Alberta (re)Bound

One of the mandates of any festival worth its salt is to support local talent. Film fests, folk fests, writing festivals all program special events focussed exclusively on local talent. This looks great on paper, pleases government funders and seems to be a win-win situation. But this inevitable practice also puts the artists themselves in the slightly awkward position of representing a notion of local that isn’t really found in their work. Such was the case this afternoon at the second installment of Alberta Bound, a series of readings focussed exclusively on new works set in Alberta.  I went thinking that I was exploring the characteristics and ongoing emergence of a distinct Alberta literature, and left thinking about how authors explore complex commonalities that underlie our society’s love of tagging, categorizing and dividing into groups.

Darcy Tamayose read from her debut novel Odori. Though it starts off in the Southern, Alberta town of Rainmaker Hills, the bulk of this book transpires in ancient Okinawa and a dreamland between death and life populated by a woman in a coma and a storytelling spirit. As Tamayose so eloquently put it in the q+a session after the reading: “land is a character and there is a commonality of all places.” We might want to label her an Albertan writer (she lives in Lethbridge after all), but I’m not sure that does much to help us understand her writing or the writing of the Western Canada.

Tim Bowling also read this afternoon. He’s from BC, but his book The Bone Sharps, an eloquent, ambitious novel, is set in a late 19th and early 20th century Alberta Badlands, and the fetid trenches of World War I. Bowling was inspired to write the book after spending 5 weeks on a ranch near Dinosaur Provincial Park. He told the audience that it wasn’t like he set out to deliberately explore any particular notion of the West and its landscape. It just happened that way. I think that’s true of most artists – we set our stories where we feel the ideas we want to get across will be able to grow, live, breath, and take on their own life.

Then again, that’s maybe just the luxury we have today as Canadian writers and creators. We don’t have to justify the very idea of setting a book in, say, the smalltown Alberta town of Marvin. Marvin is where the action of Calgary first time novelist Andrew Wedderburn’s Milk Chicken Bomb takes place. Wedderburn, responding to Bowling’s book, noted that one of his inspirations as an Alberta writer is Robert Kroetsch’s hallucinatory Canadian masterpiece Badlands, the tale of a deranged archeologist willing to risk anything and everything in the quest for bones. For Wedderburn, Kroetsch’s book legitimated the idea of setting a book not just in Alberta, but in the forgotten, partially populated areas of Alberta the rest of Canada doesn’t even know exist. In Milk Chicken Bomb, Wedderburn creates a genericly distinct smalltown with a single cross street, a ramshackle IGA and a curling rink. It’s a town as recognizable in smalltown Ontario and rural Manitoba as it is in Winnipeg. And yet, there’s something almost accidentally distinct about Wedderburn’s Marvin. As he put it today, “It could have been anywhere, but it turned out that it could only be where it was. “