A Fireside Chat in Calgary's Marda Loop

A novelist, a nonfiction writer, a First Nations elder and a moderator gather in front of a fireplace and a crowd of eighty readers and writers at the Marda Loop community hall.

The stories begin.

A young Irish civil servant immigrates to the Canadian West in the 1960s looking for “something better someplace else.”

A six-year-old Siksika girl attends residential school on a reserve east of Calgary. She can see her family's house a mile away but she can't go home. 

A woman on a ranch in southwest Saskatchewan puzzles over the meaning of a dream about a coyote.

Chatting fireside with Sharon Butala, Brian Brennan, Ruth Scalp Lock and her co-wrier, Jim Pritchard (Photo: Marda Loop Community Association)

The Irishman is now a nonfiction writer who chronicles the lives of the historical characters in his adopted West. He quotes Alberta author, Robert Kroetsch. “We haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real.”

The Siksika girl is now an esteemed elder in her community. Under the huge Alberta sky, she and the friend who is helping her write her memoir set out to find the spokes of an ancient medicine wheel in the tinder-dry prairie.

The woman on that prairie ranch is now a writer. In her novel, she creates a fictional pioneer town in southwest Saskatchewan. In the pile of buffalo bones at the edge of the village, the novelist finds ghosts, grieving and responsibility.

Words – specific, inspiring, challenging, complex –  West.

In the next post: my introductory remarks for this fireside chat.

Notes after a One Yellow Rabbit play about Calgary

“The City is a nest and distraction. Safe and dangerous, comforting and alien, it exhausts and energizes in equal measure. Does a city that spends much of its energy visualizing what is occurring below the surface of the earth have a quality notion of what’s going on above?

Who are we as a city? If an animal, what kind? If a gender, what variety? Are we a griffin or a gopher? A sphinx or a spaniel? A warrior-queen or a tipsy teen?

Does the city have a soul and if so how do we describe it? Just who the hell are we now?”

“Calgary I Love You, But You’re Killing Me”  

1.     Small talk from the row behind, people comparing their Calgary pedigrees. E. P. Scarlett, Henry Wise Wood.

2.      The city imprints itself on the adolescent soul, shapes the contours of personal geography. (Wise Wood, Class of 1979.)

3.     Does the city have a soul?

4.     Soul, noun: the spiritual or immaterial component or nature of a human being or animal (or city), regarded as the seat of the emotions or intellect.

5.     The tangible city, in music and verse. “Paisley shirts with pearl button nipples”; fitness club confidential; Chicken-on-the-Way.

6.     Psychogeography.

7.     When it comes to a city, is the soul in the eye of the beholder? Is it something we all have to agree upon? Or both?

8.     Dance interlude: traffic jam.

9.     The soul of Calgary is rush-hour traffic, speeding up, cutting in, cursing. (Whatever happened to the courtesy wave?)

10.  “Rear-view mirrors: we don’t need them.”

11.  Dream sequence: Mermaids of the Bow.

12.  This is a city with stories still to be told. 

13.  Musical bridge: the first bars of David Foster’s Olympic theme song, and laughter. A joyful inside joke. (And an inner surge of civic pride you don’t entirely trust.)

14.  There is a reluctance to love this city. Maybe even fear.

15.  Dance interlude: a Calgary pas de trois with squirrel, gopher and magpie.

16.  Denise Clarke as magpie: the walk, the squawk. Stage lights catch the glint of her corvid smile.

17.  Is the soul of Calgary a magpie?

18.  “I’m a positive magpie." Eyes on the shiny bits. Noisy bird/city. Ungovernable. Insatiable. Creative.

19.  The magpie spirit of Michael Green.

20.  Monologue: A Toronto transplant tells the familiar story. The place she left behind (history), the place where she arrived (hope), the city where she lives (Calgary).

21.  Does the soul of a city look different when you call it home?

22.  Monologue in a minor key: a woman in the Arriva Tower drowns in a tumbler of Grey Goose, nurses the lost promise of her youth.

23.  The ghost of Dorothy Joudrie haunts this town.

24.  Segue to a middle-aged oilman in a moment of reflection, looking past his magpie self, into the strata of his conscience.

25.  Solo: the poetry of geology.

26.  A theme with literary variations: here and here.

27.  The city rises out of rock. Its slippery petrochemical profits. And the past we ignore.

28.  “The frontier is a contemporary idea.”

29.  How does a fixation on the frontier/future affect the soul?

30.  (And what about your future? After a lifetime in the magpie city, can you embrace the place that shaped you? Can you live anywhere else?)

31.  A city of open questions.

32.  Make like a yellow rabbit/magpie.

33.  Engage.

34. Imagine.

Writing the City: A Look Behind the Scenes of the Blog

Thanks to Susan Toy, author, blogger and one-time Calgarian, for featuring my blog, Writing the City: Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers, on her blog.

p.s. If where you live is as as wintry as Calgary in mid-January, check out Susan’s mystery novel, Island in the Clouds, set under the palm trees of Bequia. And, if you’re prowling around for a good book to read, visit her excellent Reading Recommendations site.

New Year's Greetings from Calgary

I love the handwritten message on this 1906 postcard: "Which one are you?" No doubt, the sender had something else in mind. For me, the postcard is the perfect tagline for the blog series I launched during Stampede Week in 2015.

Seeing Calgary through the eyes of writers reminds me that this is a complicated city with a multitude of stories that capture the particular essence of this place. 

So far, the blog has run 37 posts spanning the city's 140-year history, its geography and the literary genres. The posts have struck a chord with resident Calgarians, far-flung expatriates and literary travellers. 

Thanks to all of you who have joined me on this virtual walk through Calgary's literary landscape, and welcome to those who are just tuning in. I hope you discover the city you recognize, and the one you've never seen before.