Inundation provided inspiration to city’s artists
It was a rough 48 hours for poet Richard Harrison.
When flood waters swept through Calgary in June of 2013, his Sunnyside basement was among the casualties. He lost a lifetime of poetry books, letters, notes and works-in-progress. Ten thousand papers were under water, another ten thousand were partially soaked. It felt like his entire world, his past and his present, had unravelled.
But, somehow, that wasn’t even the worst of it. For a devastating couple of days, Harrison also feared that his father’s ashes had been carried away by the water.
“That upheaval of the flood, artistically, was a huge moment that said I needed to reorganize everything,” Harrison says. “In terms of substance, it gave me poems to write: the flood at the Saddledome, the flood at work, the flood and my father’s ashes. But it also, spiritually, threw everything into such disarray that I had to pull everything together in a new way. In a way I’ve never thought of before.”
The ashes were eventually found. A friend had moved them when helping to clean up. But the flood had a lasting impact on Harrison’s poetic sensibilities. A new collection of poems he was working on had already gone through a few iterations. They began as poems about poetry. When his father grew increasingly ill and eventually passed away in a Victoria, B.C. nursing home in 2011, Harrison began to write more personal verses. Then the flood came and the poems collection changed for the last time, fuelled by an overwhelming sense of loss, grief and chaos.
Harrison’s collection, On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, came out in 2016 and picked up the prestigious $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry the following year, making it one of the more high-profile and lasting pieces of art that sprang from the 2013 floods.
But it was hardly the only one. Tough times tend to be fertile ground for the artist.
Granted, much of what was inspired by the floods has a bit of a practical flavour to it. The River Throws and Tantrum, by writer Rona Altrows and illustrator Sarah-Joy Goode, was published to help children deal with the aftermath of the flood.
The Herald’s book — The Flood of 2013: A Summer of Angry Rivers in Southern Alberta — raised money for the Calgary Foundation’s Flood Rebuilding Fund.
Calgary’s Terri Heinrichs organized the Alberta Flood Rose Project, which collected funds for flood victims and involved 450 artists depicting Alberta’s wild rose in various mediums. Matt Embry’s 2014 documentary, Hell or High Water: Rebuilding the Calgary Stampede, chronicled the work done to ensure the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth came together after the flood.
Songs inspired by the flood tended to have a defiant and motivational groove to them. That included Ryan Perez’s hip-hop tune #letsbuild and at least three called Hell or High Water. Nashville-based singer-songwriter Marc Martel, best known for his time in a Queen tribute act, enlisted Calgary’s Young Canadians for backup vocals on his version, which some called Alberta’s “unofficial anthem” of the flood rebuild.
Even Corb Lund, one of Alberta’s best songwriters, contributed with a fiddle-fuelled old-timey ballad Blood, Sweat and Water, which he said “uses Stampede as a metaphor for the city’s courage, hard work and resilience.”
Other artists used the deluge for other inspiration. One of the more intriguing works was former High River resident Nowell Berg ’s Jet Girrl and Mr. Bizzaro: Surviving Natural Disaster, an illustrated book and app that put a filmnoirish fictional twist on Berg’s experiences being evacuated in High River.
The flood ends up uncovering deep-seated corruption in his unnamed, small-town setting.
Last September, Theatre Calgary produced two-time Governor General Award-winning playwright Sharon Pollock’s Blow Wind High Water, a new play that used the Calgary flood as a backdrop for a complex tale about three generations of a dysfunctional family struggling to survive numerous crises.
The play was set in Calgary during the 2013 flood, but also introduced elements of magical realism. Not unlike Harrison, Pollock used the flood as both a narrative device and rich metaphor.
“When I think of the flood ... I think less in this incident or that particular incident and more of what it means in terms of a community and how it pulls together,” Pollock told the Herald’s Swerve magazine last year.
“What’s brought to light and what it isn’t. That idea of renewal and rebirth. Destruction, rebirth. How you stand against it,” she says. “The idea of the flood becomes a means for me to explore a lot of other things about old age and family.”