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Legacy Article "The Thoughts and Words of Rudy Wiebe"
Spring 2004
by Gordon Morash
Rudy Wiebe

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 hyperactivity—bookends, really, that represent the very beginning and most current stages of his writing life—have 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 Christmas—first in a 1979 adult short story and then in a 1992 children's book—he 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 myth—two elements which have absorbed Wiebe throughout his entire writing life, in fiction, non-fiction and essay—that come together in this book.

Rudy Wiebe  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 battle—the last and one of the largest between Aboriginals—is 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 Wiebe—a 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 own—a heritage is what you are born with, do with it what you will—which 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 in—as in Canada I can with an almost inconceivable freedom—explore 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 debt—among them Alberta writers such as Hiromi Goto, Glen Huser, Myrna Kostash, George Melnyk, Peter Oliva, Fred Stenson, Aritha van Herk and Tom Wharton—yet 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 it—but 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 teaching—until 1992, his University of Alberta roundtable creative writing classes were required training for writers of promise—he 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 crime—life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years—and 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 differently—something never done before in Canadian literature—or 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 from—my immediate relatives were all village farmers, and 400 years ago the Wiebes were water engineers building cities all over Europe—but 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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