A SENSE OF PLACE
Many Canadian authors evoke a particular locale in their writing
Not everyone needs to be Susanna
Moodie roughing it in the bush of 19th-century Ontario. But many authors do evoke a sense of place that makes their writing seem distinctly Canadian.
In both his poetry and prose,
Michael Crummey ( b. 1965) often draws on the history and landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador ( he was born in Buchans and grew up in Wabush). The short stories in his Journey Prize-nominated Flesh and Blood, for example, are set in the fictional mining town of Black Rock, which resembles Buchans.
Also in Atlantic Canada, David
Adams Richards ( b. 1950) is firmly rooted in his New Brunswick birthplace both in his writing (novels, screenplays, non-fiction) and teaching, where he is currently artist in residence at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. And of course we can’t forget
Lucy Maud Montgomery (18741942) who paints a vivid portrait of Prince Edward Island in the books of her creation Anne of Green Gables.
In Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, McGill University economist and humorist Stephen Lea
cock (1869-1944) exposes the foibles of small-town Mariposa, a thinly disguised Orillia, Ont. (where the Leacock summer home is now a museum and source of a humour medal named in his honour).
Montreal- born Mordecai
Richler (1931-2001) drew on his Jewish heritage in bilingual Montreal to examine cultural clashes in novels including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain’s Horseman and Barney’s Version and in essays collected in Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!
More recently, Heather O’Neill
( b. 1973) portrays 1990s referendum-era Montreal in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and in the early 20th century between the world wars in The Lonely Hearts Hotel. The various writings of Rob
ertson Davies (1913-95) have many connections to Ontario. His Thamesville birthplace is in part the model for his trilogy set in fictional Deptford (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders), while Kingston (where he studied at Queen’s University) is generally seen disguised as the fictional university town of his breakout Salterton trilogy (TempestTost, Leaven of Malice, A Mixture of Frailties). Other works, including an incomplete Toronto trilogy, draw on aspects of his academic life at Trinity and Massey colleges at the University of Toronto.
Making the Salterton academia seem quaint by comparison, playwright Judith Thompson ( b. 1954) explores the darker underbelly of Kingston’s rough north end in her seminal 1980 play The Crackwalker.
Nobel Prize winner Alice Mun
ro ( b. 1931) is a rare author closely associated with two distinct locales, with short stories firmly rooted in southwestern Ontario, where she grew up, and also British Columbia, where she moved after her first marriage. Though born in Sri Lanka, Mi
chael Ondaatje ( b. 1943) has lived in Canada since 1962 and has long been a champion of Canadian literature. His 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion centres on the building of Toronto’s Bloor Viaduct spanning the Don Valley, completed in 1918.
Margaret Laurence ( 192687) wrote about her childhood in Neepawa, Man., in her novel Bird in the House and set her bestknown novel, The Stone Angel, in the fictional Manitoba small town of Manawaka (also referenced in her final novel, The Diviners).
Perhaps no writer is more closely associated with the Prairies as
W. O. Mitchell (1914-98), most notably in his novel Who Has Seen the Wind and short story collection Jake and the Kid.
In her early works and her most recent novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien
( b. 1974) explores ideas of family, belonging and locale closely tied to her life in Vancouver.
Born in Whitehorse, Yukon, narrative historian Pierre Berton (1920-2004) examines the importance of Canada’s North in books about the Klondike Gold Rush and the growth of Canadian identity in the building of the railway.
And although born in Belleville, Ont., Farley Mowat (1921-2014) wrote evocatively of the North in books ranging from People of the Deer and Lost in the Barrens to The Snow Walker.
It seems with so much geography, Canada also has no shortage of inspiration.