EXPLORING CALGARY’S LITERARY LANDSCAPE
In 1983, writer Barry Callaghan came to the conclusion that Calgary did not exist.
It was for an essay in Saturday Night magazine that found Callaghan, the son of Canadian icon Morley Callaghan, visiting a Calgary that was in the midst of an economic slump. Apparently, he visited a gay bar on 17th Avenue, a coffee shop in a neighbourhood frequented by prostitutes and, eventually, Calgary author John Ballem. At the time, Ballem’s Alberta Alone was the only literature Callaghan could find that “evoked the city in a novel.” Eventually, he came to the less-than-flattering conclusion that “Calgary, as a city, does not exist in the imagination. A city that has no imaginative shape has no meaning, no presence. In a very real way, Calgary — though it is certainly here — does not exist.”
“Calgary is hurting, and he comes basically to try and find whether the city has a soul,” says Shaun Hunter, author of Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers (Rocky Mountain Books, 304 Pages, $30). “He decides probably not. He’s just vicious, vicious.”
As a born and bred Calgarian, was Hunter personally offended?
“I was!” she says with a laugh. “But then I thought ‘No, do not look away Shaun. Keep your eyes on the page.’ Because that perspective has value too, right?”
An excerpt from Callaghan’s essay is one of 150 that Hunter offers in her sprawling book, which looks at Cowtown through a literary lens that goes back 200 years.
Yes, the first excerpt was written about a time 100 years before Calgary became Calgary. It’s from David Thompson’s 1850 memoir The Travels, which chronicled the Hudson Bay clerk’s experiences with the Piikani First Nation on the Bow River in the winter of 1787.
Hunter also includes the memories of Peter Fidler, another Hudson Bay representative. Fidler’s cumbersomely titled Journal of a Journey Over Land From Buckingham House to the Rocky Mountains in 1792 also finds him writing about his experiences with the Piikani and attempts to cross the Bow at Nose Creek.
“I’m calling that Calgary’s first action scene,” says Hunter, who will hold a book launch at the new Central Library on Sunday. “This is a storied landscape. This has been a storied landscape for millennia.”
Still, the real catalyst for the book goes back to Hunter’s postsecondary years in Ottawa studying Canadian literature.
“I went away to university and studied English Literature and ended up studying Canadian literature,” she says. “I never say Calgary in the canon of Canadian literature. It used to be a running joke among my professors and classmates. The Calgary novel. Hah! That was disappointing and festered for quite a while.”
In early 2015, the essayist and academic, who often hosts “literary walks” through Calgary, began thinking about her city as it lived in the imagination of writers. Through extensive research, she began blogging some of her findings, eventually discovering that she had enough for a book. Calgary, it turns out, has lived in the imaginations of writers for quite some time, often taking on various manifestations far beyond our oil and cowboys.
Hunter divides the book into eras, from those frontier memoirs up to chronicling the 2013 floods. Calgary has appeared not only in the imaginations of our own writers — Fred Stetson, Aritha van Herk (who writes the intro to Hunter’s book), Will Ferguson, Deborah Willis — but outsiders as well.
Ontario writer Tanya Huff ’s 2009 fantasy novel The Enchantment Emporium, for instance, adopts a somewhat mystical Calgary as its setting, a city full of haunted junk shops, leprechauns and dragon lords. Cowtown even appeared in the writings of Graham Greene (in the 1963 short story Dear Dr. Falkenheim) and Rudyard Kipling (who declared it the “wonder city of Canada” after a few visits.)
Hunter uncovers Calgary through various literary perspectives. Authors such as Suzette Mayr and Rae Spoon write from an LGBT community. Women’s voices in literature are obviously present throughout, but Hunter goes back to century-old, Calgaryset novels of Isabel Paterson and the work of Margaret Sadler Gilkes, one of the few female beat cops who patrolled postwar Calgary.
She investigates a new vanguard of writers who are establishing themselves, and their hometown, as a literary force, including awardwinning short-story writer Willis.
“In spite of all the efforts to put us in a box, to give us a slogan to put at city limits to define us, this city is too big,” says Hunter. “It’s too diverse. It’s too complicated to box up and simplify. I think the writers’ voices in my book prove that and I’m so glad they do.”
Still, Hunter admits that she didn’t necessarily find the definitive Calgary writer — someone to represent our city the way Mordecai Richler came to represent Montreal, for instance — or even the definitive “Calgary novel.”
There are good ones, of course. Hunter mentions Ferguson’s Giller-winning 419 for instance, and van Herk’s 1998 Restlessness, which is set in the Fairmont Palliser.
“Maybe I started out looking for the Calgary novel,” she says. “I did not find the Calgary novel. I’m not sure it exists and do we really want it to? The city is elusive. It has multitudes.”