Book mines Alberta's rich literary history

by Bob Blakey

Judging creative writing is nothing new to U of C professors George Melnyk and Tamara Parker Seiler, but their latest publishing project presented some especially daunting moments.

Their task was to choose which writers from the past 100 years should be included in The Wild Rose Anthology of Alberta Prose (University of Calgary Press, 408 pages).

“ There were a lot of tough decisions,” Seiler (right) admits.

“ There were several stories that would have been appropriate, and we had a hard time deciding.”

In the selected story, The Broken Globe, Kreisel (1922-1991) explores connections and tensions between a new world (North America) and an old one, the war-ravaged Europe from which the author, a Jew, had fled.

The University of Calgary is well represented by such writers as Hugh Dempsey, W.P. Kinsella and Aritha Van Herk, who are among the teachers. U of C students listed in the table of contents include Hiromi Goto and Emma Lee Warrior. Robert Kroetsch and Sam Selvon have been writers in residence.
And of course Seiler and Melnyk teach in the Faculty of Communication and Culture.

“ A number of practicing, active, literary people end up teaching,” Melnyk explains.

“ One reason is you can’t always earn a living as a writer.”

He and Seiler worked on the book over a three-year period, revisiting stories with which they were familiar and discovering others they’d perhaps only scanned at one time.

They noted that anthologies of Alberta fiction had been complied in 1955, 1967 and 1979 but this one takes on a grander scale.

“ They leaned more towards what was contemporary at the time,” Melnyk says, “so you got a decade around that period. They were writers who were part of the scene at the time.

“ This is really the first chance to look back over a long period of Alberta history.”
The Wild Rose Anthology’s stories cover a remarkable range of topics, eras and styles. Sid Marty’s excerpted Men for the Mountains, for example, blends humour and fantasy with its booze-drinking central character’s late-night visitation by the spirits of rugged mountain men who reminisce about the old days in Banff National Park.

Hugh Dempsey’s non-fiction account of Deerfoot, an amazing, Blackfoot youth who dominated competitive running more than a century ago, reminds us among other things how Calgary’s only true freeway got its name.

“ Some of it is familiar territory,” Seiler says, “but I think people will be surprised, particularly the many people who are new to Alberta – and people who have not thought much about Alberta as a place that produces culture.”