The COVID-19 pandemic has put Calgary’s literary calendar on hold. While we wait for the virus to run its course, here’s a look back to the 1920s and the literary world that sprouted here in the aftermath of the Spanish flu.
This 1923 inscription by Onoto Watanna (aka Winnifred Eaton Reeve ) to Lady Lougheed sparked the “Storied City” exhibit
My research for the “Storied City: Early Calgary through the Eyes of Writers” exhibit at Lougheed House was sparked by a piece of literary ephemera: a copy of Onoto Watanna’s 1923 novel Cattle inscribed to Lady Lougheed.
I already knew that the acclaimed Canadian poet P. K. Page spent much of her childhood in the blocks around what she called “old Lady Lougheed’s stone castle.”
I wondered if there might be other literary connections between writers and the Lougheed family, their house and their Beltline neighbourhood.
And so I started digging.
The result was “Storied City”: an imaginary 1923 dinner party featuring 12 writers of early Calgary. Lougheed House curator Caroline Loewen and I assembled photographs and artefacts, an annotated map, a soundscape of contemporary writers reading historic works, and stories that show the literary geography of 1920s Calgary.
Famous British authors like Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited 1920s Calgary. Christie and her husband were part of a whistle-stop tour of Canada in advance of the British Empire Expedition, and Conan Doyle gave a lecture on Spiritualism not far from the Lougheed House, at the Al-Azhar Temple on 4th Street and 17th Avenue -- where the Second Cup now stands.
The bestselling Canadian author Arthur Stringer came to the city to visit his brother Bert -- a Calgary entrepreneur -- and his half sister, Mary, the wife the Lougheeds’ son, Norman.
And notable visiting Canadian poets like Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts and Wilson McDonald gave poetry recitals to large crowds at Central Methodist Church downtown.
1920s Calgary was also home to three writers with international reputations.
Bob Edwards, the journalist and Calgary Eye Opener editor, was read as far away as Toronto, New York and London.
Nellie McClung, the acclaimed author and activist lived on 15th Avenue, two blocks from the Lougheed House.
Calgary’s literary rock star of the day, Onoto Watanna (known in Alberta as Winnifred Eaton Reeve)
And Onoto Watanna, the celebrated novelist known in Calgary as Winnifred Eaton Reeve, also resided here. (When Onoto Watanna moved to town from her Morley ranch in 1920 it was as if Danielle Steele had relocated to contemporary Calgary.)
As I dug into the history, I also found writers starting out on their careers.
Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance -- our Grey Owl -- launched his career as a journalist at the Calgary Daily Herald in 1919.
In 1923, Laura Goodman Salverson, a rising young literary star with roots in Icelandic Manitoba, moved to Calgary just as her much-talked-about debut novel The Viking Heart was published. (That novel would cause a stir in CanLit circles as far away as Toronto, when Winnifred Reeve publicly accused Salverson of paying a friend to review her new book. But that is a different story.)
Flos Jewell Williams was another young Calgary writer who launched her career her in the 1920s . A school teacher from Toronto, she wrote her first novel in her Elbow Park home -- a story set in Muskoka. (Toronto’s Cabbagetown named a laneway in her honour.)
Across the street from the Lougheed House, the adolescent Maxwell Bates scribbled poems in his notebook about the urban landscape of his hometown.
And there was P. K. Page. During her Calgary childhood and adolescence, she soaked in the city’s light and landscape that would later inform her poetry.
Many of these writers, both well-known and emerging, moved away from Calgary. But others -- like Bob Edwards and Winnifred Reeve -- put down roots, living out their lives here.
If you’re interested in cemetery tourism, you can pay homage to Edwards at Union Cemetery, and Reeve at Queen’s Park.
Calgary poet Elaine Catley circa 1930s in her hiking gear (Photo: Catley family)
A Calgary poet whose name you may never have heard also lived out her life in the city.
In 1920, Elaine Catley and her young family arrived from England at Calgary Station and soon established themselves in Tuxedo Park.
Over the course of her long life – Catley died in Calgary in 1984 at the age of 94 – her poems appeared in numerous publications and six chapbooks. Sadly, her Victorian verse has not stood the test of time.
But as a builder of Calgary’s literary culture, Catley left an important legacy.
Her diaries (archived at the Glenbow) offer detailed accounts of the minutiae of a Calgary writer’s life through the decades of the 20th century.
Catley’s legacy also includes her tireless and sustained work building what author and critic George Woodcock calls “a literary world.”
That world evolved over the decades, but in the 1920s it looked like this:
There were places for writers to publish their work.
Mount Royal College circa 1916 (Photo: Glenbow Archives)
Students at Mount Royal College over by Mewata Stadium, had Chinook, a student literary journal. Both the Calgary Daily Herald and The Morning Albertan regularly featured the work of local writers -- and paid them. (The Herald bought Elaine Catley’s poems for $5 each, about $70 in today’s currency.)
Calgary’s first radio station -- launched in 1922 and owned and operated by the Calgary Herald -- relied on local content, including readings by city poets and authors.
There were also places for writers to connect with each other and forge a community.
Since the 1910s, Mount Royal College students convened at their Literary Society, and women journalists belonged to the local branch of the Canadian Women’s Press Club.
And starting in 1921, Calgary authors had a brand-new chapter of the Canadian Authors Association -- an organization of published writers started in Montreal by Stephen Leacock and his colleagues that same year.
Through the Calgary branch, Calgary writers formed a small, vibrant writing community in which they made friends, found mentors, and set out to cultivate an appetite among Calgarians for the written word.
Winnifred Reeve in Calgary (Photo: courtesy of Reeve’s granddaughter Diana Birchall)
Chapter president Winnifred Reeve welcomed local writers to her pied-à-terre and read their manuscripts. Executive member Nellie McClung held literary gatherings in her home, coached young writers like Laura Goodman Salverson and Elaine Catley, and helped Winnifred Reeve place a novel with a London publisher.
The CAA Calgary branch organized a rich calendar of offerings, including lectures on craft, poetry recitals, and writing contests for high school students.
We often trace WordFest’s roots to the Olympic Literary Arts Festival and Book Fair, held downtown in 1988. But Calgary’s first literary festival happened decades before, in the early 1920s.
“Calgary Book Week” offered several days of programming for readers and writers across the city. Talks, daily radio messages, luncheon talks by local literati, and bookstore displays. The pièce de resistance? A book pageant at the Palliser Hotel featuring young dancers dressed as characters from Canadian literature.
Elaine Catley was one of Book Week’s organizers, rolling up her sleeves alongside successive CAA branch presidents Winnifred Reeve, Nellie McClung and Calgary’s chief librarian Alexander Calhoun.
Catley was indefatigable when it came to creating a literary culture in Calgary.
In 1924, she formed the “Consider-It” – a club “for the Discussion of Literature and Philosophy.” The entrance fee? “A friendly spirit of toleration to all opinions.”
Courtesy: Catley family
The next year, she started a poetry group under the auspices of the CAA. A decade later, that group spearheaded the publication of two poetry chapbooks featuring the work of Calgary poets. The 1937 book Canadian Poems gave a young poet named P. K. Page one of her first writing credits.
Over time, the CAA Calgary Branch begat the Calgary Authors’ League, which begat the Calgary Writers’ Association, which operated until 2001. Those groups paved the way for the today’s thriving literary organizations like the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.
1920s Calgary not only had a literary world: the young city was also setting, subject and muse.
Winnifred Reeve’s Cattle, Arthur Stringer’s The Prairie Child and Robert J. C. Stead’s The Cow Puncher capture Calgary’s boom-and-bust economy.
Novelists Isabel Paterson and Flos Jewell Williams, and nonfiction writers Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and Bob Edwards, give us a taste of the particularities of early Calgary society.
P. K. Page, Maxwell Bates and Elaine Catley show us that the city’s natural and urban landscape inspired the poetic imagination.
See the city through the eyes of these writers of early Calgary and you will discover a layered, complex, and three-dimensional place.
Explore their connections to what was then a city of 65,000, and you will uncover the small, vibrant literary world that sprang into life in the years following the devastation of that era’s pandemic in 1918.
A literary world that will return to contemporary Calgary when the current pandemic has passed.