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WRITING ALBERTA: Aberta Building on a Literary Identity Edited by George Melnyk and Donna Coates ISBN 978-1-55238-891-4 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org Writing AlbertaBuilding on a Literary Identity edited by George Melnyk and Donna Coates Writing Alberta THE WEST SERIES Aritha van Herk, Series Editor ISSN 1922-6519 (Print) ISSN 1925-587X (Online) This series focuses on creative non-fiction that explores our sense of place in the West - how we define ourselves as Westerners and what impact we have on the world around us. Essays, biographies, memoirs, and insights into Western Canadian life and experience are highlighted. No. 1 ∙ Looking Back: Canadian Women's Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity S. Leigh Matthews No. 2 ∙ Catch the Gleam: Mount Royal, From College to University, 1910–2009 Donald N. Baker No. 3 ∙ Always an Adventure: An Autobiography Hugh A. Dempsey No. 4 ∙ Promoters, Planters, and Pioneers: The Course and Context of Belgian Settlement in Western Canada Cornelius J. Jaenen No. 5 ∙ Happyland: A History of the “Dirty Thirties” in Saskatchewan, 1914–1937 Curtis R. McManus No. 6 ∙ My Name is Lola Lola Rozsa, as told to and written by Susie Sparks No. 7 ∙ The Cowboy Legend: Owen Wister’s Virginian and the Canadian-American Frontier John Jennings No. 8 ∙ Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre Edited by Donna Coates No. 9 ∙ Finding Directions West: Readings that Locate and Dislocate Western Canada’s Past Edited by George Colpitts and Heather Devine No. 10 ∙ Writing Alberta: Building on a Literary Identity Edited by George Melnyk and Donna Coates Writing AlbertaBuilding on a Literary Identity edited by George Melnyk and Donna Coates THE WEST Series ISSN 1922-6519 (Print) ISSN 1925-587X (Online) © 2017 George Melnyk and Donna Coates University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 press.ucalgary.ca This book is available as an ebook which is licensed under a Creative Commons license. The publisher should be contacted for any commercial use which falls outside the terms of that license. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Writing Alberta : building on a literary identity / edited by George Melnyk and Donna Coates. (The west series ; 10) Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-55238-890-7 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-55238-891-4 (open access PDF).—ISBN 978-1-55238-892-1 (PDF).— ISBN 978-1-55238-893-8 (EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-55238-894-5 (Kindle) 1. Canadian literature—Alberta—History and criticism. I. Coates, Donna, 1944-, editor II. Melnyk, George, editor III. Series: West series (Calgary, Alta.) ; 10 PS8131.A43W75 2017 C810.9’97123 C2017-902847-2 C2017-902848-0 The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund for our publications. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. This book has been supported in part by the University of Calgary Open Access Authors Fund. Copyediting by Francine Michaud Cover image Chinook Arch. Marion Twyman (artist), Kristina Twyman (photographer) Cover design, page design, and typesetting by Melina Cusano Table of Contents Introduction 1 Writing Alberta: Continuities, Interventions, and Lacunae George Melnyk and Donna Coates 1 | My Alberta Home 19 Katherine Govier 2 | “My Bones Have Known this Land Long Before 29 Alberta Was Born”: Intersection in Indigenous Geography and Creative Expression Tasha Hubbard 3 | Strategies for Storying the Terrible Truth in John 45 Estacio’s and John Murrell’s Filumena and Betty Jane Hegerat’s the Boy Tamara Palmer Seiler 4 | Alberta’s Environmental Janus: Andrew Nikiforuk 71 and Chris Turner Geo Takach 5 | Alberta in the Alberta Novels of David Albahari 91 George Melnyk v 6 | Science and the City: The Poetics of Alice Major’s 117 Edmonton Neil Querengesser 7 | Double Vision in Betty Lambert’s Jennie’s Story 135 Cynthia Zimmerman 8 | Seeing Seeing, and Telling Telling: Framing and 149 Transparency in Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K. and James Turrell’s “Twilight Arch” Harry Vandervlist 9 | The Mythological and the Real: Sheila Watson’s 161 Life and Writing Joseph Pivato 10 | Gwen Pharis Ringwood and Elsie Park Gowan: 175 Writing the Land, 1933-1979 Moira Day 11 | Writing Alberta’s History 201 R. Douglas Francis 12 | Fin de Siècle Lunacy in Fred Stenson’s 223 The Great Karoo Donna Coates 13 | The “Father” of Ukrainian-language Fiction and Non- 249 fiction in Alberta: Rev. Nestor Dmytrow, 1863-1925 Jars Balan Contributors 269 vi Introduction Writing Alberta: Continuities, Interventions, and Lacunae George Melnyk and Donna Coates In 2005, art critic Mary-Beth Laviolette published An Alberta Art Chroni- cle covering the post-1970 art history of Alberta. Its length of five hundred pages suggested that there was something to say about the province’s art scene. To talk about an Alberta art identity within the context of Canadian art does not seem strange or unusual. So, too, it should not seem strange to talk about an Alberta literary identity. The conversation started sixty years ago with the publication of the Alberta Golden Jubilee Anthology in 1955. It offered Albertans their first collection of Alberta writers and was followed in 1967 with Chinook Arch and The Alberta Diamond Jubilee An- thology in 1979. In 1986, Fred Stenson edited Alberta Bound: Thirty Stories by Alberta Writers, followed by Aritha van Herk’s 1990 volume, Alberta Rebound: Thirty More Stories by Alberta Writers, and then Boundless Al- berta in 1993. Clearly, at least as far as fiction was concerned, there was an acknowledgement that Alberta writers were producing valuable work and making a statement about the province. In 1999 a new anthology, Threshold: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing from Alberta, edited by Srjda Pavlovic, which included poetry, was published. Pavlovic was not afraid to use the term “Alberta literature” in his introduction. All seven volumes were statements of creativity, not critical studies. Then came George Mel- nyk’s two-volume Literary History of Alberta, published in 1998-99, which argued for the distinct nature of Alberta’s literary identity. It was followed by the four-hundred-page Wild Rose Anthology of Alberta Prose (2003), edited by George Melnyk and Tamara Palmer Seiler and, most recently, 1 Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature (2009), edited by Donna Coates and George Melnyk, which was the first collection of scholarly essays deal- ing specifically with Alberta writing. Alberta writing has a distinctive literary identity, but there has been a pushback from traditional quarters tied to previous categories—Canadian Literature (1960s) and Prairie Literature (1970s). In Quebec, literature was viewed as independent of Canadian literature because of the post-1960 sovereignty movement and its distinctness within the context of a bi-national and bilingual literary identity. But what could justify a province like Alberta seeing its literary heritage as identifiable and distinct? If we examine how national literatures come to be defined, we can see that Alberta literature shares characteristics with the terms used to define a national literature without being a nation.

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