Margaret Atwood

Ms. Atwood was born in 1939 in and is described on the British Council literature site as "one of the world's leading woman novelists."

I'm doubt she'd appreciate being called the "Other Margaret," but she is younger than the other "Other Margaret." When Laurence died in 1987, Atwood was just hitting her stride. Her Selected Poems II appeared that year, and she also had three collections of short fiction under her belt.

In addition, she had published five novels, including the sensationally dystopic The Handmaid's Tale (1985, Houghton Mifflin, Cape). The movie based on this novel would come out in 1990 and prove controversial, with people trying to boycott the theatres where it was being shown. It's still making news, as demonstrated by this recent article reprinted from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

In 1987, Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, which would appear in 1989 and be nominated for the GG and the Booker Prize, was already in the works. She had also produced two children's books and three works of literary criticism, as well as editing a book of short stories, one of poetry and the CanLit Foodbook (Totem, 1987), two television scripts, a radio script and several audio recordings.

Since then Atwood has enlarged her repertoire in every genre. In 2007, she published a play called The Penelopiad, (Faber and Faber). This was produced the same year and is currently under production by the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver. Called by the Province the 'original desperate housewife story,' The Penelopiad opened yesterday at the Stanley Theatre.

Like The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake (McClelland and Stewart, Bloomsbury, Doubleday 2003), Atwood's latest opus, The Year of the Flood (same publishers as Oryx & Crake), portrays an unpleasant future. When it appeared in 2009, it was described by Jeanette Winterson in the New York Times as "strangely lonely." Yet, says book blogger Jessica Klassen, Atwood "finds a way to make readers feel at home" as they struggle with perennial human issues.

Though I'm not sure it's a label she enjoys, Margaret Atwood deserves to be called the Mother of CanLit, and not only because of her large brood of literary children. In addition to raising a variety of clever literary offspring, she has written extensively about CanLit and brought odd bits of Canadian history alive. (Think Alias Grace, a novel based on an infamous 19th century Ontario murder case.)

A moving target, this writer is ever willing to experiment and grow. And though she is busy with readings and related events, Margaret Atwood has a blog and can now be found on Facebook and Twitter. To see a crossword featuring her, check here.

Hat's off to CanLit's Mum!

Margaret Laurence

Photo from UC Davis

Margaret Wemyss (1926-1987) started writing in Grade two and began her professional writing career at eighteen by taking a summer job on a newspaper. After completing an Honours English BA at what is now the University of Winnipeg, she became a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen.

She married Jack Laurence and the young couple spent several years in Africa, first in Somalia and then in Ghana. It was his name she used for her writing life, although they divorced.

In Africa, Lawrence worked on translating Somali poetry and prose, and began the short stories that were eventually collected in The Tomorrow Tamer (1963). She remained interested in African literature, and back in Canada, published a critical study of contemporary Nigerian dramatists.

While living in Vancouver, she published This Side Jordan, a novel set in the newly independent Ghana. This book received an award for Best First Novel by a Canadian writer. The Stone Angel, set in her fictionalized home town, followed soon after. This was staged as a play and made into a movie that became an official selection at the Toronto and Tokyo film festivals.

In 1966 she published A Jest of God and won the Governor General's Award for fiction. This novel became a successful movie, Rachel, Rachel. Paul Newman directed and Joanne Woodward starred.

The Fire-Dwellers came out in 1969. In 1970 Lawrence published A Bird in the House, a linked short story collection about the fictitious town of Manawaka. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1971. Though Laurence continued to publish for the remaining thirteen years of her life, The Diviners (1974) is her finest work. It won another Governor General's and also the Molson Prize.

Laurence's work generated considerable controversy. In 2010, Nora Foster Stovel published an essay in the International Journal of Canadian Studies, discussing the "racist or anti-racist?" nature of the Metis girl character Piquette Tonnerre in "The Loons" (A Bird in the House).

The novel The Diviners also came under fire from Christian fundamentalists who complained the book was "obscene" and pressured school boards to ban it (CBC 1985). Presumably, what they found objectionable part was the sex scene between the young protagonist and her Metis lover.

Margaret Laurence spoke and wrote not only on social issues like race and gender, she also spoke out to support nuclear disarmament and to promote literacy. It is a blot on Canadian literary history that the final years of her life were plagued by attempts to censor her groundbreaking work.

Today the house where Laurence lived in Neepawa is a Manitoba Provincial Heritage site.

Stephen Leacock and Douglas Gibson

Stephen Leacock image from literature online

Canada's first giant of humour was born in England in 1869 and immigrated to Canada as a child. I discovered his work as a young teen. Reading in bed, I nearly fell out of it laughing at My Discovery of England (1922), with its hilarious send-up of colonial attitudes, the human side of international borders and the cultural differences between British and Canadian men on a train.

Leacock's essays still demonstrate the power of words. In "How to be a doctor," he gently mocks the fear of illness, simultaneously revealing the human fallibility of the medic. "How to live to be 200" pokes fun at the man who "was ridden by a health mania," and then, in spite of his healthy habits, got some "old-fashioned illness" and died like anybody else.

Another early favourite was "A, B and C, the Human Element in Mathematics," a tragicomedy in which the characters in math problems come alive as a bully, a follower and a weakling. In another hilarious feat, he catalogues train engines and their drivers in a sonorous spoof of Homer's catalogue of ships from The Iliad.

Image of Douglas Gibson from Spur Festival

By an interesting coincidence, I just read an interview with editor-turned-author Douglas Gibson, who spoke last night as part of the Vancouver International Writers Festival. As I did, Gibston fell in love with Leacock's work in high school. His first discovery was the melodramatic Nonsense Novels. Later, his first assignment as a beginning editor was a biography of Stephen Leacock.

Douglas Gibson has just published Stories about storytellers: Publishing Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Alistair Macleod, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and others (ECW Press, 2011) It's been called a "prize read" by Alice Munro. Gibson appeared in Vancouver last evening. This one-man-show will speak in Ottawa on Sunday.

Three years after Stephen Leacock's death, a medal was established to honour him. Since 1947, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour has been awarded annually to the Canadian author judged to have written the funniest book of that year.

Leacock was also a founding member of the Canadian Authors Association. This year the CAA book award winners were announced at the Stephen Leacock Festival in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario, where his former house is now a museum. Fans of Stuart McLean will be unsurprised to learn that he is a three-time winner of the Leacock Medal.

In 1969, the centennial year of his birth, Leacock was featured on a six-cent stamp, using a photo taken by Canada's iconic photographer Yousuf Karsh. If Leacock were alive, no doubt he would find something funny to say about that.

Morley Callaghan

Image from quotessays

Teaching academic English to students from around the world, I learn a great deal. One memorable anecdote came from an Afghani woman who had studied and admired Morley Callaghan at the University of Kabul. Until then I had no idea that Callaghan's work, much of it published in the 1930s, had garnered such international attention. Many younger Canadians have not heard of this writer, once an important figure on the literary scene. Callaghan was born in Toronto in 1903 and attended St. Michael's College at the U of T in the early nineteen twenties.

Between 1928 and 1937 he produced a number of novels of which the most famous were More Joy in Heaven (1937) and Such is my Beloved (1934). He was also a short story writer of some note. One of my personal favourites is "All the years of her life," a tale of an immature young man who begins to grow up when he suddenly perceives the toll his irresponsibility has taken on his mother.

In 1929, Callaghan spent the summer in Paris, where he was often in the company of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway, whom he had known earlier in Toronto. In 1963, he wrote a memoir of that time called That Summer in Paris. Norman Mailer's review in the New York Times (Feb 1, 1963) calls this "a modest dull bad book." The same review describes Callaghan's boxing match with Hemingway. Timed by Fitzgerald, who also boxed, he managed to knock Hemingway down. Though Mailer had little praise for it, the book recently earned four stars in Goodreads.

Originally trained as a lawyer, Callaghan worked as a journalist and also wrote for radio. He was awarded the Governor General's Medal in 1951 for The Loved and the Lost, and the Order of Canada in 1982. He died in 1990, the same year as Hugh MacLennan.

Hugh MacLennan - the beginning

Hugh MacLennan was the first Canadian writer of fiction to attempt to describe the national character and experience of the nation. At the age of ten, he survived the Halifax explosion (1917) and later wrote a novel about this, Barometer Rising, published in 1941.

His great novel Two Solitudes (1945) is a poignant portrayal of the tensions between the French and English in Quebec. The book's title refers to a poem by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and afterward became a shorthand term for French and English Canada.

In 1959 MacLennan published The Watch that Ends the Night, a novel based loosely on the life of another famous Montrealer, Dr. Norman Bethune. This book portrays the intellectual culture and values of the thirties, especially through Jerome Martel, a brilliant communist doctor who leaves to serve in the Spanish civil war and then vanishes, leaving his family to pick up the pieces. His reappearance long after his supposed death has devastating consequences.

The above is by no means a complete list of MacLennan's novels, although these are probably the best known. Each of the three won the Governor-General's award.

MacLennan was not only a novelist but a respected essayist as well. In 1949 he published a collection called Cross-Country, and this and another essay collection, Thirty and Three, both won Governor-General's awards.

A Rhodes scholar, Hugh MacLennan was educated first at Dalhousie in Halifax, and later at Oxford. He won international as well as national recognition. He became the first Canadian to receive the James Madison Medal from Princeton Univesity, along with many other honours. For many years, he taught at McGill University in Montreal.

Without doubt, this literary giant has profoundly influenced Canadian literature.

The birth of CanLit

Taking my BA at UBC, I majored in English Literature, a category that in the late sixties excluded the literature of Canada. Most of my English professors, including Geoffrey Durrant (Shakespeare) and the great John Hulcoop (The English Novel), as well as Errol Durbach (Modern Drama) were British. (And male. Through my entire Bachelor's degree, I had only two women professors.)

The term Canadian Literature had yet to come into vogue, although the Father of CanLit, Hugh MacLennan, had been publishing for some twenty years. He was then teaching at McGill in Montreal, as Canada's incomparable humourist Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) had before him.

CanLit's Mother has to be one of the two Margarets. We'll say Margaret Laurence, since Canada's other great Margaret is younger, and still very much alive. Indeed, the feminist novel The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood, was making the rounds when I lived in rez, though not then recognized as actual literature.

Since MacLennan (1907 -1990) and Laurence (1926-1987), Canada has experienced an uninterrupted literary flowering. The arrogant prediction of Hugh Hood in a radio interview in the seventies that his generation would produce no more great writers couldn't have been more wrong. Hugh Who? You may well ask. A solid short story writer he may have been, (b 1928 d 2000) but his name has long since been overshadowed by a Pantheon of literary giants.

In the Bi and Bi era, Hugh MacLennan's work revealed the the other solitude to English Canadians (more of that later) while Roch Carrier became a beloved storyteller of Quebec tales in English Canada. A passage from his classic story, The Hockey Sweater, can be seen with its illustration of the national game on the $5 bill. Another Quebecker, Michael Ignatieff, (1947--) wrote both moving fiction and thought-provoking non-fiction, long before entering politics as the Liberal member for Etobicoke.

As multiculturalism went mainstream, CanLit began to disseminate a dazzling variety of stories by people with roots from all over the world. Toronto poet turned novelist Michael Ondaatje penned thrilling tales of early Canada as well as portraying his original home, Sri Lanka. From Brampton, Ontario, Rohinton Mistry (1952--) rocked the reading nation with profoundly moving tales set in his native India.

Women joined the fray too--of that more to come.

Getting excited about the Emerge launch

Pardon me. I'm just so excited. The launch of EMERGE 2011 is coming up in just a week and I am stoked.

Last night we non-fictionistas got together and practiced for our readings.

We timed each other so nobody goes over the two and a half minute allocation, and worked on our delivery. We gave each other support and advice to prepare us for the brief but important performance that we are each to give as our TWS Anthology is launched on October 22 at SFU Woodward at 8 pm.

It's so great to have writing buddies, to give and receive fearless feedback and help one another make our prose sing.

Yes, the launch is definitely top of mind now. At the same time, my thoughts have been all over the map, and so have my blog posts.

Bear with me. I've got another series in mind to blog about, but I'm not revealing what it is just yet.