Angie Abdou's The Bone Cage

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Students performing in front of the George Norris sculpture (known on campus as The Prairie Chicken) at the University of Calgary in 1977. (Photo: Glenbow Museum)

Swimmer Sadie Jorgenson is training for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She spends her days in the University of Calgary pool, where she “has memorized every line, every crack, every drain, every single wad of gum.” On a March afternoon, Sadie comes up for air. On the lawn in front of the Phys Ed complex, she meets her friend Lucinda.

Calgary has started to melt, and the smell of wet soil fills Sadie’s nostrils; a fast chinook wind blows her hair in her eyes. She raised her face into the warm air, breathes deeply, knows it won’t last. It’s not even the end of March. Calgarians will see minus twenty again.

Sadie and Lucinda walk across campus, past the student union building and towards the Phys Ed complex. Undergrads pour out of the buildings into the sun’s warmth, prematurely wearing shorts and pushing their sleeves over their shoulders, splaying their bodies across benches, playing Frisbee on the wet grass, skidding across the patches of snow. Sadie wants to rest in the sunshine too. “Want to stop, Lucinda? Time? I’ve got half an hour before my cage shift.” She slows her pace and points at a green bench were two boys pack books into knapsacks, rushing off to class.

Both boys wear mirrored glasses and have just the slightest hint of sunburn on the tips of their noses. One of them smiles at Sadie and Lucinda, and waves his arm over the abandoned bench as if he’s prepared it just for them. “Enjoy, my ladies.”

In Calgary, everyone is friendlier during a chinook.

Angie Abdou, The Bone Cage (NeWest Press, 2007)

Katherine Govier's Between Men

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

The Calgary Herald arrived in the city days before the railway in the summer of 1883. The first issue was published in a canvas tent. In 1887, the paper moved into this purpose-built sandstone block on Stephen Avenue, where the Divino Bistro now stands. (Photo: Glenbow Museum)

February 28, 1889. A Calgary blacksmith called “Jumbo” Fisk mutilates and murders a Cree girl named Rosalie New Grass above a seedy downtown bar. A century later, a young historian, Suzanne Vail returns to Calgary, struggling to find her footing in her hometown after a decade in Toronto. She spends hours in the local history collection at the old sandstone library, a few blocks from the scene of that long-ago killing on Scarth Street. Puzzling through the facts and the missing pieces of the city’s Jack the Ripper murder, she decides to tell the story through a man she calls Murphy. He’s an outsider, and a meddler. In the days after the murder, Murphy hangs out downtown, eavesdropping and scheming. As his story about Rosalie New Grass unfolds, Murphy will reveal his own twisted part in her murder.

I went down to the little building where the Herald had its offices, east on Stephen Avenue past the Bodega restaurant. It was quiet in there. The editor was out, and the printers elsewhere. I thought an editorial would be the right idea at that point, as opinions were forming and reforming everywhere. But what would I write?

The town was divided on Rosalie’s case. Most of the top men wanted the whole thing hushed up, and quickly… I toyed with the title “Dead is dead, white or red,” on my sheet of paper, but decided against it. This was no time for word play.

The fact that our little murder came on the heels of London’s Jack and his last strike in Whitechapel had fanned the flames of panic; I suppose I didn’t want to encourage them any more. Mine is an academic interest; though some think me ill-willed, I’m just as happy to see right as wrong.

Katherine Govier, Between Men (Viking, 1987) 

David Albahari's Snow Man

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

YYC (Photo: Blair Carbert)

A writer arrives at the Calgary airport after a turbulent overseas flight. He has left his home in war-torn Yugoslavia to serve as writer-in-residence at the university. From the passport control area, he spots the driver holding a sign with his name. He joins the throng of passengers leaving the transit area, and walks down “the narrow, partitioned passageway like a funnel emptying into the world.”

In the beginning, as we left the airport, I tried to follow our route, memorize the sequence of turns, as if I were entering a labyrinth from which I would later have to work to extricate myself, but soon I gave that up. The city was too big, night was descending incredibly swiftly, the street names flitted by too fast, there were no city squares, and to my side the city center swept by, as if on a movie screen, dozens of skyscrapers packed with light like glowing stars. Several times my head slumped to my chest, my eyelids lowered from exhaustion, my jaw went limp and dropped into emptiness, but each time I managed to recover, with a jolt, and with the hope that the driver hadn’t noticed anything. Only later, when I was alone in the house, did my exhaustion catch up with me, and I felt as if I were falling apart, and I thought, “I will grow old here.”

David Albahari, Snow Man (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005)

Weyman Chan's "Calgary in February"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

The Plaza Theatre by Calgary artist, Stan Phelps (Photo: Arcadja Auctions)

For the poet in inner-city Kensington, “pastorally winter sucks.” A “sparrow-thing” offers a small comfort as it dives into a Japanese lilac, “dune frost pampering each blow.” But it is the street that captures his attention. A girl in Hello Kitty western boots skipping with her mother “like fire-eaters/toward the hurdy gurdies at Livingston & Cavell.”  Hipsters in fedoras “chatting up graces of the vexed/and crawly eyed.” The marquee at the Plaza Theatre announcing its latest offering.

Across the street the world’s

best commercials are at two

well you can put a price on just about

anyone’s salted butter lavished

over the dark I’m in, thin, screamy,

and now the curtains unfold

to my astigmatism

looking out for itself

Weyman Chan, “Calgary in February,” Chinese Blue (Talonbooks, 2012)

Suzette Mayr's Monoceros

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Chinook arch over Calgary in mid-winter  (Photo: Weather Network)

February, and the city is in the midwinter grip of “ice winds and mood flurries.” In Calgary’s northwest, a community reels after the suicide of a boy subjected to interminable homophobic bullying at his Catholic high school. The week before Patrick Furey takes his own life, a Chinook wind turns the air warm and fragrant. Patrick and Ginger, the boy he loves, come together in the cemetery halfway between their houses. Their meeting is a brief reprieve in “a winter that never ends.”

The dead boy and Ginger wrestled into scorching sex in the dead grass, hot enough to start a grass fire, their bodies flaring in the dark, in the middle of a February chinook, the smell of chinook wind and Ginger in his nose, Bed Head shampoo, blue wool sweater the dead boy pulled up over Ginger’s head, Ginger’s sweaty silky ribcage, flowery fabric softener from all six of the their shirts, Ginger’s tongue pushing bright as a meteor into the dead boy’s, Ginger’s nipples, the warm salt of him, behind a tombstone that said, Lél Somogyi Gone But Never Forgotten 1987-2004. Ginger’s torso naked and slick, dead grass and twigs sticking to his skin.

Suzette Mayr, Monoceros (Coach House Books, 2011)

Susan Calder's Deadly Fall

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Dennis Oppenheim's "Device to Root Out Evil" was installed in Ramsay, a few blocks away from the murder site in Susan Calder's novel. The sculpture became a landmark during its stay in Calgary between 2008 and 2014. (Photo: Calgary Public Library, Judith Umbach Photograph Collection) 

Paula Savard notices the crime scene on her way home from work. Yellow tape blocks the entrance to the Elbow River trail by the railway bridge near her house in Ramsay. Police officers in coveralls scour the site. In her renovated clapboard-and-stucco bungalow, Paula listens in disbelief as a reporter identifies the murder victim: Paula’s girlhood friend, Callie Moss. The next day in her kitchen, Paula tells two Calgary police detectives how a summer road trip in 1973 from Montreal to Vancouver ended with both friends living in Calgary. After Callie’s fling with a folk rock musician that summer, she married an oilman and settled into a comfortable life in Mount Royal. For Paula, the decision to move to Calgary happened twenty years later: a fresh start with unexpected turns.

Most people assumed they had moved to escape the sour mood that permeated English Quebec after the 1995 independence referendum. The move was more to rejuvenate their personal lives. She was tired of working for a large insurance firm. Gary, her husband, was tired of being a small insurance agent, but couldn’t find anything better due to his lack of fluency in French. Most of their friends had already left Montreal. They decided to hopscotch Ontario and try Calgary. They liked its gung-ho atmosphere. Callie was here; Gary got along with her then husband, Kenneth.

The water jug was empty. She got up to refill it, glad for the opportunity to stretch her legs. With the sun’s movement to the front of the house, the kitchen had grown cool and dark. The unstated reason, even at the time, for her and Gary’s move to Calgary was a hope that the change would boost their stagnant marriage.

Susan Calder, Deadly Fall (Touchwood Editions, 2011)

L. R. Wright's Among Friends

Calgary through the eyes of writers

The Bow River near Calgary's Inglewood, January 1, 2016 (Photo: Shaun Hunter)

Leona is home after spending the Christmas holidays with her parents in BC’s Lower Mainland. Usually, she’s anxious to get back to her job as a senior editor at one of Calgary’s newspapers. This year, she is reluctant to resume her daily life. The holidays were happily uneventful: no sign of the panic attacks that plagued her in the fall. From the warmth of her apartment, she pauses to consider the Calgary weather. She has no choice but to go out into it: her friend Marion is moving into an old house across the Bow River, and Leona has offered to help.

The day in January that Marion moved was very cold but clear, except that ice fog breathed from the earth, obscuring the outlines of things, filling the air with white; the sun, struggling to penetrate it, had lost much of its light and all of its warmth by the time it got down to ground level. Leona, gazing from her apartment window, thought it looked like another planet out there. The coldness was a thing of unquestionable malevolence. It would strike skin numb, and make breathing painful. She thought there was a lot to be said for the colorless rain which had fallen on southwestern British Columbia at Christmas.

L. R. Wright, Among Friends (Doubleday, 1984)

Anita Rau Badami's Tamarind Mem

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Detail from "Qol/Voice, 1987," by Calgary artist John Brocke (1953-2009). The painting depicts a street in Crescent Heights. 

When Kamini told her mother she was moving from India to Calgary to pursue her studies as an engineer, her mother was incredulous. “Calgary?...Where is this place? Has anybody ever heard of it? What is so special there that you have to go, hanh?” Her mother is right. This is the North Pole, and Kamini is cold and homesick. On their regular Sunday phone calls, there is no point in complaining. Her mother, abrupt and critical, speaks with a tamarind tongue. For comfort, Kamini turns to her memories, family photographs and stories. The phone calls stop. Her mother, free for the first time in a lifetime, is on the move, making a solo pilgrimage around India. As the Calgary snow obscures the narrow windows of Kamini’s basement apartment, she pores over her mother's postcards, feeling the complex tug of home.

I felt like a mole tunnelled into its lair of darkness, weary of the never-ending night that had descended on the city. When I left home in the morning the stars were still scattered in the sky, the moon a pale aureole. And at five in the evening when I trudged home laden with coat and sweater and muffler and mitts, barely able to turn my head for the padding around my neck, it was still night. I held Ma’s card against my face and breathed in deeply. Opened my eyes and I could see, against the implacable white of the snow outside my window, dark leaves and the bright colour of fruit ripening in the sun. My mouth filled with the tart juice of a burst orange.

Anita Rau Badami, Tamarind Mem (Penguin Books, 1996)

Don Gillmor's Long Change

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Downtown Calgary in 1972, at the beginning of what novelist Don Gillmor has called the city's "decade of collective madness" (Photo: via BuzzBuzzHome News)

“Nineteen seventy-nine had been a glorious year, a drunken march into the future, staggering under the weight of new riches.” The price of oil had skyrocketed and Calgary oilman Ritt Devlin was one of the many who had made a fortune. On New Year’s Eve, Ritt stands at the window of his office high above downtown Calgary and considers the city.

Behold the New Rome. Twenty-nine construction cranes were poised like carrion birds along the skyline. Every month, thousands moved here: welders, labourers from the East, professionals, criminals, women with tight jeans and damaged blonde hair who bought cowboy boots and drank shooters and hoped the city would shower them with love…

In three years, oil had gone from $14 to $35 a barrel, and that leap had made fortunes for a lot of people, including Ritt. Yet each time West Texas Intermediate crept up another fifty cents, he felt increasingly unsettled. One of the effects of expensive oil was it made people feel they were smarter than they were. Every half-baked junior with two producing wells was suddenly a genius. They convinced themselves it wasn’t market forces (and some manipulation) that made them rich; it was wisdom and insight and corporate courage. And this kind of instant wealth made them feel like they weren’t quite getting enough even as they were getting more than they ever had in their lives. It fuelled a sense of want, it redefined need, everyone living like Elvis. And the nagging remains of Ritt’s Pentecostal upbringing felt a judgment coming.

From his view on the nineteenth floor, the city resembled a huge toy, a model of an urban landscape some billionaire had bought for his useless child, the scale reading one inch = one inch. Ritt took his tuxedo off the hanger and laid it on his desk, then stripped to his underwear. He stood in the window and stared down at the city, ironically recalling Matthew 25: When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.

Don Gillmor, Long Change (Random House, 2015)

Literary Map of Canada, 1936

Calgary through the eyes of writers

A literary map of Canada circa 1936, compiled by William Arthur Deacon; drawn and embellished by Stanley Turner; published by MacMillan.

Eight decades ago, Calgary made it onto William Arthur Deacon’s 1936 literary map of Canada. Zoom in on the city and you will see references to four literary works associated with Calgary and its environs:

• Ralph Connor’s 1899 bestselling western, The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills 
• Arthur Stringer’s 1922 The Prairie Stories, a trilogy set on a ranch southwest of the city
• Frederick Niven’s 1935 The Flying Years, a novel about Western settlement
• Isabel Ecclestone MacKay's 1922 poem “Calgary Station” 

Rosemary Griebel's "Walking with Walt Whitman Through Calgary's Eastside on a Winter Day"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

South Bank of the Bow River near the Langevin Bridge, December 30, 1954 (Photo: Glenbow Museum)

The poet walks through Calgary’s downtown east side on a bitter winter afternoon. The 19th century American poet, Walt Whitman is on her mind, and his Leaves of Grass, poems that celebrate the world. Beside her, the Bow River “churns and smokes/as the city rumbles, economy chokes and bundled homeless/build cardboard homes in the snow.” In this bleak, frigid landscape where “crystal/meth is more common than a leaf of grass,” the poet reaches for Whitman’s “relentless cheer” and his “great capacity for wonder.”

There I quaffed the sharp chiseled air, the slow, sad light

of merciless winter and said, yes, this world is for my mouth forever…

And I am in love with it.

Yes.

Rosemary Griebel, Yes (Frontenac House, 2011)

Graham Greene's "Dear Dr Falkenheim"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Chinook Centre, Christmas 1963. Business as usual, as far as I could tell.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the British novelist Graham Greene travelled to Alberta several times to visit his daughter, a rancher near Cochrane. According to one account, Greene wrote a large part of his novel Our Man in Havana during one of his stays in Alberta. One of his Christmas visits sparked a short story published in 1963. In “Dear Dr Falkenheim,” an English couple and their six-year-old son move to Canada to “the great steely neon-lit city which lay on the foothills of the Rockies more than three thousand feet up.” In their bungalow on the outskirts of town, the narrator notes, they “did not feel in the least exiled in the far West. If anything there was a sense of exhilaration, of freedom, and of a new life beginning.” But on Christmas Eve, everything changes. At a suburban shopping mall not unlike Chinook Centre, the family awaits the arrival of Father Christmas who is scheduled to fly in by helicopter.

The sun would be going down soon below the Rockies and we heard the helicopter a long way off in the wide green sky; it rose vertically up from some store in the city, hovered like a vulture, and then came buzzing busily towards us, while the babies screamed and gurgled in the perambulators. When Father Christmas looked down from two hundred feet up, below the knifing rotary blades, he must have seen hundreds of open mouths. The helicopter circled above us, and he untied his sack and the air was full of small bright objects dropping down. They fell into the prams and into the cowboy hats and ricocheted all around beside the high heels and the miniature cowboy boots… Then swaying a little, first this way and then that, the helicopter sank slowly plumb in the centre of the roped-off space with its big rubber buffers, and a loudspeaker warned the parents to keep their children away until the blades stopped turning.

The trouble was, no one bothered to warn Father Christmas.

Graham Greene, “Dear Dr Falkenheim,” Graham Greene: Complete Short Stories (Penguin, 2005)

Rupert Brooke's Letters From America

Calgary through the eyes of writers

"The Civic Centre of Calgary as It May Appear Many Years Hence." In 1913, the city commissioned English landscape architect Thomas Mawson to design this plan for Calgary. Never realized, the plan was known as "Vienna on the Bow." (Image: Archives of Alberta)

In the summer of 1913, the charming young English poet, Rupert Brooke toured Canada by rail. In mid-August, he arrived in Calgary. The city was booming. Population had soared from 4,000 in 1901 to over 63,000, and along with it, civic dreams of a thriving metropolis. Brooke visited one of the newest jewels in the city’s crown: the public library on Second Street West. “Few large English towns,” he wrote to British readers in one of his regular dispatches to the Westminster Gazette, “could show anything as good.” That summer, weeks before the economy crashed and the boom turned to bust, Brooke saw a city hell bent on the future. If he didn’t experience an August heat wave during his visit to Calgary, he clearly felt hot air of another kind.

These cities grow in population with unimaginable velocity. From thirty to thirty thousand in fifteen years is the usual rate. Pavements are laid down, stores and bigger stores and still bigger stores spring up. Trams buzz along the streets towards the unregarded horizon that lies across the end of most roads in these flat, geometrically planned prairie-towns. Probably a Chinese quarter appears, and the beginnings of slums. Expensive and pleasant small dwelling-houses fringe the outskirts; and rents beings so high, great edifices of residential flats rival the great stores…

The inhabitants of these cities are proud of them, and envious of each other with a bitter rivalry. They do not love their cities as a Manchester man loves Manchester or a Münchener Munich, for they have probably lately arrived in them, and will surely pass on soon. But while they are there they love them, and with no silent love. They boost. To boost is to commend outrageously. And each cries up his own city, both from pride, it would appear, and for profit. For the fortunes of Newville are very really the fortunes of its inhabitants.

Rupert Brooke, Letters From America (Charles Scribner, 1916) 

Dale Lee Kwong's "Overcoming Adoption"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary's original Centre Street Bridge in 1912. Two years before this photo, the city's Chinatown was relocated from 10th Avenue and 1st Street West to the southern end of the bridge, where it remains to this day. (Photo: University of Alberta Libraries)

As a young woman, writer Dale Lee Kwong set out to discover the facts of her birth in 1960 in Calgary’s small Chinese community. Her search resulted in a few scraps of information. Years later, she receives a letter from her birth mother, Mei Li’an, who tells Kwong she was conceived in a rape in Calgary. I walk up and down Centre Street Bridge, Mei Li’an writes in her letter, contemplating suicide. This news and all its implications traumatize Kwong. Months after the revelation, she goes to the Centre Street Bridge, determined to cross, afraid she, too, might jump.

How many times did Mei Li’an pause here to think of her death? Did those thoughts give her strength while taking away mine? I looked at the passing traffic and nonchalant fellow walkers. Does anyone know about the woman who walked up and down this bridge in 1960? I put one foot in front of the other and kept walking. Can you see my shame?

Dale Lee Kwong, “ Overcoming Adoption: From Genesis to Revelations,” Somebody’s Child: Stories About Adoption (Touchwood Editions, 2011)

Bruce Hunter's In the Bear's House

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

400 million years ago during the Devonian period, Alberta lay close to the equator and was covered by expanding and receding seas (Map: Lloydminster Heavy Oil)

It’s the early 1960s and Will Dunlop is growing up in Ogden at the southeast edge of the city. The deaf boy everyone calls Trout is fascinated by the sea. His basement bedroom is a marine landscape he and his mother have painted aquamarine and dotted with pieces of fishing net, glass floats and his cherished collection of shells. From this refuge, Trout thinks about the world beyond his room, and another, ancient sea.

Above him, a small window and outside, the green laving of the lawn. Past the end of the street, the first farms on the edge of the city and behind them the raw bristle of brome, all that remained of the pale blonde prairie. Beyond the rising dunes of the foothills, the blue slopes of the Rockies, their edges snapped and jagged at the “moment” of upheaval, some twenty million years long. Themselves the wreckage of the Devonian seabed heaving thick plates of shale and limestone into the sky. In places, the shells and fossils of all the earlier seas littered some slopes with sea life so rich, it could be scooped up in delirious handfuls, like unburied treasure amongst the clouds.

Trapped six miles below his imaginary and silent ocean lurked the subterranean and tideless ooze of the Devonian Sea. Full of squashed marine life, darker and thicker than heavy syrup, toxic and exhilarating as any narcotic, pulled up in globular gulps by those mechanical tyrannosaurs, pump jacks, their obedient jaws smacking the ground. The domain of Trout at nine, and his future waiting to be lived and lost and escaped.

Bruce Hunter, In the Bear’s House (Oolichan Books, 2009)

Fred Stenson's The Story of Calgary

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Fred Stenson begins his history of Calgary with the words of a teller of tall tales, Robert E. Gard’s Johnny Chinook: “Anything can happen in Calgary and has.” In this slim volume published in 1994, Stenson recounts Calgary’s story of change over the course of the city's first century: from police fort to oil capital, and everything in between. He sees the city with a novelist’s eye, attentive not only to the characters that figure in Calgary’s past, but the way the city shapes the character of the people who call it home.

Calgary will always be a little out of sync with the rest of Canada. It did not originate in the fur trade. It is not situated in a forest. The people of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Europe were no more important to its development than the people of the United States. In the Great White North, Calgary is not even much of a winter city. The winter chinooks pull it out of the deep freeze into spring-like conditions again and again. The result of all this is that people either like or dislike Calgary a lot. It inspires little in the way of neutral opinion.

When Calgarians look to the future they tend to see brightness. This habit of optimism may be the key ingredient in the recipe that makes Calgary a pleasurable place to be. The expectation of good fortune lifts it up from the economic busts it is prone to, and helps it fly to record heights during the booms that are just as much its fate.

Fred Stenson, The Story of Calgary (Fifth House, 1994)

Ellen Kelly's "Snapshots: Life, Peace and Coffee on the Home Front"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

An aerial view of Battalion Park on Calgary's Signal Hill. The numbers represent a few of the infantry units that trained at Sarcee Camp during World War I: the 113th Lethbridge Highlands Infantry Battalion, the 51st Canadian Infantry Battalion, the 151st Central Alberta Battalion and the 137th Infantry Battalion of Calgary. (Photo: City of Calgary)

Ellen Kelly’s father was a World War I veteran who served in the 137th Infantry Battalion of Calgary. Before he was shipped overseas, he trained at Sarcee Camp on the Tsuu T’ina Reserve at the southwest edge of the city. In 1916, he and his fellow soldiers hauled fieldstones up a steep hill as a training exercise and formed their battalion numbers on the hillside. Decades later, Kelly contemplates the whitewashed stone numbers preserved on Signal Hill. She sifts through history, photographs and childhood memories to understand her father’s war. In the scene below, she is a cranky five-year-old, packed into her parents’ 1930s Chevy sedan for a picnic adventure on the outskirts of town. It will take her a lifetime to unearth the memory and see the significance of those rock numbers on the hill.

Finally we are there. We get out of the car in a field of tall grass and thistle. Daddy picks me up, looks south, to where he spent almost a year in Sarcee Camp, “learning to be a soldier,” he tells me. Then he looks northwest to the hillside, points at rocks that look to me like rubble.

Daddy pushes back his tweed cap and traces numbers in the air with his finger… He know exactly where the numbers lay…

I am busy with childish interests – chasing grasshoppers, plucking wildflowers, picking the burrs out of my socks.

Mom winds new film into the Kodak box camera, follows Daddy’s finger and takes a picture of the hillside. I eat my sandwich and swat mosquitoes, trying not to think of the long, dusty ride home.

Ellen Kelly, “Snapshots: Life, Peace and Coffee on the Home Front,” Embedded on the Home Front: Where Military and Civilian Lives Converge (Heritage House, 2012).

Betty Jane Hegerat's Running Toward Home

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Dinny the Dinosaur at the Calgary Zoo, as he once was. (Photo: City of Vancouver Archives)

Corey Brinkman is running away from home, again. For a twelve-year-old boy on his seventh foster family, the notion of home is confusing. This time, he bolts at the Calgary Zoo. The zoo gates close, it’s dark and Corey’s alone. He doesn’t know why he runs but sometimes running is the only thing he can do. On this cold spring night, he’s caged up on St. George’s Island like the zoo animals, scared but oddly at home. As the night wears on, he makes his way to the giant cement brontosaurus at the southern edge of the park. His most recent foster mom told him Dinny hadn’t always been fenced in. In her day, you could climb the dinosaur, or at least try until someone caught you. But Corey is too chicken. Or is he? Sizing up the brontosaurus, he feels a surge of confidence.

The dinosaur’s back was a cinch. Corey stood on the tip of the tail and, like a tightrope walker, made his way up the long curve until he was directly over the hind legs. His head felt like it was floating in front of him, lifting off his shoulders and disconnecting his thoughts from the heavy weight of his feet. He had a clear view across the river to dark houses. Look over his left shoulder, past shrubs and trees, and there were the black conservatory windows. Glance over his right shoulder, through lacy leaves, and there was the dark path leading to the tiger’s small world. But best of all, from where he stood steady and tall on the hump of Dinny’s back, he could see two security guards floodlit against the back wall of their office. They leaned there, smoking and staring across the park at Dinny. And he knew that they couldn’t see him. At last, he was invisible.

Betty Jane Hegerat, Running Toward Home (NeWest Press, 2006)

Nellie McClung's The Stream Runs Fast

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

The Nellie McClung House (803-15th Avenue SW) is currently home to the Colombian Consulate. An enhanced replica of McClung's Calgary home opened in 2014 at Heritage Park as the Famous Five Centre of Canadian Women. (Photo: Calgary Herald)

The morning after the 1926 provincial election, Nellie McClung slept until she heard “the clip-clop of the milkman’s horses” outside her half-timbered Calgary home on the corner of 15th Avenue and 7th Street West. The radio confirmed what she suspected: she had lost her Liberal opposition seat in the Alberta legislature. The defeat came as a shock, but on that sunny June morning, McClung rallied, rolled up her sleeves and set to work.

No woman can be utterly cast down who has a nice bright kitchen facing the west, with a good gas range and a blue-and-white checked linoleum on the floor, a cookbook, oil-cloth covered and dropsical with looseleaf editions. I set off at once on a perfect debauch of cooking. I grated cheese, stoned dates, whipped cream, and made salad dressing, and I let the phone ring. It could tear itself out by the roots for all I cared. I was in another world–the pleasant, landlocked, stormless haven of double boilers, jelly moulds, flour sifters. The old stone sugar crock with the cracked and handleless cup in it seemed glad to see me, and even the marmalade tins with their typed labels, sitting in a prim row, welcomed me back and asked no questions. I patted their honest flat heads and admitted that the years had been long; reminding them, too, that I had seen a lot more wear and tear than they had…

I do not think I could have endured it that day if my cooking had gone wrong, but nothing failed me, and no woman can turn out an ovenfull of good flaky pies with well-cooked undercrusts and not find peace for her troubled soul.

Nellie McClung, The Stream Runs Fast (1945)

Will Ferguson's 419

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

View of Calgary from the North Hill, 1911 (Photo: Calgary Public Library)

Laura Curtis lives in a shopping mall. Her apartment elevator delivers her into the village of North Hill Centre. Everything she needs is here: food court, pharmacy, gym; hair salon, doctor’s office, chocolate shop. Her life is constrained and careful. She lives alone, works from home editing books about other people’s lives. Keeps things simple. From her apartment window, she watches the city with the cool, steady gaze of a copy editor.

Laura’s windows were aligned not with the mountains but toward downtown; they looked onto that sandstone-and-steel city below with its Etch-a-Sketch skyline, a city that was constantly erasing and rewriting itself… She could chart the price of a barrel of oil from her bedroom window by the turning of construction cranes along the skyline. When the price fell below some magical point, the cranes would slow down. And then stop. When the price rose again, the cranes would start up, spinning anew. Faster and faster.

The Heart of the New West. That’s what they called the city. And from up here, it did indeed beat like a heart, like one of those stop-motion films of traffic pulsing on aortal avenues.

Will Ferguson, 419 (Penguin, 2012)