6. the Mayor’s Luncheon for Business and Edmonton Book Prize the Arts. 1 Naming The Prize is sponsored by Audrey’s Books and the Edmonton Arts Council. Recommendation Edmonton Arts Council Past winners include Myrna Kostash, Thomas Trofimuk, Todd Babiak, Ted Bishop, Marty Chan, Gloria Sawai, Recommendation: Alla Tumanov, Fred Stenson, That Community Services Committee Yvonne Johnson, Jack W. Brink, recommend to City Council: Bert Almon, Rudy Wiebe and That the City of Edmonton Book Prize Yvonne Johnson, David Carpenter, be named the “Robert Kroetsch City F. Royer and R. Dickinson, Bob Hesketh of Edmonton Book Prize”. and Frances Swyrpia. Report Summary Naming Recommendation The Edmonton Arts Council is It is common to name a City book prize recommending that the City of after an individual writer. Examples Edmonton Book Prize be named the include: Carol Shields Winnipeg Book “Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Award; and City of Calgary W. O. Book Prize”. Mitchell Book Prize. Report Robert Kroetsch was closely connected The City of Edmonton Book Prize was with Edmonton. He was recognized established by Edmonton City Council in internationally for his writings and was 1995. an important teacher and mentor for many Edmonton and Alberta writers. The Prize is awarded annually to titles His 1969 novel, the Studhorse Man, set addressing some aspect of the city or in Edmonton won the Governor written by an Edmonton author. Entries General’s Award for Literary Merit. may be written in various forms such as fiction, poetry, or drama and the chosen His death in a traffic accident in June audience may be adult or child. The 2011, was widely mourned by the only other stipulation is that entries people of Edmonton and the capital touch on some aspect of Edmonton region. culture, whether it be art, history, current events, or people. Since his death, the Edmonton Arts Council received many calls from The Prize is administered by the Writers members of Edmonton’s writing Guild of Alberta who solicits nominations community who expressed their desire and organizes a selection committee. to see the City of Edmonton Book Prize The winner is announced at the annual named the “Robert Kroetsch City of Mayor’s Celebration for the Arts and the Edmonton Book Prize”. winner receives a cash prize of $10,000. Prior to 2004 the prize was awarded at ROUTING – Community Services Committee, City Council | DELEGATION – J. Mahon WRITTEN BY – J. Mahon | September 6, 2011 – Edmonton Arts Council 2011EAC026 Page 1 of 2 Edmonton Book Prize Naming Recommendation - Edmonton Arts Council The family of Robert Kroetsch has been contacted and they support this action. The Writers Guild of Alberta and Audrey’s Books support this action. Justification of Recommendation Changing the name of the book prize would be an appropriate way to honour the memory of Robert Kroetsch, and his impact on Alberta’s and Edmonton’s writing communities. Attachments 1. June 23, 2011 Edmonton Journal Article, written by Todd Babiak Page 2 of 2 Attachment 1 June 23, 2011 Edmonton Journal Article, written by Todd Babiak Author brought prairie magic to this city Robert Kroetsch Photograph by: edmontonjournal.com There are conflicting reports about what Edmonton was actually like in 1969 when Robert Kroetsch published The Studhorse Man. Facts don't matter nearly as much as the best-told story. We live in Robert Kroetsch's town. The fact that he died in a car accident late Tuesday afternoon at the junction of Highway 21 and Rollyview Road doesn't change that. The Edmonton of The Studhorse Man is a city of lust and snow and magic. Hazard, the unforgettable hero of the novel, explores an exotic yet familiar Edmonton, hunting for his stallion, visiting the taverns and bedding a curator in the legislature building. It's a boozy, chaotic city of wild horses, a place where a cowboy, a poet or a curator could have a lot of fun. I read The Studhorse Man at precisely the right time. I was 19 and pretending to be a writer. I was looking for a reason to love the city where I'd just rented a house with three other nerds from Leduc. Kroetsch's Edmonton is a city of myths. His Alberta is the weirdest place in Canada. I didn't think I officially liked poetry until I read Seed Catalogue, his long autobiographical poem about growing up in Heisler and becoming a writer. Like everything else Kroetsch wrote, his poetry bounces with joy and curiosity, sex and banality, adventure, love. Page 1 of 3 Report: 2011EAC026 Attachment 1 Attachment 1 In Seed Catalogue, he imbued cod liver oil, mustard plasters, Sunny Boy cereal, crowbars, fence posts and barbed wire with nobility. Commonplace things pulse with meaning: This is a prairie road. This road is the shortest distance between nowhere and nowhere. This road is a poem. Then there's What the Crow Said, a novel set in Bigknife, another mythic place on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border which opens with a sex scene involving bees. And 26 other books. I was so star-struck when I first met Robert Kroetsch, at one of his readings at Audreys Books when I was not yet 30, I could barely speak. He said, with what I'd come to know as typical selflessness and grace, that he'd read my first novel, which had just come out. It couldn't be true. But he had said it so sincerely. Blushing and anxious, I introduced my then girlfriend and now wife. Kroetsch shook her hand. "You're not going to marry him are you?" he asked. "A pretty girl like you shouldn't marry a writer." In this era of agents and marketing departments, film rights and e-publishing and conferences that, viewed from afar, might be for management accountants, Kroetsch represented a more rebellious era for writers. In Seed Catalogue, he illuminated an episode in the spinning top of the Château Lacombe with another of Canada's greatest writers, Al Purdy. "The waitress asked us to leave. She was rather insistent; / we were bad for business, shouting poems at the paying / customers." On June 11, at the Alberta Literary Awards gala in the Calgary Zoo, there were two marvelous acceptance speeches; one was by Robert Kroetsch and one was about him. Kroetsch won the Golden Pen Award from the Writers Guild of Alberta and, on stage, spoke of being a dinosaur in the zoo. At 83, he was still the funniest, quickest, most charming man in the room. In accepting his award, he talked about everyone but himself. Rudy Wiebe, who won an award for his collected work of short stories, spoke movingly about his favourite in the book, a story about his pal Bob Kroetsch. Many of the people at the gala were under 40, trying to make their way as writers, editors, publishers. They had their photos taken with Kroetsch, who made careful eye contact. He listened, joked and offered encouragement, the same sort of encouragement he'd offered to me many times: just write. The next afternoon, when the reigning king of Alberta poets might have been dining with acolytes in the Palliser Hotel, Kroetsch pulled up a hard chair and sat through the famously uneven open mic at the Auburn Saloon down 9th Avenue, clapping enthusiastically for each performer. Page 2 of 3 Report: 2011EAC026 Attachment 1 Attachment 1 We had made plans to get together in Leduc, where Kroetsch had been living, with a bottle of wine sometime in July. The idea that Robert Kroetsch was living in the town of my childhood gave it a special hum: lusty bees and naughty horses in Leduc. I'd shown him Twitter and he thought it might work for poetry in some way. We would explore this, or not. He might have been humouring me. He would have known that to me, to any reader, sharing a bottle of wine with him on a July evening would be as dreamy as reading Seed Catalogue for the first time. Unfortunately, re-reading it will have to do. No trees around the house. Only the wind. Only the January snow. Only the summer sun. The home place: a terrible symmetry. © Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal Used with permission Page 3 of 3 Report: 2011EAC026 Attachment 1 .