Alistair MacLeod’s edmonton connection
Writer wants to be sure he has something worth saying
Alistair MacLeod is known, both in Canada and across the globe, as a chronicler of Nova Scotian life: in two acclaimed story collections, one novel (No Great Mischief, which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award — among the world’s most lucrative literary prizes — in 2001), and an illustrated Christmas story.
But he has a strong connection to the Prairies, too. MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Sask. He’s also lived in several different places across Alberta. And it was in Edmonton in 1954, when he was fresh out of high school, that MacLeod got a job that he can still vividly recall to this day: driving a horse-drawn milk wagon.
“Edmonton, at that time, was still kind of rural,” MacLeod, 76, recalls, reached by phone at his home in Windsor, Ont.
“There were urban people, but a lot of them had come from rural areas. So they were very interested in horses. You’d stop and deliver your milk, and they’d come out and give apples and pails of water to the horses.”
It was the unemployment office that placed MacLeod with the Northern Alberta Dairy Pool.
His daily route took him from the south side, across the Low Level Bridge, and up McDougall Hill. Here, his horses would stop midway to rest before trotting up past the Hotel Macdonald and across Jasper Avenue.
If you were going with horses, MacLeod says, everyone was very tolerant if you went through on an amber light. “If you went through in a truck, they’d kill you.”
While he held the job for only a year, MacLeod’s memory of Edmonton in the ’50s is unnervingly precise. He lists off not just the names of all four horses he drove, but also the names of the four competing dairy companies in the city, all without a moment’s pause.
“And when I was leaving,” he adds, “they told me I was making a big mistake. They were going to make me a route foreman. So, I could have stayed in Edmonton for a long, long time.”
Instead, MacLeod headed back East, where he began his career in literature, producing fiction and also teaching at the University of Windsor.
He’s a famously slow and steady writer, too, never moving on until the sentence he’s just written is exactly right. That might explain why he took more than a decade to write No Great Mischief and why, with the exception of just two stand-alone short stories, MacLeod hasn’t published any books since then.
“Kafka, that barrel of laughs, had a poster above his desk that said, ‘Is this novel really necessary?’ ” MacLeod says.
“So, I like to ask what I’m trying to say in a story. You’re not just writing like the dog chasing its tail, running in circles. You’re really trying to say something. I like to think
“... I like to ask what I’m trying to say in a story. You’re not just writing like the dog chasing its tail, running in circles. You’re really trying to say something.”
that I’m saying something worthwhile.
“Some people say, ‘I just sit down and write.’ But if you don’t know whether you’re building a birdhouse or a deck — just driving nails into boards — I don’t think it’s going to be very good, whatever it is.”
So, aside from last year, when he was commissioned to write a short story for the 25th anniversary of the Vancouver Writers Fest, MacLeod is happy to wait for his muse to come and find him.
“I’m thinking now,” MacLeod says of his current workload. “And a revelation will follow.”
I ask how he’s able to stay patient while waiting for the revelation to show up.
MacLeod chuckles. “I’m getting older now, so I better not be too patient.”