Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Northwest LRT extension, Rocky Ridge/Tuscany, 2012 (Photo: City of Calgary)

Toronto writer, Noah Richler is touring the country, talking to writers about place. He arrives in Calgary but doesn’t linger. His sights are set on the foothills, that landscape west of the city that author Fred Stenson brings to life in his historical novel, The Trade. Calgary gets only a passing glance in Richler’s literary atlas of Canada: a slice of the northwest suburbs seen from the passenger window of an SUV heading out of town.

Fred Stenson and I drove past Royal Oak and then Tuscany on our way to the nineteenth century… The houses appeared as flimsy as stacked playing cards on the grassy hide of prairie ruptured here and there where the rocky ground, the sleeping leviathan, obstinately pushed through.

Noah Richler, This is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)