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Legacy Article "The Thoughts and Words of Rudy Wiebe"
Spring 2004
by Gordon Morash
In the annals of obsure collectibles, I might possess the Holy Grail of
acquisitions. It's a 1994 mint first-edition Rudy Wiebe T-shirt. Black
cotton, never worn, created by his publishers Knopf Canada to commemorate
the winning of that year's Governor General's Award for his eighth novel,
A Discovery of Strangers.
Now, I am aware that this probably marks me as a CanLit geek of the
highest order, and perhaps I should get a life, but I'm not alone. "Hey,"
says the 70-year-old Wiebe, surprised at the longevity of a publisher's
giveaway souvenir, "I have that T-shirt, too!"
What is much more intriguing, however, is the longevity of the career of
Alberta's only two-time GG winner that now spans 41 years and, in
particular, has seen a surge of creativity over the past five years.
In that latter period, Wiebe has revisited three previous creative works
and written four new books. The Mad Trapper is now converted to a
young-adult novel. A screenplay of his first GG Award-winning novel, The
Temptations of Big Bear, has been written with director Gil Cardinal, and
the results broadcast on CBC Television as the two-part mini-series, Big
Bear. And Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic, a creative
non-fiction essay anthology that examines the physical and metaphorical
world of the Artic, for which he wrote two new essays, reissued. There
have also been a new children's book. Hidden Buffalo, a novel concerning a
four-century history of a Mennonite family, also named Wiebe, Sweeter Than
All the World; a collaborative examination of the incarceration for murder
of Big Bear's great-granddaughter, Yvonne Johnson, in Stolen Life: The
Journey of a Cree Woman; and Place, a consideration of the southern,
Alberta landscape of Lethbridge.
By this spring, all of his early novels will be back in print (First and
Vital Candle, The Scorched-Wood People and My Lovely Enemy), prompting him
to say, "Well, there's lots of Wiebe available." And as befits a senior
literary artist, his writing continues to be anthologized. The newly
released Wild Rose Anthology of Alberta Prose, the first book off the mark
to salute this province's centennial, contains a fine appreciation of
Wiebe by editors George Melnyk and Tamara Palmer Seiler as well as his
1974 short story, "Did Jesus Ever Laugh?"
So why the seemingly sudden output?
"Being a writer, able to write full time because I'm retired from a
full-time professor's job, and having a couple of very good publishers
interested in my work. Why? You'll have to ask them. But obviously, to be
crassly practical about it, nobody's losing any money publishing me."
Interestingly, two of the works from this period of
hyperactivitybookends, really, that represent the very beginning and most
current stages of his writing lifehave their origins in Wiebe's
childhood.
In 2001, Juvenilia Press, an Edmonton-based publisher specializing in
well-known authors' earliest works, released an anthology called Early
Voices. Among poetry and short stories by Greg Hollingshead, Carol
Shields, and Aritha van Herk was "Predestined," a six-page story of
Wiebe's written when he was 18 years old, which won the fiction prize in
the church high school he was attending in Coaldale. His introduction to
the story shows a writer critical of this earliest published work. "I find
little to say about it 47 years later, except that it is completely
imitative. Almost every fiction element in it: time, place, character,
action, I had never come close to experiencing."
In person, however, he's a bit more benign. "Teenage writing is what it
is, that's what you did then and you can't change it now," he says. "There
are, of course, many bits, pieces, ideas, starts in a writing life that
never see the light of publishing. I don't know if I have more than most,
but there are lots because I can't seem to ever throw anything away. I
can't believe how Margaret Laurence would burn entire manuscripts as she
reportedly did. So my office slowly sinks into the ground."
Place, however, is another matter. At the age of 12, Wiebe moved with his
family from his home province of Saskatchewan to Coaldale, 15 kilometres
east of Lethbridge. Yet, except for a mention of the city in Chinook
Christmasfirst in a 1979 adult short story and then in a 1992 children's
bookhe had never written about his life there.
In Place, Wiebe revisits the Lethbridge area with an older man's eyes in
an eight-chapter essay, "Where the Black Rocks Lie in the Old Man's
River," a mix of geography, geology, history, reminiscence and mythtwo
elements which have absorbed Wiebe throughout his entire writing life, in
fiction, non-fiction and essaythat come together in this book.
Wiebe explores the battlefield at the Oldman River, now within the
Lethbridge city limits, where in late October 1870, Cree and Assiniboine
attacked a small Blood camp to avenge the killing of the Cree chief
Maskepetoon. The resonance for Wiebe is palpable, as the battlethe last
and one of the largest between Aboriginalsis featured in The Temptations
of Big Bear, his first, in publisher's parlance, "break-out novel." The
battle is the point at which fact and fiction meet for Wiebea glorious
photographic example of prairie sky and the wind-whipped grassy
battlefield itself is printed immediately following this essay chapter.
Published last spring, the coffee-table book is a collaboration between
Wiebe and Toronto photographer Geoffrey James, whose critically acclaimed
exhibition of these photographs. The Lethbridge Project, was mounted at
the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in the fall of 1999.
When you ask Wiebe about his place in this universe, his answer is mixed
with the expected family chronicle crossed with authorial purpose. It
could be, with some minor alteration, a raison d'etre for any writer.
"My place is here where I was born, though I've lived in some other places
for parts of my life, in 'pioneer western Canada,' where my parents fled
as refugees from European persecution and could build a home, where never
once in 50 years had the state police hammered on their door. My place is
the heritage my ancestors have given me, through no decision of my owna
heritage is what you are born with, do with it what you willwhich
includes, besides all the Canadian miracles, a particular understanding of
how the teachings and life of Jesus can perhaps help you to try and live
the life of a good person. If I can explore these concepts in relation to
the world the Creator has given me to live inas in Canada I can with an
almost inconceivable freedomexplore them by telling stories, I must do so
as best I can. As Flannery O'Connor once said of writing, 'If you have
been given a gift, you have an obligation to develop it.'"
And obviously to pass it along. There are now two generations of writers
and editors out in the literary wilderness who owe Wiebe a creative
debtamong them Alberta writers such as Hiromi Goto, Glen Huser, Myrna
Kostash, George Melnyk, Peter Oliva, Fred Stenson, Aritha van Herk and Tom
Whartonyet he hesitates to discuss his own legacy.
"One could get pretty heavy about this question, and take oneself too
seriously," he explains. "It's always better if others do it, rather than
you, yourself. If they want to."
Still, he will allow that writers have the responsibility to pass along
their skills. "The point is, you have a responsibility. You understand
that I'm trying to avoid the Catholic word 'calling,' as Flannery O'Connor
would certainly use itbut anyway, as long as your brain remains clear and
your imagination doesn't shrivel, though it may take a bit longer to warm
up, you keep on doing what your gifts make it possible for you to do."
One of those "possibles" continues to be teaching. Though technically
retired from teachinguntil 1992, his University of Alberta roundtable
creative writing classes were required training for writers of promisehe
still headlines workshops and works one-on-one with writers on a casual
basis.
"I'm doing that now with a woman from the North exploring her Alberta
Iroquois great-grandmother. This, too, is part of 'gift' and
'responsibility'to share with others what the Canadian world has given
you. In that way, writing Stolen Life with Yvonne Johnson was a mutual
gift exchange: she gave me her trust and her story, I helped her work it
into a book shape that people could read."
Stolen Life was a five-year project that began with Wiebe receiving a
letter from Johnson and then visiting his eventual co-author in the
federal Prison for Women in Kingston. In acting as an agent provocateur,
he opened readers' eyes to the possibility that Johnson had been wrongly
convicted of murder. She had received the heaviest possible sentence for
the lightest involvement in the crimelife in prison with no possibility
of parole for 25 yearsand is the only Aboriginal woman serving this
sentence in the country. In fact, in a 1998 interview with Edmonton
columnist and author Linda Goyette, he went so far as to place his own
judgment on the court proceedings that upheld the Wetaskiwin court's
decision on appeal. "Yvonne won't say it, but I will: It is a terrible
injustice."
Stolen Life won a quartet of awards: the Edmonton Book Prize, the Viacom
Canada Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Writers Guild of Alberta
Award for non-fiction, and the Saskatchewan Book Prize. Wiebe colourfully
noted, as he picked up his and Johnson's Writers' Trust Award, "I suppose
that many of us know more about the antiquities of Egypt than we do about
the First Nations on this continent."
Through Wiebe's imagination, he has lived in worlds encompassing the
Canadian West and Arctic; the Mennonite roots of Germany, Russia and
Paraguay; the Cree and Métis settlements of the prairies; and finally, the
activism prompted by the case of Yvonne Johnson, Big Bear's distant
relative, still jailed at the minimum-security Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge
for Women in Saskatchewan, and then transferred to the Edmonton Institute
for Women. Novelist, essayist, teacher, playwright, creative non-fiction
practitioner, memoirist, historian, screenwriter, children's author,
activist. Where, in all of this is the literary place of Rudy Wiebe?
"A writer has to be a true generalist," Wiebe offers. "He's probably not
an expert in anything except for the instant of interest and deep snooping
in a tiny area and there are innumerable things that can be made with
words, a lifetime of writing gets you into everything. For example, I've
never repeated the stage plays I wrote in the '70s, and I don't think I'll
ever write another film script, but then I didn't think I'd ever write a
memoir with a Cree woman either, until Yvonne wrote to me and the power of
Big Bear rolled over us both. That book, a gift in one sense, and one of
the most problematic texts I ever tried to construct in the other, is one
of the most widely read books I have ever been involved with. And I like
the sense of 'difference'me working with a woman in prison to tell a
unique story thousands experience but no one really has written. In the
same way, making an historical Cree chief the main character in a novel
and seeing him differentlysomething never done before in Canadian
literatureor writing the first realistic English novel in 1962 about Mennonites
with Peace Shall Destroy Many, and having it still in print 40 years
later with more readers than ever. I don't know where these talents come
frommy immediate relatives were all village farmers, and 400 years ago
the Wiebes were water engineers building cities all over Europebut to a
certain extent I'm happy with what I've been able to discover within
myself."
There is a universality to any story, Wiebe ventures, simply because the
actions of characters and progression of plot bring readers "into worlds
they know almost nothing about, but which are imaginatively exciting,
because human beings are human beings. It's the way a New Zealand prof
wrote me about his class reading The Blue Mountains of China and some
students from the Fiji Islands told him they loved it, partly because,
'This is our story.' I know absolutely nothing about Fiji islanders, but a
story of flight and loss speaks to many peoples of the world. Sadly, too
many."
Throughout Wiebe's oeuvre, one reads and visits the physical settings of
this literary wanderer. He refuses, however, to discuss where his next
steps will take him. "I never answer this question," he explains. "There's
time enough if something emerges, whenever, to talk about it. In a world
as complex as writing, one can never be content, and one would be worse
than stupid to be smug. As Emily Dickinson wrote: 'Hope is the thing with
feathers, which perches in the soul,' and for me there's still a lot more
to feathers than a waiting pillow."
From a pillow back to that T-shirt, then. On the back is printed an
extraordinary snippet from Wiebe's Governor General's Award speech, which
itself was broadcast nationally on CBC Radio. "Only the stories we tell
each other will create us as a true Canadian people," he said on that
November day in Ottawa, back in 1994. It's an insular, character- and
nation-building battle cry.
Gordon Morash is a freelance writer and editor in Edmonton.
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