Edited
by derek beaulieu and rob mclennan, and designed by Chaudiere co-publisher
Christine McNair, The Calgary Renaissance highlights some of the diverse and
astonishing experimental poetry and fiction that has emerged out of the past
two decades of Calgary writing. An essential portrait of some of the most
engaged and radical of Canadian writing and writers from one of the country’s
most important literary centres. You can order a copy directly, here.
Andrew Wedderburn attended the
Alberta College of Art and the University of Calgary between 1995 and 2001,
dropping out of the former and graduating from the latter after studying
creative writing. His stories have been published by filling
Station
and Alberta Views magazines. His debut novel, The Milk Chicken Bomb, was published by Coach House Books in 2007.
In 2008 it was a finalist for the Amazon / Books in Canada First Novel Award,
and long-listed for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. As a musician
(guitar, shouting) Wedderburn has written, recorded and toured extensively as a
member of the groups Hot Little Rocket and Night Committee, releasing 7
full-length albums over the last two decades. After 20 years living in Calgary,
Wedderburn recently moved back to the farm north of Okotoks, Alberta, where he
grew up. He now spends most of his time stuck in traffic on McLeod Trail.
Q:
How long were you in Calgary, and what first took you there?
A:
I was born in Calgary and grew up outside what used to be a small town called
Okotoks, just south of the city. When I was eighteen I moved into the city for
school. I did a year at the Alberta College of Art (they hadn’t added Design to
the name yet at that point) and sort of fumbled around. Realized that it wasn’t
the place for me and moved over to the University of Calgary. So Calgary has
always been part of my life in one way or another.
Q:
How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing
community in Calgary?
A:
I wanted to write and “be a writer” from about the time I started reading. My
mom had published stories in magazines, and I’d grown up watching her work at
the craft – dedicating time, chipping away at drafts, working from an idea
through to a text. So I grew up knowing that it was possible and with a rough
idea of where to start.
As
a teenager, I wrote stories and shared the manuscript copies with friends.
Half-finished comic books and at least one play that we put on at my high
school. But I didn’t really have any peers who were doing the same kind of
thing, or any concept of how to reach beyond my circle of friends for an
audience.
Then
when I moved to the city I got exposed to this world of people who took the
matters of creation, distribution and community into their own hands –
published zines, put out records on their own labels, booked and organized
shows for bands, held readings in community halls. Punk rock kids who sat on
the boards of artist run centres. I remember going to a joint launch party for filling Station and dANDelion magazines at the Carpenter’s Union Hall in Kensington. I
had my mind blown in two ways: the fact that people were creating and publishing
on their own, and then what that they
were creating. All these ideas about experimentation, about play and testing –
seeing all that acted out from a podium was pretty amazing and inspiring.
As
time went on I moved into the Creative Writing program at the U of C – fiction
with Aritha van Herk, who has this monumental influence on several generations
of Calgary fiction writers now. And then at the same time I was going to more
and more events, where you had a lot of cross contact with poets, who had grown
up under Fred Wah and Nicole Markotić. I worked at a cooperative bookstore on
17th Avenue as well called Books n Books, and we sold a lot of local
zines and chapbooks, the creators of which were in and out, so I got to sit in
a few different creative communities. All of it was really inspiring and
wonderful.
Q:
How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing,
if at all? What did Calgary provide, or allow?
A:
I learned new kinds of goals and outcomes to focus my interest and attention
towards. Engaging with the reader, leaving them more space, playing with them.
Balancing detail and ambiguity. As opposed to This happened And then This
happened And then, finally, This. I learned about effects and timing: now’s the
time for slapstick and now’s the time for silence. And how the practice and the
care and the recital and the showmanship are all equal players. There were all
these people tinkering in their various garages and then pulling up to the Show
and Shine and I learned mechanics and preparation and performance.
What
Calgary provided was this enthusiastic space where you were invited to Do It
Yourself. There’s this unfair idea of Calgary as an indifferent suburban
wasteland – and I mean, in a lot of ways there’s good reason people have that
picture. But deep in the yolk of the city, especially back then, you had this
passionate population of people deep into artistic production and distribution.
In the eighties and nineties and even into the early two thousands Calgary was
still relatively off the beaten path. “Culture” wasn’t going to show up in its
tour bus from the Metropole, so whatever you were into – from concrete poetry
to surf rock to contemporary dance – you’d have to do your goddamn self. Which
we did, and we built this really self-contained, energetic culture. A reaction
against the vacuum. CJSW radio, One Yellow Rabbit, the music scenes around the
east village Multicultural Centre, the Carpenters Union Hall, the Night Gallery
– all of these were thriving and very, very Calgarian. And the literary scenes,
whether that was experimental writing or spoken word, were some of the
strongest forces for that.
I
toured Canada for ten years in a rock band. Before I started, I thought of
Calgary as an indifferent suburban wasteland. Then you start driving to Vancouver
or Toronto or Ottawa or Halifax, or Kamloops and Kitchener and St John, and – I
don’t want to say there isn’t great stuff going on in those places, because
there is. But I realized just how vibrant and self-made and self-sustaining the
artistic culture in Calgary at that time really was. And that was really
inspiring, and made me really proud to be a little part of.
Q:
What do you see happening in Calgary that you don’t see anywhere else?
A:
Really it’s about a unique environment of influence and interests that just
doesn’t exist anywhere else. Which individuals have had the most influence on
writers in our city? Robert Kroetsch, Aritha van Herk, Fred Wah. Nowhere else
in the world do you get that answer to that question. And that’s just one particular
current – there’s a whole spoken word scene where someone like Sheri-D Wilson
is tremendously influential and even if you’re not involved in that mode, it’s
a vibrant part of the community that you engage and interact with. So you have people responding to those unique
people and their ideas over generations, in the particular environment and
climate of Calgary, which itself is different from anywhere else. Calgary is
weird. Decades of weird, idiosyncratic prairie conservatism to respond to and
react to. Earnest Manning. And then the actual environment is weird. You go to
the Banff Centre and the first thing they tell you is “If you feel weird or
can’t sleep, it’s the altitude. The altitude has a physical effect and don’t
discount it.” We get Chinooks and half the city gets a headache and can’t think
straight. All of this stews together and makes for a really unique situation to
grow, learn, create and work in.
Q:
What prompted your move away, and what kind of effect has the shift made in
your work?
A:
I’ve moved away by moving back. We live on a corner of the farm where I grew
up, twenty minutes south of the city. I’d lived in and around 17th avenue for
fifteen years – anything and everything happening in Calgary was a ten minute
walk. Now I spend two hours a day driving in and out of the city to get to
work. You get time to think sitting on Deerfoot Trail or Mcleod Trail but the
thinking you do driving is different from the thinking you do walking. And then
at home, we’re in the middle of nowhere, it’s dark, it’s quiet. There are moose
and elk and badgers and skunks. Cows and sometimes kids who live down the road
go by on ATVs. I’m adjusting. It’s interesting. It’s different too because I'm
back in the landscape where I grew up but it’s all subtly or not subtly
different. The town where I went to school – Okotoks – has gone from 4,000
people when I was a kid to over 20,000 now. I drive past my old High School
whenever I go into town to go for groceries or to the Canadian Tire. I don’t
know what any of it means yet.
Q:
Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements there? How did
the city and its community, if at all, change the way you approached your work?
A:
The Milk Chicken Bomb was in large
part an effort on my part to recreate the rural landscape of the Foothills that
I’d grown up in from the context of the city I was living in at the time. A lot
of my youth was spent driving from one small community to the next – going to
curl in High River, to camp outside of Longview, heading to the mountains
through Turner Valley and Bragg Creek to avoid driving through the city. As a
teenager my favorite thing was to drive out west of Millarville, find roads I’d
never seen, and drive down them as far as they went. As a broke twenty
something living in the city I had no access to that landscape, so I tried to
re-build it from memory. Calgary isn’t in that novel but it had a direct impact
on a lot of the decision making and choices involved in the novel.
Now
I’m doing the opposite. I’m trying to finish off this way too long in the pot
second novel which is actually set in and involved with Calgary, the Beltline
Calgary, and I’m trying to get it across the finish line from the other side of
a windshield driving in and out of the city.
Q:
What are you working on now?
A:
I’m in the homestretch on the new novel – the slow sticky part of fixing
pacing, cleaning up inconsistencies, patching holes, cutting unproductive
stretches and replacing them with things that work. It feels like this has been
going on for years and I suppose it has. The funny thing is, the new novel is
about driving. I mean, it’s about other things, but it’s about someone largely
alone in a vehicle. It was about that when I started it while I was still on
foot living a ten-minute walk from everything I needed in the city, and now I'm
finishing it up actually living that every day. Maybe that removal will help me
finally finish it.
I
have a few other ideas germinating in the background that I’m trying not to
sink time into until the big project is done, but it’s hard because they're
exciting and all still in the “fun to write” stage – the opposite of pace
fixing and hole patching. Trying to find time for all of this before and after
work, in between time with the baby, around the time it takes for all this
driving back into and out of the city. Every other year I try to write a poem,
which will never be shared with anybody. Sometimes I write new songs for the
band. I’m getting there.
