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Reviewed by:
  • Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature ed. by Donna Coates and George Melnyk
  • Jon Gordon (bio)
Donna Coates and George Melnyk, editors. Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature. Athabasca University Press. 2009. xii, 206. $34.95

In their ‘Preface,’ Donna Coates and George Melnyk imagine Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature as the first volume in a series which will [End Page 538] legitimize the notion that ‘Alberta literature is a reality’ and start the process of rectifying the fact that ‘there has been no critical literary study of Alberta writers as Alberta writers other than [Melnyk’s] Literary History [of Alberta].’

In the ‘Afterword: Writing in Alberta – Up, Down, or Sideways?’ Fred Stenson traces some of the changes to literary institutions in Canada and Alberta during his lifetime – the Lougheed government’s creation of a Culture Ministry with a Literary Arts Branch, the founding of regional presses, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, the Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts – to show how they helped to nurture a generation of writers in this province, including himself. He is struck by the irony that the history he traces might seem to a younger generation of writers rather like the Literary Arts Branch workshops that he attended in the 1970s and found ‘pointlessly autobiographical and square,’ since the writers he works with today as part of the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing studio ‘wish to be perceived as global writers.’ Stenson concludes, ‘Maybe all I really have to say to younger writers, critics, and theorists is that tradition is important. Whether the tradition you choose is local, national, continental, or global is up to you.’ This conclusion stands in tension with the ‘Preface,’ which suggests that there is something called ‘Alberta literature’ and that it has a tradition worth knowing. This tension is a useful lens through which to read the essays collected in the remainder of the volume.

After the ‘Introduction: Wrestling Impossibilities: Wild Words in Alberta’ by Aritha van Herk, which considers Melnyk’s literary history and Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K as the two books that are ‘essential to anyone wishing to understand Alberta writing,’ Wild Words is organized by genre. Part 1 deals with poetry, Part 2 with drama, Part 3 with fiction, and Part 4 with non-fiction. This reviewer, though, experienced the essays as dividing between those that sought to provide a kind of survey of a genre in Alberta (Douglas Barbour’s essay on poetry, Anne Nothof’s essay on drama), those that provided a survey of an individual writer’s contribution (Jars Balan’s essay on Michael Gowda, which deserves special mention for stretching the tradition of Alberta literature back to the nineteenth century, Sherrill Grace’s on Sharon Pollack, or Lisa Grekul’s on Myrna Kostash), and those that focus mainly on a reading of one or two key texts (Christian Riegel’s essay on Kroetsch’s ‘Stone Hammer Poem,’ Helen Hoy on Suzette Mayr’s Moon Honey, or Malin Sigvardson on Rudy Wiebe’s Sweeter Than All the World and Of This Earth). All of them might be read as examinations of the diverse ways writers have brought their inherited traditions to Alberta and adapted them to present circumstances.

Although many of the writers discussed are still active on and influential in the Alberta literary scene, most are the product of the funding of 1970s cultural institutions that Stenson outlines. The combination of [End Page 539] reductions in funding for such organizations and a younger generation’s more explicit identification with the global raises a question not answered here: if such a thing as ‘Alberta literature’ did exist, or maybe even does exist today, will it continue to exist in the future? Can the tradition that Stenson traces sustain itself?

A book like this is inevitably an exercise in canonization, despite the editors’ claim that ‘we are too early in the process to do that [articulate a canon]’ and their desire to cast the collection as ‘a step on the long road of legitimization.’ If that process is to continue, the relationship between an Alberta literary tradition and writers’ identification with the...

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