P.K. Page's "The First Part"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Elbow River looking west from Weaselhead Flats, toward the old Sarcee Camp (Photo: City of Calgary website)

The poet P.K. Page spent childhood summers along the banks of the Elbow River, a few miles southwest of the city centre. In the 1920s, her father served as an officer in the Lord Strathcona’s Horse. In the summer, the Pages would move from their Calgary home to Sarcee Camp, on the perimeter of the Tsuu T’ina Reserve, where her father participated in military exercises. Page’s time in this landscape, her biographer writes, provided some of the poet’s most vivid childhood memories. Decades later, when Page was living in Australia, she gave a talk about Canadian cities. When she spoke of Calgary, she recalled its “glass air” and its “limitless grassland wrapped in light as clear as cellophane.” In a late autobiographical poem, she reflects on the role this landscape at the edge of the city played in shaping her artistic sensibility.

Backdrop: the cordillera of the Rockies.

Infinity – slowly spinning in the air –

invisibly entered through the holes of gophers,

visibly, in a wigwam’s amethyst smoke.

Eternity implicit on the prairie.

One’s self the centre of a boundless dome

so balanced in its horizontal plane

 …

 It was a landscape in which things could grow

enormous.

P. K. Page, “The First Part,” The Hidden Room: Volume 1 (Porcupine’s Quill, 1997)

Robert Kroetsch's Alberta

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Husky Tower under construction, 1968 (Photo: Calgary Tower website)

“What does it look like to you?”

“What’s it really for?”

“What does it make you think of?”

It's 1968 and the brand new Husky Tower rises twice as high as the city’s tallest building. To celebrate Canada's centennial, Marathon Realty and Husky Oil have commissioned a concrete and steel observation tower that transforms the city's skyline. Author Robert Kroetsch, then a university professor in upstate New York, has returned to Alberta to write a centennial travelogue about his native province. In Calgary, he contemplates the tower.

They gather at its base and tilt their heads up and back, their mouths opening, their gaze following the slender bone-white curve to where its high point swells against the sky. They watch it from old verandas and new patios, and from the balconies of glittering high-rise apartments. They see it from far out on the prairie and marvel at what they behold.

Calgarians have invented for themselves a new Rorschach test. It is no ink spot on a folded page, but a smooth tower of concrete with a revolving restaurant on top.

To a child, it is a turret that makes his home a castle. To a preacher outside the gate of the Calgary zoo, it is a beacon that draws the innocent to this new Babylon. To a young man who soars six hundred feet above his high city to be served and pampered, it is proof to his date that he deserves her pampering too. To a student at the university, it is an embarrassing symbol of his city’s materialism and raw taste. To the oilmen, it is higher than the Rockies on the horizon far to the west; it is the axle-tree of God’s universe, and they, by God, built it.

And as the sun sets on the chatter and speculation, the Husky Tower burns splendid and tall in the warm soft night, in the caressing Chinooks that blow down over the Rockies. This is the city’s long, hard, and enduring dream.

Robert Kroetsch, Alberta (NeWest Press, 1993, 2nd edition)

Barb Howard's Whipstock

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

"Looking Ahead to Work in Alberta Oil Patch" (Photo: Khalid Calgary, Wikimedia Commons)

The oil patch is in Nellie Mannville’s blood. Her grandmother, an industry pioneer, used her cramping uterus to find oil, and Nellie’s mother is a cheeky, chain-smoking landman. Nellie works at an oil company cafeteria in downtown Calgary for a woman called Sauerkraut. She signs up for a new-employee rig tour. Her mother guffaws at her daughter’s sudden interest in the oil business and offers her own quick-and-dirty primer. (“Think of a dick. That’s the derrick.”) But Nellie is intent on going on the tour. She heads to the meeting place outside the company office tower downtown, past a large bronze statue in the lobby: a cowboy riding a bucking oil barrel. The sculpture hints at what’s to come. On the bus ride to the rig site, the landscape is the familiar parade of gas stations, car dealerships and lube shops. But soon after Nellie arrives at the rig, the terrain turns strange, and Nellie finds herself surrendering to the derrick.

The group photo of the rig tour participants appears in the July 1998 issue of the company newsletter. Nellie, thickish and sweaty, stands at the end of the middle row. Her jean shirt and jeans protrude from her open coveralls. Her big silver belt buckle catches the sun, twinkles like a magic egg on her belly. Sauerkraut cuts the photo out of the newsletter and pins it on the kitchen bulletin board, beside the safety chart.

“Did you enjoy yourself on that rig tour last month?” Sauerkraut asks Nellie.

“It was orgasmic.”

Barb Howard, Whipstock (2001)

Ophira Eisenberg's Screw Everyone

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Western Canada High School (Photo: Michael Denning, Wikimedia Commons)

Ophira Eisenberg’s memoir begins in 1980s suburban Calgary: “a nice, safe place – it was like the walls were made of soft sponges. You had to work really hard to get in trouble.” At Western Canada High, Eisenberg is, like her role model Ferris Bueller, “the ultimate self-assured outsider.” Unlike some of her serious-minded classmates, she’s intent on losing “the new-car smell” of her adolescence, including her virginity. She and her friend Cheryl hatch a plan in Cheryl’s wood-panelled basement: they will try to lose their virginity on the same night. They zero in on two boys in a high school U2 cover band. At a house party, the girls put their plan in motion.

When the set ended, as a treat I passed around a bottle of Schnapps I’d found in my mom’s liquor cabinet. Judging by the layer of dust on the label, it had probably been sitting there since the first Star Wars movie came out in theaters. After sharing a swig with Cameron, I led him into the “makeout room” – my mother’s sewing room – where we necked and dry humped in between quilt squares and sprigs of crinoline from my ballet costumes. We were both such novices, our groping ended up being too licky and fast paced. Occasionally our teeth would collide. At the end of the night when I puked, it was from the combination of worry, wine coolers, and a dash of melon Schnapps. Cameron biked home on his beat-up ten-speed, and I scrubbed the house and my mouth for two days. It was a near-perfect teenage evening.

Ophira Eisenberg, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (Seal Press, 2013)

Aritha van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Union Cemetery (Photo: City of Calgary)

“A place,” Aritha van Herk writes in Places Far From Ellesmere, “is counted for the people buried there.” She wanders the cemeteries of Calgary, her chosen place, a city with a turnstile history of arrivals and departures. But Calgary’s cemeteries are crowded with the people who stayed. “Graves elbowing each other awake, saying ‘move over.’” Why leave, she asks herself, "when everything is here?"

To dare to stay here to die, to dare to stay after death, to implant yourself firmly and say, “Here I stay, let those who would look for a record come here.” You want a death more exotic than it is, would choose repose in the arms of foreign grass, odd moles rather than gophers. But the lengths of darkness measured metre for metre are shorter here and the pinhole photography of death as immobilizing as east or west. The graveyards of Calgary are your grottos, and even ashes scattered and unburied settle here with the mosquitoes and the rippled gusts of wind off the foothills.

Aritha van Herk, Places Far From Ellesmere, (Red Deer College Press, 1990)

Kris Demeanor's "On Being A Lifer"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

“I’m a Lifer,” Kris Demeanor, Calgary’s inaugural poet laureate writes in his introduction to The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual. He presents his city CV: a list of landmarks, neighbourhoods and schools (“Nellie McClung Elementary/Louis Riel Junior High/Henry Wise Wood High”). A Calgary pedigree. He has travelled, but “always came back” to the “city of infuriating possibility” he calls home.

But somewhere during the city’s transitions

and transformations, the outlook of the Lifer changes too.

It’s not only about what has been covered up and plowed under,

it’s not only about what the city gives you – a job,

entertainment, proximity to the mountains.

Once a Lifer makes the commitment, decides

‘This is My Home,’ there’s no joy in complaining

about a city’s shortcomings.

The natural evolution is to ask ‘What am I adding?’

'What’s my place?’

Kris Demeanor, “On Being a Lifer,” The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual (Frontenac House, 2014)

Lori Hahnel's Love Minus Zero

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

The National Hotel, 1042 - 10th Ave, SE (Photo: Alberta Culture)

Kate Brandt is forty-something, divorced and working part-time at the Mount Royal College library. A lifetime ago, she haunted Calgary’s punk rock scene, playing guitar in an all-girl band called Misclairol. The seedy downtown bars of the early 1980s where she performed are history. The National Hotel is shuttered; the Calgarian Hotel has burned down; and the Long Bar on Eighth Avenue is long gone. At a friend’s wedding, Kate reconnects with her old flame and fellow punk rocker, Niall. When they dance, she feels the familiar heat. They take their drinks outside the Hillhurst-Sunnyside community hall and catch up on the years. Niall, a lawyer's kid who grew up in the posh part of town, is still drifting.  As the sun goes down, Kate tells him that, after a lifetime in Calgary, she’s decided to move on.

I used to defend Calgary when people would put it down. But a few years ago, I don’t know if it’s the city or me or what, I realized I couldn’t stand it anymore… It’s all about the money. It’s about driving your SUV for an hour from your half-million dollar 5000-square foot house in the suburbs to pay $25 to park downtown every day. People are stressed, rushed, grim. The place is like Toronto but without the arts scene. So why would an old lefty punk rocker stay here?

Lori Hahnel, Love Minus Zero (Oberon Press, 2008)

Chris Turner's "Calgary Reconsidered"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

“I was never going to live in Calgary,” journalist and author Chris Turner says. And he certainly wasn’t going to write about it. But life had other things in store. A dozen years ago, he and his family moved to Calgary. In 2012, he wrote an essay for The Walrus about the changes he has observed in his adopted hometown. Turner considers six old truths about the city that still hold true, including this one: “Calgary is (still) Cowtown.”

If Stampede was just Stampede, a ten-day summer festival with calf roping and fireworks and those addictive mini-doughnuts, a free pancake breakfast in the parking lot of the nearest mall, and some overzealous boozing with co-workers – if that’s all it was, it wouldn’t inspire such spite. But it isn’t just that. It won’t just stay there on the flat land below Scotsman’s Hill, won’t keep quiet after the last explosion in the Grandstand fireworks show. You can’t just take it or leave it while the carnival is up and running. It insists on being everything to everyone everywhere, Calgary by proxy, the default iconographic setting for any discussion of the city and the province and the Canadian West in general. And to question its value, to argue that Calgary is a much more interesting city than its monomyth, is tantamount to blasphemy.

Chris Turner, “Calgary Reconsidered,” How to Breath Underwater (Biblioasis, 2014)

Cecelia Frey's "Ode to Fireworks During Stampede"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Fireworks over Calgary (Photo: Calgary Public Library, Postcards from the Past)

The poet sits atop Nose Hill watching the Stampede fireworks. She surrenders to the “electric air,” sees in the darkness “night flowers/blossoming/gone.”

I imagine the trillions of human beings

that exist, have existed, will exist

marching through pre-history

history, post-history

imagine them as spurts of colour

jetting into the sky

flowering, facing

disappearing

as black takes them

absorbs them

but there is always another

another

and another flower opening with such intensity

Cecelia Frey, “Ode To Fireworks During Stampede,” Under Nose Hill (Bayeux Arts, 2009)

Will Ferguson's 419

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary Stampede midway (Photo: Shelagh McHugh Cherak)

In the wake of her father’s apparent suicide, Calgarian Laura Curtis is “cataloguing memories, compiling an inventory of loss.” Who was this flawed, beloved man who got tangled in the deadly web of a Nigerian 419 scam? She remembers a childhood trip to the Stampede: the rough-and-tumble of the chuckwagon races, the clang and noise of midway rides, carneys touting games of chance. “Throw a ball, win a prize! It’s just that easy.” In her memory, Laura finds traces of the man her father was.

While waiting in line for mini-doughnuts – moist and warm and dusted with cinnamon, the highlight of any Stampede midway visit – Laura had walked ahead, down the line, while her dad held their spot. She’d peered seriously at the menu-board options, decided after great deliberation to get the Big Bag, and was hurrying back when she kicked something underfoot. A twenty-dollar bill.

She ran, breathless, back to her dad. “Look what I found!”

Her elation didn’t last, though. “Sweetie,” he said. “It’s not ours to keep.”

Will Ferguson, 419 (Penguin, 2012)

Dymphny Dronyk's "What Beer Can Do"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Stampede square dancers, 1982 (Photo: Rainer Halama, Wikimedia Commons)

Nashville North. The air is thick with the “sweaty cologne of drugstore cowboys/with undertones of puke,” and she’s dancing.

Shine my buckle, baby, he yells in my ear,

pulls me tight against him,

and two-steps me around backwards,

sloooooooow, sloooooooooow, quick-quick

one body with too many feet

we stumble, no gliding here

Dymphny Dronyk, “What Beer Can Do,” The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual (Frontenac House, 2014).

Jackie Flanagan's Grass Castles

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Game of chance, Calgary Stampede midway (Photo: Shelagh McHugh Cherak)

Maureen’s family is barely making ends meet. It’s the 1950s and they’re living in a new house at the edge of Bowness, a small town beyond the western edge of Calgary. In the evenings, Maureen’s mother pores over her budget book. With five children to raise, there is never enough money. Her father squanders his pay on booze and loses his job. When her mother goes to work, Maureen and her father set out in his old green Pontiac. Wilf Carter croons the bluebird song on the radio as they drive into Calgary. They make the rounds, visiting her father’s friends, letting the summer day play out as it will.

It was about closing time so we all head down to the Stampede.

Marcel and Dad worked the nickel slot machines – Gold Diggers. Dad won some money. They played the Roulette Wheel. I made patterns in the sawdust at my feet. When it was very dark Dad bought me a corn-on-the-cob.

At midnight he put me on his shoulders above the noise and smells of the Midway and I looked up at the clear clean sky, so calm, and fireworks exploded breaking its smooth blue skin.

Dad lifted me out of the car cradling me in his arms like a baby.

“This beats everything, John,” Mom hissed. “You’ve pulled some real stunts in your time but this beats them all.”

Jackie Flanagan, Grass Castles (Bayeux Arts, 1998)

Catherine Moss's "Ruby Wedding Anniversary"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Heavy horses at the Calgary Stampede (Photo: Shelagh McHugh Cherak)

At the gates, the young woman waves them in – free Stampede passes for the couple in their fortieth year of marriage. They make their way through “a clamour of fried onions” toward the Big Top and the “sweet hay-sweat/of Percherons dappled and black.” When the heavy-horse show is over, her husband jumps from the bleachers.

I watch him drop

stumble

on a cardboard box

lurch backward

two inch bolt

slices

scalp

wound flows

into a bystander’s pack of tissues

my hand

sticky and scarlet

his shirt soaked

blood

dropping on straw and the upturned brim

of my new white

cowboy hat

Catherine Moss, “Ruby Wedding Anniversary,” Swallowing My Mother (Frontenac House, 2001)

Aritha van Herk's Mavericks

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary Stampede bull rider (Photo: Chuck Szmurlo, Wikimedia Commons)

On the first page of her popular history of Alberta, Aritha van Herk shows her cards: she is no historian. Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta will be idiosyncratic, a story born out of her life in Alberta and her life-long impatience with Central Canada’s clichéd notions about her home province. There are multiple lightning rods for the liberal Torontonians she is trying to educate; near the end of the book, she gets to the Calgary Stampede. There is no tiptoeing into the subject. Best to begin in the centre of things. Feel the heat of a July afternoon, taste the dirt in your mouth, watch a man riding a bull.

On a sweltering July afternoon, the grandstand at the Calgary Stampede groans under the weight of thousands of tourists and locals, intent and sweating in their costumes of blue jeans and cowboy hats. I’m there, bent toward the dust of the infield where a Brahma bull churns and fishhooks, horns swiping a parabola in the air, the man fastened to his back like a burr exercising some insane ritual that believes this ton of moving muscle can be subdued.

Aritha van Herk, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Penguin Canada, 2001)

John Ballem's Alberta Alone

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Pierre Trudeau rides in the Stampede Parade, 1978 (Photo: Calgary Herald)

It’s Sharon’s first Stampede parade and she’s anxious about parking and crowds. Leaving her Chevy Vega in an impromptu parking lot, she guides her five-year-old daughter to their reserved seats on one of the bleachers on Ninth Avenue. Soon, the cloudless sky is marred by a sense of menace. The crowd erupts into a thunder of boos and catcalls as the parade marshal approaches. Prime Minister Lambert sits rigid atop a golden palomino, glaring straight ahead. He ignores the banners and placards. STAY OUT OF ALBERTA… CANADA WHO NEEDS IT?... SEPARATE NOW. The parade continues and the tension eases. Sharon’s daughter delights in the animal mascots dancing down the street. Then a giant raccoon scoops the girl up and dances her into the parade.  

The laughter died on Sharon’s lips as the animal figure disappeared in the mass of prancing horses… In the distance she saw the furry figure with the small, pale face of her child peering over its shoulder. The blaring racket of the band still blotted out all other sounds but she could see Shelley’s lips forming “Mommy, Mommy!” They disappeared behind a flower-decked float.

John Ballem, Alberta Alone (General Publishing, 1981)

Yvonne Trainer's Tom Three Persons

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Stampede Corral (Photo: Shelagh McHugh Cherak)

On Labour Day weekend 1912, six hundred First Nations people arrive in Calgary for the first Stampede. The impresario Guy Weadick has persuaded the authorities to allow Indians off their reserves to participate in the six-day celebration. Among them is Tom Three Persons, a young Blood man from the Standoff Reserve southwest of Lethbridge. The poet Yvonne Trainer sees the Stampede through Tom’s eyes. Walking through the streets of Calgary, he notices the electric lights shining in windows.

Power

in Calgary

and none of it

carried in the bag

of the Medicine Man

or in the wisdom

of the chief

On parade day, Tom canters down Eighth Avenue on horseback.

Painted faces       war-whoops

and feathers

we rode like burning hell

through the streets of Calgary

We were stared at with wonder

and with more than a little fear

At the rodeo, all eyes are on the gifted Blood horseman. He mounts a black bronco named Cyclone, an outlaw horse known among cowboys as the Black Terror.

everyone was standing hands clapping

stone to stone

Then I knew

and walked out lake-quiet

into the shadows

of the motor-cars

but someone with a box camera

came and drew me into the sun

and I couldn’t help

smiling a little

when he snapped this picture.

Yvonne Trainer, “1912,” “Calgary Stampede, 1912” and “Snapshot,” Tom Three Persons  (Frontenac House, 2002)

Nancy Huston's Plainsong

Calgary through the Eyes of Writers

First Stampede Parade, 1912 (Photo: Milward Marcell, Calgary Stampede)

Twelve-year-old Paddon Sterling rides into Calgary from a ranch southwest of town. His father steers the democrat through the crowds of people streaming into the city for the first Stampede, September 1912.

Calgary had gone mad. A quarter of a million people surged together to congratulate themselves on their health and wealth, their young strong virile brawny land, the rich lore of the West.

Paddon and his father watch the parade – “a fantabulous re-enactment” of the province’s short history. The boy stands "in a throng that lined both sides of Eighth Avenue twenty people thick and all you could smell were armpits.” For the first time, Paddon sees Indians in all their finery, waving “perplexedly to the crowds who had defeated them and were now tossing thousands of white Stetsons in the air to hail their illusive comeback in near delirium.”

At the rodeo, Paddon’s senses are assaulted "by the loud voices, the pushing and the stamping, the smell of rank excitement and manure.” Later, as his father dances with a strange, beautiful woman, Paddon begins to retch. They head home in the democrat, his father cursing, the boy “desperate… to be anywhere in the world” but here. 

As you left the fairgrounds you began to sneeze again and [your father] burst out, For the luva God, Paddon, wot is the matter with yer… I go out o’ my way to give yer a treat and yer go an’ wreck the whole bleedin’ day. I’m tellin’ yer man, there won’t be too many more chances, if yer want to ride broncs yer better look sharp ‘cos I can’t be bothered with crybabies always snufflin’ in a hanky.

Nancy Huston, Plainsong (HarperCollins, 1993)

Katherine Govier's Between Men

Calgary through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary Stampede Ferris Wheel (Photo: Shelagh McHugh Cherak)

After a decade in Toronto, Suzanne Vail has come back to Calgary. She wanted to settle in the east, but “There she’d had too little weight, no depth; she had passed along the streets like a shadow.” And besides, in Toronto she could never see the sky. “It’s like being up to your eyeballs in hills and trees. It’s like standing on a bed that’s gone soft.”

Coming home to Calgary in the mid-1980s is a bumpy ride. Suzanne is at odds with the city: the traffic, the construction, the macho culture of money. “It was a striving kind of place. Always trying and never, by accident of geography, arriving.”

She cowboys up for Stampede: fringed vest, beaded belt, white Stetson. Only her shit kickers are authentic: riding boots she wore as a teenager during her horsey phase. For old time’s sake, she goes down to the Stampede grounds. She rides the Ferris wheel and reacquaints herself with the view.

She was on the front of the wheel, gently swinging. It turned a dozen feet and stopped to load. She saw her years stacked beneath her in stages; she had ridden on that seat, and then that one. She could see up to the North Hill, down to the river. There was so much out there, in this large bowl offered of the city, much more even than she ever thought. The higher she got the more she could see. There was no need for limits. The wheel turned and stopped, turned and stopped. At last it was full. Grandly lifting to begin the descent, she rose up from the centre and went over the top.

Katherine Govier, Between Men (Viking, 1987)

Edna Alford's "Half Past Eight"

Calgary through the Eyes of Writers

Bing Crosby at the Stampede Parade, 1959 (Photo: Alison Jackson Collection, Calgary Public Library)

Stampede Parade Day, 1977. Tessie Bishop and Flora Henderson head out of the seniors’ lodge where they live and ride the city bus to Mewata Stadium. They’re an odd couple. Tessie, thin and petite in her best summer dress and Scarlet Fire lipstick, and Flora, tall and big-boned with fuzzy pin curls sticking out from under her straw hat. They find their seats in the midday heat, clutching Revels and paper cups of Orange Crush, Flora cursing as they go. “Why don’t you watch where you’re goin’, ya dirty bugger.” They’re just in time for the parade marshal: Prince Charles, riding an RCMP stallion. Almost as exciting, Tessie thinks, as the time Bing Crosby waved at her from his convertible when he was parade marshal years before.

By the time the parade finishes, the women are hot and thirsty. Tessie hails a Yellow Cab and they head to the Palliser Hotel. Inside, they settle into red velvet chairs in the Rimrock Lounge and order drinks: a Shanghai Sling for Tessie, a shot of whiskey – neat – for Flora. After their second drink, an old man in western clothes joins them and buys two more rounds. Unlike their friends back at the lodge, Tessie and Flora will be out well after half past eight.

“Well wha’ did you ladies think of it this year?” asked Hank.

“Stacks up, I’d say,” said Tessie. “Better than last year’s if you ask me.”

“Didya ever see so much horseshit in all yer life?” Hank shook his heavy hawk head.

“Never,” Tessie replied, emphatically.

“Seems to me it don’t all come from a horse’s ass neither.”

Edna Alford, “Half Past Eight,” A Sleep Full of Dreams (Oolichan, 1981) 

Anthologized in Alberta Bound: Thirty Stories by Alberta Writers, Fred Stenson, ed. (NeWest Press, 1985)

Writing the City: The First Post

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary's Eighth Avenue, 1912 (postcard)

I have lived in Calgary most of my life, but I have rarely seen the city imagined on the page. For a long time, I thought it was the city’s fault. The soil seemed too thin for the literary imagination, too far away from the country’s literary centre.

In 1983, the Alberta author Jon Whyte argued that writers had failed to evoke Calgary’s specialness in their fiction or poetry.

This winter, I set out to see if his assessment still holds true.

I thought my search would be brief, that at best, I might find a novel or two, a handful of poems, a few essays and plays. But months later, I am still at it. Books crowd my desk. A reading list has blossomed as sudden and urgent as a Calgary spring. The city, it turns out, has a literary landscape: all I had to do was go looking.

In the weeks to come, I will be posting glimpses of the city as writers have imagined it. You will find excerpts, a little context and links so you can track down the featured work. If you have a favourite Calgary story you think I should check out, please let me know.

Stampede is around the corner, so that’s where we begin. New posts will appear on Fridays. I hope you’ll drop by often.

Welcome to Writing the City: Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers.