Seeds of Calgary's Early Literary Culture

This article first appeared in the Chinook Country Historical Society newsletter in November 2018.

On a summer night in 1911, an anonymous city-watcher wandered down Calgary’s busy 8th Avenue. The economy was booming and the weather was perfect for making literary wishes.

“If some great master of fiction could only look into the hearts of some of those that pass, what a novel he could write,” our observer wrote in the July 20, 1911 Calgary Herald. “A book might be filled about this street and its people by one who has seen and known.”

If our city-watcher had been able to glimpse beyond the “ebbing, flowing crowds” on 8th Avenue, she or he might have noticed the seeds of a literary culture already sprouting in early Calgary.

This was a city of readers.

Bookstores on 8th Avenue like Linton’s, Mackie’s and Osborne’s vied to satisfy Calgarians’ thirst for newspapers, magazines, books and educational texts. Citizens had their own private libraries, perhaps the most impressive being James and Isabella Lougheed’s, a collection said to have included 10,000 volumes.

Newspapers like the Weekly Herald, the Morning Albertan and the Calgary Eye Opener would have noted the progress of the city’s new public library in the final stages of construction in Central Memorial Park. The project was spearheaded not by city politicians, but by a group of avid readers: members of the Calgary Literary Women’s Club established in 1906 in Annie Davidson’s 13th Avenue living room.

When the library opened in January 1912, chief librarian Alexander Calhoun noted that “the cupboard was bare in a few days.”

Early Calgary was also a city of writers.

In 1910, journalist Ethel Heydon helped found the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Women’s Press Club: the city’s first organization of writers. A few months after our city-watcher’s visit in 1911, students at the year-old Mount Royal College at 7th Avenue and 11th Street West would form their Literary Society; the group would become the heart of the college’s intellectual and cultural life. At the Society’s first meeting? Students decided to publish Chinook, a semi-annual literary journal featuring student prose and poetry.

In the summer of 1911, Bob Edwards was a fixture on 8th Avenue and Calgary’s bard. By 1908, his satiric weekly the Eye Opener had a circulation 18,500, and was read and remarked upon not only by Calgarians, but by readers across the country and as far away as New York and London, England.

“Had he lived longer,” Grant MacEwan wrote about Edwards, “consumed less whisky, and possessed more ambition for personal advancement and fame, he might have shared immortal honours with the likes of Mark Twain.”

Bob Edwards was not the only writer who saw early Calgary’s literary possibilities. George Kerby published his bestseller The Broken Trail in 1909, a year before the Methodist minister founded Mount Royal College. His book included “The Desperado” – the story of Kerby’s visits with a fictionalized Ernest Cashel in the Calgary jail before the outlaw was hanged in 1904 at the North-West Mounted Police barracks.

Isabel Paterson saw the young city as an ideal setting for fiction. Between 1905 and 1910, she worked at the CPR’s land division and for R. B. Bennett in his Clarence Block law office on 8th Avenue. Her two Calgary novels, The Shadow Riders (1916) and The Magpie’s Nest (1917) offer a vivid look into the shenanigans of land speculators and streetcar politics.

Of The Shadow Riders, Paterson said: “[T]his story could not have happened anywhere else. […] I could not have imagined it anywhere else. If I had tried to place it in another city, there would have been no story.”

Read Paterson’s Calgary novels today (both are available online) and you will see young people hungry for urban life and women who chafe at society’s expectations. To me, these century-old Calgary stories still feel fresh and relevant.

Early Calgary held more literary promise than our city-watcher observed on that summer night in 1911. Readers, writers, newspapers, literary journals and organizations, and a carefully curated public library: these were the seeds of a literary culture that would continue to blossom in subsequent decades.

Curious about how that story unfolds? I hope you’ll check out my book Calgary through the Eyes of Writers. There you will find early Calgary on the literary page, and much more.

A Calgary Bookmark in 2019!

Something wonderful is coming to Calgary in Fall 2019! The city’s East Village has been chosen as the site of Alberta’s first stop on Project Bookmark Canada’s national literary trail.

Calgary’s Bookmark will feature Rosemary Griebel’s poem “Walking with Walt Whitman Through Calgary’s Eastside on A Winter Day.” A permanent plaque will be installed in front of Loft 112, a creative and literary hub on 8th Avenue East in Fall 2019.

As a member of the Calgary Reading Circle for Project Bookmark Canada, I am thrilled to tell you that a generous grant from Glasswaters Foundation has helped bring this Bookmark to Calgary. We have a little more money to raise and would be grateful for your support. (You can make a charitable donation to the Calgary Bookmark here.)

Check out Project Bookmark Canada’s website for the full announcement about the Calgary Bookmark. You can also listen to the interview Rosemary and I did on the CBC Homestretch, or read the story on the CBC Calgary website.

Thanks to Lisa Murphy-Lamb, Director of Loft of 112, who has offered to host the Bookmark, and Calgary artist Stacey Walyuchow whose painting “Rosemary’s Walk” was inspired by the poem and graces our campaign.

I’ll leave you with Rosemary Griebel reading “Walking with Walt Whitman Through Calgary’s Eastside on a Winter Day” (at the 2-minute mark) — a beautiful poem that speaks to the human heart of one of Calgary’s oldest and most storied neighbourhoods.

Calgary through the Eyes of Writers – the book!

Three years ago, I began blogging about Calgary's literature. This fall, that reading project will become a book.

For a sneak peek at Calgary through the Eyes of Writers, check out Rocky Mountain Books' website.

I'm thrilled to be launching the book at Calgary's New Central Library on Sunday, December 9th at 2 p.m. Hope to see you there!

Calgary's Literary Beltline

I had the honour of hosting an evening of Alberta literary trivia at the Writers’ Guild of Alberta 38th annual conference in early June, held at the Memorial Park Library. I welcomed attendees with this glimpse of Calgary's literary landscape, and in particular, the Beltline neighbourhood.

This weekend, we join a long tradition of storytellers who have been gathering in this wide valley since Indigenous people camped at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers thousands of years ago. 

In 1875, when the North-West Mounted Police established a log palisade a couple of kilometres from here, they set the city's creation story in motion. 

The story of the literary landscape where we are meeting this weekend begins three decades after the founding of Fort Calgary, in 1906. That February a 68-year-old widow moved here from Brandon, MB to set up house at 112 - 13th Ave West, a block or so from here, directly behind what is now Hotel Arts. Annie Davidson brought with her a trunk filled with books, and a love of literature.

1906 Calgary was a small city of 12,000 in the early throes of a real-estate boom. There may have been “a bar and brothel on every corner” but in those days, Calgary also possessed a literary culture. Two newspapers. A satiric magazine called the Eye Opener, a more-or-less weekly that featured Bob Edwards and his special blend of fact and fiction.

Stephen Ave in 1906 (Photo: Peel's Prairie Provinces)

Bookstores were among the first businesses on Stephen Avenue in the early 1880s, and in 1906, they continued to thrive. One of them was Thomson’s – a bookstore that operated where Thomson’s Restaurant now stands – part of the Hyatt Hotel where we will be gathering to celebrate the Alberta Literary Awards tomorrow evening.

There were several libraries in 1906 Calgary – all of them private. While Annie Davidson was settling into her new home on 13th Avenue West, down the street, James and Isabella Lougheed were planning an addition to their sandstone mansion, in part to showcase their extensive library of leather-bound books.

Soon after Annie Davidson arrived in Calgary, she invited a group of women to her parlour, with an eye to starting a reading club. That invitation would, over the decades, turn these few blocks in the Beltline into a literary landscape.

The women who met in Annie Davidson’s parlour in February 1906 formed the city’s first – and longest running book club. (It still convenes to this day with 38 active members and a lively, rigorous program of reading and discussion.)

But for Annie Davidson and her friends– a book club was only the beginning. Soon, their Calgary Women’s Literary Society began petitioning the city to build the province’s first public library in this park behind us, down the block from Annie’s house.

Davidson would die before the library opened its mahogany doors on January 2, 1912, but the city’s first librarian, Alexander Calhoun carried the torch – intent on offering Calgarians what he envisioned as a “temple of knowledge.”

What we now call the Memorial Park Library opened with Calhoun’s carefully curated collection of 5280 books to, which would – in his words – “satisfy the thirst of all classes of individuals.”

He also created a place that would become a magnet for writers.

The English poet Rupert Brooke was the first notable author to visit, in 1913 – the year after the library opened. “[I]n Calgary,” he wrote in Letters from America, “ you find a very neat and carefully kept building, stocked with an immense variety of periodicals, and an admirably chosen store of books, ranging from the classics to the most utterly modern literature. Few large English towns could show anything as good.”

The Calgary-born expressionist painter, poet and essayist Maxwell Bates spent hours in the stacks across the street as a boy and adolescent, receiving in the library what his biographer calls “his real education” in art and literature.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the young P. K. Page found her way to the library. The building became her “mecca” – the place that fed her aspirations to be an artist, and her first poems, scribbled in a basement cubbyhole at a friend’s house a couple of kilometres from here, on Riverdale Avenue.

In the 1930s and 40s, the library caught the imagination of the prolific BC-based author Frederick Niven. He gave the sandstone building two literary cameos – in his 1930 nonfiction book Canada West, and his 1942 novel The Flying Years. For Niven, the library represented the tangible evidence of the city’s urban aspirations.

In the early 1950s, Sheila Watson likely visited this library when she lived in Calgary, borrowing a lecture by a French existentialist philosopher while she was writing The Double Hook in her house across the Bow River in Crescent Heights.

And, jumping ahead to 1998, the narrator of Aritha van Herk’s novel Restlessness takes note of the Memorial Park Library, describing it as a “dowager” with a “damelike façade” – an “Odd place, breathing ghosts.”

Since the 1970s, the Memorial Park Library has become a hub of literary activity. In the late 1970s, Timothy Findley’s book tour for The Wars stopped here – a memorable visit involving an inebriated audience member curious about Findley’s Irish storyteller’s scarf -- and anxious to know how much money Findley made as a novelist. A few years later, Findley returned with his novel Not Wanted on the Voyage and inadvertently triggered the fire alarm. Both incidents made their way into Findley’s memoir and that of his partner William Whitehead.

“[W]e had come to view that library,” Whitehead writes, “as a symbol of Calgary itself – a source of endless wonders.”

The Memorial Park Library was not just a venue for visiting authors, but offered a place for homegrown writers to share their work. The Calgary Creative Reading Series, launched by W. P. Kinsella in 1979, migrated to the library and showcased many local writers. So did Splits the Heard. The reading series held in association with the Muttart Art Gallery in the 1990s featured the collaboration of literary and visual artists.

In 1987, the Calgary Public Library launched its author-in-residence program with Fred Stenson serving in the inaugural role. During his term, he met aspiring and practicing writers in a well-lit room on the ground floor. In later years, the author-in-residence took up digs in a basement room with metre-thick cement walls – a room called “the vault.” A fitting place for a civic literary jewel.

The author-in-residence program has since moved to the Central Library downtown, but last year the Library announced a new partnership with Wordfest. These days, the Memorial Park Library offers a year-round slate of programming featuring storytellers from near and far.

Over the years, the literary landscape has grown from the library to neighbouring blocks in the Beltline. Next door at the “Old Y,” the WGA operated its first southern Alberta office from the early 1990s to 2009. At the other end of the park, author JoAnn McCaig and her business partner Will Lawrence opened Shelf Life Books in 2012, introducing a new gathering place for writers and readers.

And no literary neighbourhood is complete without a watering hole: for many years, the Hop In Brew pub has served in that role – the setting for stories still to be written and ones in which some of you may very well feature.

As you spend time this weekend in Alberta’s first public library – a brand-new addition to Canada’s register of National Historic sites – I invite you to consider that you are part of a long tradition of storytellers gathering in this place: from the Indigenous peoples who have been sharing stories through the millennia in this valley, to the writers and readers who have been drawn to this particular part of the city since 1906.

Decades ago, Annie Davidson was a reader intent on making books available to the citizens of Calgary. But in these blocks, she also planted a landscape where writers would grow, be inspired and come together.

When you step through the library doors tomorrow, pause for a moment by the display in the vestibule and pay your respects to Annie.