches the history of the Hudson's Bay Company in Calgary, in the welcome shelter of the store's elegant, Venice-inspired arcade. When this building opened in 1913, it offered a circulating library and reading room to its patrons.

Photo: Ben Gibbard

In front of the Calgary Herald Block, literary historian George Melnyk recounts the story of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, who worked as a reporter at the Herald in the 1920s. Claiming to be the son of a Blackfoot chief, Long Lance was later exposed and nicknamed "The Glorious Imposter." 

Photo: Leo Aragon

Author and CNFC co-founder Myrna Kostash holds forth on Laura Salverson, the novelist and award-winning memoirist who rented a studio in the Lougheed Block (now the Belvedere Restaurant) in the 1930s.

Photo: Ben Gibbard

Harry Sanders, the good-humouredl Historian Laureate Emeritus of Calgary came along, too. His Historic Walks of Calgary (2005) is filled with facts, curiosities and inspiration.

Photo: Leo Aragon

Kris Demeanor shares his findings after a term as Calgary's first Poet Laureate. Calgary, he notes, is a city of " infuriating possibility."

Photo: Ben Gibbard

Aritha van Herk and Emily Murphy: two Alberta mavericks.

Photo: Leo Aragon

Author Ted Bishop and Barbara Patterson's  Women Are Persons! sculpture in Olympic Plaza.

Photo: Leo Aragon

Myrna Kostash warms the crowd with her take on Laura Salverson's fierce Icelandic patriotism.

Down at ground level, Fonzie takes the literary walk in canine stride.

Photo: Leo Aragon

A beautiful limited-edition map, designed by ACAD student Soo Kim, features her original watercolour drawings. Thanks to Maranda Reprographics for printing the map, and to the walk sponsor, Calgary law firm Stones Carbert Waite LLP.

Next year, the Creative Nonfiction Collective's annual conference will be held in Victoria, BC, April 24-26, 2015. I plan to take my walking shoes.

I'll leave you with one last photo from the literary walk: worth at least a thousand words.

Photo: Leo Aragon

A Post-Conference Creative Nonfiction Reading List

There wasn’t much time for reading at last weekend’s Creative Nonfiction Collective conference, but I carried a pile of books home with me: several wonderful new essay collections, and Judy McFarlane’s Writing with Grace: A Journey Beyond Down Syndrome.

I also brought home scribbled notes of things I want to read, and, in some cases, re-read. Here are a few of the titles at the top of my list, in no particular order:

The Art of the Essay, Lydia Fakundiny

This out-of-print book pre-dates Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay by three years. Joanna Eleftheriou, the bright young scholar who led a session on the lyric essay with her University of Missouri colleague Lauren Fath, told me there is gold in this important collection.

An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery, Janna Malamud Smith

I inhaled Smith’s wonderful book last year. When Jane Silcott told me she was reading An Absorbing Errand on the flight to Calgary, I realized I need to re-read the book; this time, more slowly.

“A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay,” by Brenda Miller in Writing Creative Nonfiction, Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard, eds.

My copy of Miller’s classic craft essay is covered with marginalia, but there is room for more. Miller shows us the lyric essay from the inside. Here’s a taste of where she's going: “We’ve entered a realm of unknowing, a place where definitions are constantly in flux, a place where answers are not as important as the questions to which they give rise.”

The Girl in Saskatoon, Sharon Butala

I’ve read Butala’s memoir, The Perfection of the Morning, but I haven’t kept up with her recent nonfiction. At the conference plenary, Communicating with the Dead, Butala said that even though the deceased are constantly reaching out to writers, they are “ultimately unknowable.” I’m curious to find out how she navigates this landscape in The Girl in Saskatoon.

Madeline Sonik’s upcoming essay in the summer edition of The Malahat Review

At the end of Sonik’s excellent talk about crossing genres, she shared an anecdote about her soon-to-be-published essay concerning the poet Ted Hughes. Time to subscribe to The Malahat Review. A side trip back to Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures is probably in order, too.

Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother, Helen Humphreys

My reader’s rule: after three creative nonfiction writers rave about a book, it’s time to find out what they’re talking about.

Renovating Heaven, Andreas Schroeder

Canadian writers call Andreas Schroeder the “godfather of creative nonfiction.” At CNFC, we honour him as one of our founders. Renovating Heaven is Schroeder’s autobiographical novel. I can't wait to read it.

The Concubine’s Children, Denise Chong

I read Denise Chong’s first book too long ago. At her session this weekend, my pen couldn't move fast enough to capture all of the gems Chong shared. Here is one I caught that continues to hum: “Turn every surprise into your advantage.” I may wait until August and get myself a new copy, when The Concubine’s Children is issued as a Penguin Modern Classic.

That's my creative nonfiction reading list for this spring. What's yours?

Finding the sweet spot

I’ve been re-reading Katherine Govier’s 1987 novel Between Men. The protagonist Suzanne Vail is a young historian who has moved back to Calgary after a decade in Ontario. Her marriage is crumbling and her beloved, oil-hungry hometown is exasperating to live in. When she’s not teaching Canadian history at a local college, Suzanne works on a secret research project: piecing together the murder of Rosalie New Grass. This young Cree woman, Govier explains in the acknowledgements, was killed in Calgary in 1889.

Among other things, Between Men is about a writer making sense of history. How does she find her way beyond the incomplete historical record? What bearing does the past have on her life in the present?

As a writer of creative nonfiction, I was captivated by the moment early in the novel where Suzanne crosses genres.

Here, we see her struggling against the constraints of her scholarly discipline.

“Suzanne raised her head from the greyed papers, frustrated. Newspaper accounts were notoriously bad sources, even if she could make out the words. Facts, she needed facts, the hard centres in this fatty flesh of description, but there were few. Few facts and many accounts, here and elsewhere, the story of the story, impossible to verify, leading her this way and that. Fact, the supposedly irreducible thing, was not so easily preserved.”

How will she burrow back in time?

“Suzanne needed a way in... She needed a guide, a torch, a pick-axe. Something, or someone.”

And in her stacks of research, she finds him.

“He was a spectator to the entire sequence of events… He was always there but never mentioned, the invisible man… This man had a name of course. But Suzanne did not, for the moment, write it down. Instead she pondered on what she knew of his characteristics.”

This man could be useful to her, but she would have to breach the historian’s rules.

“She would have to make assumptions, to invent. But she was sure that if she did, this man would be her vehicle to carry her past the great century behind her. He could cut through the intervening rings of darkness and light, the banal seasons of freeze and thaw, as if it were not time but more geography. But if he were to be the means for this ungeographical journey, and she to follow him, she would have to make him her own.”

In this moment, Suzanne finds the sweet spot of creative nonfiction.

“She stroked out his real name on her copies of the papers. She would call her man – what would she call him? She put the end of her pencil in her mouth, and though. She would call him Murphy.”

In Between Men, the making of creative nonfiction is a clandestine, renegade act. Suzanne knows her project is risky, that she will pay a price for imagining between the grey archival pages of the past. But the reimagined story of Rosalie New Grass’s murder tugs the writer and the reader into a new interstitial space of invention constrained by fact. The sweet spot where the past comes alive in the present. 

Belated Birthday Wishes

On Thursday, my maternal grandmother would have celebrated her 106th birthday. Berniece Chedister Sykes was born in Alma, Michigan on February 6, 1908. The spring after she turned three, she and her parents headed north to claim their quarter section of Saskatchewan homestead.

My grandmother was a storyteller and she loved talking about her pioneer childhood. We urged her to write these stories down, and for a while, she seemed to delight in the idea and even came up with a title: Damp Furrows. But the book never materialized. I am not smart enough for that, she wrote in one of the many long letters she sent me when I was studying English literature at university. Maybe you can have a “go” at it.

I was hard on my grandmother at that time in my life. I knew she would never write a book. As far as I could tell, she spent her days wrapped in melancholy self-absorption. Her primary preoccupation? Watching herself grow old and nursing her multitude of grievances. At twenty, my own literary ambitions were insistent but muddled. I knew one thing for sure: if I were ever going to write a book, it wouldn’t be about my grandmother’s prairie childhood. 

A few years later, before I turned thirty, my grandmother died. She left scrapbooks and a handful of pencilled pages of her memories: the raw material for a book. 

A recent essay by Jane Urquhart got me thinking about my grandmother’s unwritten memoir. In the weeks after Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize, Urquhart reflects on the visit Munro paid her decades ago.

One thing she said struck me as particularly profound. Our parents, our grandparents, couldn’t have done this, she told me. They simply could not have written books. Not that they wouldn’t have had the ability – they may or may not have had that – but they simply wouldn’t have had the opportunity.

They were working people, Munro told Urquhart, engaged in physical labour, putting all their efforts into building their livelihood. At the time of this conversation, Urquhart was in her late thirties, “the unknown author of one novel.” Hearing Munro’s generous perspective, Urquhart considered herself “young enough at the time, and selfish enough, not to have thought of this…It was Alice Munro’s sense of humanity that made me aware.”

Urquhart reminds me that we grow older, celebrate birthdays, and with any luck, soften or crack open some of our tightly-held views.

These last few years, I have been writing a book about my grandmother’s life. It is not the book she had in mind, and I suspect she would take issue in places with my interpretation. My grandmother was nothing if not persnickety. Still, on what would have been her 106th birthday, I wish to tell her that I have finally had a “go” at her story. I want to apologize for taking so long to write this book. I want to say that I am beginning to understand why she did not write hers.