Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature
Donna Coates and George Melnyk, eds.
Edmonton: AU Press, 2009, 978-1-897425-30-5, 204 pp., $34.95 paper.

When I first started reading Wild Words, I felt I was entering the middle of a conversation started in George Melynk's The Literary History of Alberta. Wild Words builds on the earlier work, but it also stands on its own, a collection of essays about Alberta writers, or those who choose to write about Alberta--or from an Albertan perspective--and the various genres they write in: poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction.

"Wild" can have many meanings, as Charles Russell points out in the section "From Grizzly Bear To Grizzly Heart: the Grammar of Bear Human Interactions in the Work of Andy Russell and Charlie Russell," both outdoorsmen and conservationists. Wild can refer to animals that are "fearful of humans" (165). It conjures up something out of control, as a wild child, someone who is delinquent. It suggests something that's untamed, functioning beyond civilization's rules and regulations. Something wild could be thought of as free of social constraints and limitations.

The title Wild Words originates in Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch's The Hornbooks of Rita K. and are spoken by Rita herself: "Wild words hum in my bones" (7). But the book project grew out of "The Wild Words Conference," "which aimed to bring a critical perspective to Alberta writing on the occasion of the province's centenary" (vii). The essays attempt to assess the status of Alberta writing in the 21st century, though the editors admit that the writers under discussion represent a very small segment of the province's literary community.

As Douglas Barbour, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, points out in "The Wild Body of Alberta Poetry," Alberta poets aren't necessarily born in Alberta. Or if they were, some now live in other areas. Wilfred Watson was born in Rochester, England, and raised in British Columbia; Eli Mandel was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan. E.D. Blodgett and Bert Almon immigrated to Alberta in the 60s and Fred Wah in the 80s. Earle Birney was born in Calgary but spent most of his writing life elsewhere.

Barbour's essay demonstrates that Alberta writers come from diverse backgrounds and areas, but they all are, in one way or another, rooted in the province. From my reading of Wild Words, a central theme that runs through it is movement, which for some religious thinkers originates in the Word itself. Language takes on a religious perspective in the sense that words articulate who we are and words bind us collectively (130). They enable us to join together in communities and create a collective history.

Words also move us to action; they are moving in themselves. And the writers who use them have as much difficulty determining an Albertan perspective as the critics who are examining these literary works. While physically Alberta has provincial boundaries, the spirit of the place extends into other parts of the country through its artists; it can't be so clearly contained.

In Chapter 8, Frances W. Kaye speaks of "Richard Wagamese--an Ojibway in Alberta." Wagamese, orginally from Ontario, embraces both East and West in his work. In 1988, Wagamese began writing a column on Native affairs for Windspeaker, a newspaper that focused largely on Indigenous arts. His second novel, The Quality of Light, which moves back and forth between Ontario and Alberta, draws on some of those columns. In commenting on The Quality of Light, Kaye states, "Land here is abstract and exists as words rather than specific images" (148). But beneath the words, the land endures, whether it is in the East or on the prairies. It's the way words describe the land that is malleable, the words themselves constantly switching identities, making them "wild."

Over the centuries, while Natives have seemed more rooted in the land, like the non-native Mennonites, they also often have been on the move. Malin Sigvardson describes this movement in "Wandering Home in Rudy Wiebe's Sweeter than all the World and Of This Earth." She states, "Whether Wiebe writes about a Canadian or about a specifically Mennonite heritage, there is always some dominant spatial, temporal, or spiritual movement going on" (125). Sigvardson's observations could apply to all of the writers and their work covered in Wild Words. She refers to Joy Anne Fehr's "Re-Writing Alberta": "Taking the history of Alberta Prairie writing and Deborah Keahey's discussions of Prairie literature and movement into account, Fehr interestingly asserts that rather than landscape as such, 'movement appears as a key feature' of both Prairie and Alberta literature" (127). Rather than landscape being the determining factor of what constitutes the subject matter of Alberta writers, "it's the dynamic movement found in literature itself" (127).

This collection creates its own landscape. Though limited in the number of Alberta writers it was able to include, the ones that are covered seem representative of the rich diversity that constitutes Alberta literature. Still, as Aritha van Herk states, "The books that erupt from Alberta are too unpredictable, too wide-ranging and varied to be summarized and contained. Alberta writing is a mystery, a tangent, a shock, unexpected and vigorous" (1). Ultimately, Alberta literature retains much of the wildness suggested in the title Wild Words, refusing to be corralled into simple categories.

Though born and raised in Alberta, Lily Iona MacKenzie writes wild words from her home in Richmond, CA. http://lilyionamackenzie.wordpress.com .

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.


Back to Reviews Index