Thanks to Jennifer Friesen at Metro News for this fine piece about Writing the City: Calgary through the Eyes of Writers.
Words. West.
On February 8, 2016, I had the privilege of moderating a Fireside Chat with authors Brian Brennan, Sharon Butala and Ruth Scalp Lock. Here are my introductory remarks.
Words. West.
I like those two words, and I particularly like the sound of those two words together. Over the past couple of years, I have been thinking a lot about a variation of tonight’s theme: “Words West/Calgary.”
Calgary author, Aritha van Herk says: “A Calgarian is someone surprised to hear herself say the words ‘I’m a Calgarian.’” Some of you may have a different experience, but for me, those words ring true.
I’ve lived most of my life in this city, but I’ve only recently started to think of myself as a Calgarian. My relationship with the city is complicated, and part of that complication has to do with rarely if ever seeing the city imagined in the pages of a book.
A couple of years ago, I decided to do something about it. I started tracking down and reading Calgary stories. I set out to see how writers had captured the city in their novels and short stories, their poems, essays and memoirs. What could those stories tell me about my relationship with this city, and ultimately, what could they tell me about Calgary itself?
I quickly discovered that novelists and poets, essayists and memoir writers have been writing Calgary stories for a long time: all I had to do was go looking.
Last summer, my reading project turned into a weekly blog series called Writing the City: Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers. The blog has turned out to be a wonderful and surprising treasure hunt through Calgary’s 140-year history and across its geography.
Over the past months, the blog has featured:
- the English poet Rupert Brooke’s 1913 visit to Calgary at the height of one of the city’s first booms
- the British novelist Graham Greene’s short story set in the Calgary suburbs circa 1963
- Lori Hahnel’s novel about coming of age in the city’s punk rock scene in the early 1980s
- Cecelia Frey’s “Ode to Fireworks during Stampede”
And many more.
Let me return to tonight’s theme: Words West.
What happens when we tune in to the stories that come out of the places we live?
Here are a few things I’ve noticed, as I read Calgary stories, and as I read the works of tonight’s panelists about the West.
When I see the West through the words of writers, I see the specific details of this place – a landscape that is richer than its stereotypes, a region more complex than its myths. I feel that wonderful hum of recognition, and at the same time, the challenge of looking beyond my own experience.
My curiosity clicks into gear.
When I accept a writer’s invitation to go back in time, I find out about things I may have forgotten, not paid attention to, or never known. I make connections between the life I am living now in the West and the history that precedes me.
Last, but not least: When I see the West through the words of writers and their stories, I experience a deepening in my own relationship to this place
So: Words. West. Two words – two ideas – that belong together.
A Fireside Chat in Calgary's Marda Loop
A novelist, a nonfiction writer, a First Nations elder and a moderator gather in front of a fireplace and a crowd of eighty readers and writers at the Marda Loop community hall.
The stories begin.
A young Irish civil servant immigrates to the Canadian West in the 1960s looking for “something better someplace else.”
A six-year-old Siksika girl attends residential school on a reserve east of Calgary. She can see her family's house a mile away but she can't go home.
A woman on a ranch in southwest Saskatchewan puzzles over the meaning of a dream about a coyote.
The Irishman is now a nonfiction writer who chronicles the lives of the historical characters in his adopted West. He quotes Alberta author, Robert Kroetsch. “We haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real.”
The Siksika girl is now an esteemed elder in her community. Under the huge Alberta sky, she and the friend who is helping her write her memoir set out to find the spokes of an ancient medicine wheel in the tinder-dry prairie.
The woman on that prairie ranch is now a writer. In her novel, she creates a fictional pioneer town in southwest Saskatchewan. In the pile of buffalo bones at the edge of the village, the novelist finds ghosts, grieving and responsibility.
Words – specific, inspiring, challenging, complex – West.
In the next post: my introductory remarks for this fireside chat.
Notes after a One Yellow Rabbit play about Calgary
“The City is a nest and distraction. Safe and dangerous, comforting and alien, it exhausts and energizes in equal measure. Does a city that spends much of its energy visualizing what is occurring below the surface of the earth have a quality notion of what’s going on above?
Who are we as a city? If an animal, what kind? If a gender, what variety? Are we a griffin or a gopher? A sphinx or a spaniel? A warrior-queen or a tipsy teen?
Does the city have a soul and if so how do we describe it? Just who the hell are we now?”
“Calgary I Love You, But You’re Killing Me”
1. Small talk from the row behind, people comparing their Calgary pedigrees. E. P. Scarlett, Henry Wise Wood.
2. The city imprints itself on the adolescent soul, shapes the contours of personal geography. (Wise Wood, Class of 1979.)
3. Does the city have a soul?
4. Soul, noun: the spiritual or immaterial component or nature of a human being or animal (or city), regarded as the seat of the emotions or intellect.
5. The tangible city, in music and verse. “Paisley shirts with pearl button nipples”; fitness club confidential; Chicken-on-the-Way.
6. Psychogeography.
7. When it comes to a city, is the soul in the eye of the beholder? Is it something we all have to agree upon? Or both?
8. Dance interlude: traffic jam.
9. The soul of Calgary is rush-hour traffic, speeding up, cutting in, cursing. (Whatever happened to the courtesy wave?)
10. “Rear-view mirrors: we don’t need them.”
11. Dream sequence: Mermaids of the Bow.
12. This is a city with stories still to be told.
13. Musical bridge: the first bars of David Foster’s Olympic theme song, and laughter. A joyful inside joke. (And an inner surge of civic pride you don’t entirely trust.)
14. There is a reluctance to love this city. Maybe even fear.
15. Dance interlude: a Calgary pas de trois with squirrel, gopher and magpie.
16. Denise Clarke as magpie: the walk, the squawk. Stage lights catch the glint of her corvid smile.
17. Is the soul of Calgary a magpie?
18. “I’m a positive magpie." Eyes on the shiny bits. Noisy bird/city. Ungovernable. Insatiable. Creative.
19. The magpie spirit of Michael Green.
20. Monologue: A Toronto transplant tells the familiar story. The place she left behind (history), the place where she arrived (hope), the city where she lives (Calgary).
21. Does the soul of a city look different when you call it home?
22. Monologue in a minor key: a woman in the Arriva Tower drowns in a tumbler of Grey Goose, nurses the lost promise of her youth.
23. The ghost of Dorothy Joudrie haunts this town.
24. Segue to a middle-aged oilman in a moment of reflection, looking past his magpie self, into the strata of his conscience.
25. Solo: the poetry of geology.
26. A theme with literary variations: here and here.
27. The city rises out of rock. Its slippery petrochemical profits. And the past we ignore.
28. “The frontier is a contemporary idea.”
29. How does a fixation on the frontier/future affect the soul?
30. (And what about your future? After a lifetime in the magpie city, can you embrace the place that shaped you? Can you live anywhere else?)
31. A city of open questions.
32. Make like a yellow rabbit/magpie.
33. Engage.
34. Imagine.