Literature is a conversation.
Robert Kroetsch
I’ve been seeking out the origins of that particular quote by Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch for some time. Did I catch it in an essay or interview, perhaps? It’s a simple and straightforward enough idea that I seem to have latched onto at a fairly early point in my own thinking: the idea that to write and to read are about entering into a conversation. Entirely democratic, and perhaps naïve, but an idea that jives with my rural upbringing. One can’t exist on a working farm without some sense of the communal, the community. Perhaps this is the perspective Kroetsch offered that tidbit from, originally, as he too emerged from a rural setting. Picking stones from the fields with our fathers, or walking the fence line to repair a fresh break. During those early weeks into months of Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, I worked my way through Post-glacial: The Poetry of Robert Kroetsch (2019), a critical selected of his work edited by David Eso, which prompted, again, my return to Bob’s thinking. As Eso wrote of Kroetsch’s thinking during his student-days: “Whatever could a farm boy from Heisler find to write about?”
One could argue, in response, what would anyone from anywhere? We speak to and through other writing, other writers. We respond in kind. When I was a pre-teen, I began reading through the morality tales of Glengarry County Scottish Presbyterianism from the novels of the Rev. Charles William Gordon, who wrote under the name Ralph Connor. These were books that already sat in our house, after all, dusty old hardcovers beneath layers of dust. Gordon was born and raised in my area, after all, and was Canada’s bestselling novelist around the turn of the twentieth century, having sold over one million copies. When I read through Glengarry School Days (1902), my father pointed out where the one-room schoolhouse once sat, attended as well by his own mother, some forty years after Gordon (the building now sits at Upper Canada Village). I read through Torches Through the Bush (1934), the fictionalization of how Gordon’s Scottish-born father, the Rev. Daniel Gordon, founded the Congregational Church at St. Elmo in the 1860s, a church my father was raised in and myself as well. Gordon, as Connor, wrote of geography I held and hold dear, and temperaments that still rippled strong across the decades.
Ralph Connor’s example was an important one: it was possible to be “from here” and write. It was possible to write about “here” and that be something, enough. By the time I was twenty, having landed in the capital, I took the same example from Ottawa-born and raised Elizabeth Smart, infamous author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945): it is possible to be from here, I told myself, despite peers and mentors declaring that one shouldn’t write full-time, and local media suggesting it would be impossible to take anyone serious about their writing, or of any art-making, unless they had already moved to Toronto. There’s nothing here, they said. Nothing here.