Edmonton author receives national humour-writing award
Canadians are pretty funny — occasionally, even on purpose.
Part of a long tradition of celebrating this truth, Edmonton-born Heidi L.M. Jacobs has just won the national Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for her book set inside Edmonton’s ’90s academia … and a certain worldfamous, gigantic mall she’d rather leave nameless.
Now a librarian in Windsor, Ont., Jacobs defeated 83 other books for the $15,000 prize for her debut novel, Molly of the Mall: Literary
Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear. The story, while not a direct autobiography as such, satirically draws on her experience working in a chain retail shoe store while getting her undergraduate at the University of Alberta during the grunge era. Published by NeWest Press, it’s her first novel.
Over the phone from Ontario, she lights up when I mention first meeting Alice Cooper back in the mall in the ’80s.
“You know what is so funny,” Jacobs laughs, “someone just asked me what my favourite thing about working there was, and I said it was Alice Cooper coming into my store. And I was just talking to a guy in Milwaukee and he said, ‘I used to live in Edmonton, too.’ And he worked in a western wear store, and Alice Cooper came into his store, too.
“Two degrees of Alice Cooper,” she laughs.
Cooper aside, the Molly of the title, Jacobs explains, “wants this romantic life, like the romantic life of a Jane Austen heroine in Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice. A lot of it is her coming to terms with living in Edmonton, which she finds equally as unromantic as being named after (Daniel Defoe’s) Moll Flanders.
“But my favourite comment someone made is this is actually a love letter to Edmonton. When I graduated, everyone I knew had to leave to find work, and I think that’s one of Molly’s big challenges: how do you make great art if you live in Edmonton? Spoiler alert, she does realize she can.”
As far as the university goes, she denies any specific snipes.
“If you’ve spent any time around a university or English department you realize there are types,” she notes. “She loves being there, her family’s all there, so it’s very important to her. So, it’s a gentle chiding of academia.”