Atwood - The Burgess Shale: the Canadian writing landscape of the 1960s

Published by

The University of Alberta Press

Ring House 2

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

www.uap.ualberta.ca

and

Canadian Literature Centre / Centre de littrature canadienne

35 Humanities Centre

University of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E5

www.abclc.ca

Copyright 2017 Margaret Atwood

Introduction 2017 Marie Carrire

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Atwood, Margaret, 1939, author

The Burgess Shale : the Canadian writing landscape of the 1960s / Margaret Atwood.

(CLC Kreisel lecture series)

Issued in print and electronic formats.

Co-published by: Canadian Literature Centre.

ISBN 978-1-77212-301-2 (softcover). ISBN 978-1-77212-304-3 (EPUB). ISBN 978-1-77212-305-0 (Kindle). ISBN 978-1-77212-306-7 (PDF)

1. Canadian literature (English)20th centuryHistory and criticism. I. Canadian Literature Centre, issuing body II. Title. III. Series: Henry Kreisel lecture series

First edition, rst printing, 2017.

First electronic edition, 2017.

Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

Copyediting and proofreading by Peter Midgley.

Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

Front cover photo : Margaret in an orange mini-dress, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Newspaper photo taken after The Circle Game wins the Governor Generals Award, 1967. Used by permission

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written consent. Contact the University of Alberta Press for further details.

The University of Alberta Press supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with the copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing University of Alberta Press to continue to publish books for every reader.

The Canadian Literature Centre acknowledges the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for the CLC Kreisel Lecture delivered by Margaret Atwood in April 2016 at the Winspear Centre.

The University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund.

Foreword / Liminaire

The CLC Kreisel Lecture Series / La collection des Confrences Kreisel du CLC

WHEN I ARRIVED at the University of Alberta in 2008, the CLC was just more than a fledgling year and a half. And now, I feel like the proud parent of a gifted ten-year-old. The Canadian Literature Centre is a unique space for bilingual and multicultural reading and research, bringing people together through critical, professional, intellectual, and social alliances. It is a place where readers come to listen, authors to read, students to learn, professors to teach, and researchers to share. All of us come to the CLC to celebrate the incredible writing in this country. From the Brown Bag Lunch reading series to the Annual Research Seminars, from the Scholarly Lecture series to the CLC Kreisel Lectures featured in these pages, the CLC is a public forum for inclusive thinking, challenging criticism, and varied forms of literary circulation and production. This past decade, the CLC has organized and co-organized eight international conferences, with six ensuing collections of essays, written in English and in French, either published or currently in press. With a critical anthology, Ten Canadian Writers in Context , commemorating ten years of the Brown Bag Lunch reading series and published in 2016, CLC staff and researchers have also completed a digital archive, Inside the Bag: Can Lit Alive! of live video recordings, Proust Questionnaires, and exhaustive, searchable bibliographical content for open public access. This lecture by Margaret Atwood will be a culminating tenth title in the Kreisel series, and is co-published by the University of Alberta Press and the CLC. We are tremendously honoured and excited to welcome Canadas best-known literary grande dame to the stage to help us mark the CLCs tenth anniversary.

Les Confrences Kreisel du CLC abordent les grandes questions qui nous concernent tous et toutes dans la spcificit de notre vcu contemporain, peu importent nos diffrences. Dans une intention de dialogue libre et honnte, ces confrences refltent lardeur et la profondeur intellectuelles ainsi que lhumour et llgance des dix auteurs extrmement dous et prsents jusquici : Joseph Boyden, Wayne Johnston, Dany Laferrire, Eden Robinson, Annabel Lyon, Lawrence Hill, Esi Edugyan, Tomson Highway, Lynn Coady, et dsormais, Margaret Atwood. Pensons aux fines observations de Boyden sur loppression sociale, les identits culturelles et le lieu; ou la rflexion de Johnston sur la rencontre tumultueuse de lhistoire et la fiction. Tenons compte avec Laferrire des preuves de lexil et des joies de la migrance; ou de lthique personnelle et communautaire du rcit autochtone que nous prsente Robinson. Lantiquit et le prsent se runissent dans la confrence de Lyon au sujet du mode cratif de la fiction historique. Hill plaide le besoin dune conversation informe sur la censure des livres. Highway dfend lapprentissage librateur et heureux dautres langues, de la langue des autres , y compris le langage de la musique. Coady nous incite analyser lalarmisme culturel quant lavenir du livre lre numrique. Et ici, Atwood nous prsente un rappel pittoresque et ncessaire de notre histoire littraire.

These public lectures also set out to honour Professor Henry Kreisels legacy in an annual public forum. Author, University Professor and Officer of the Order of Canada, Henry Kreisel was born in Vienna into a Jewish family in 1922. He left his homeland for England in 1938 and was interned, in Canada, for eighteen months during the Second World War. After studying at the University of Toronto, he began teaching in 1947 at the University of Alberta, and served as Chair of English from 1961 until 1970. He served as Vice-President (Academic) from 1970 to 1975, and was named University Professor in 1975, the highest scholarly award bestowed on its faculty members by the University of Alberta. Professor Kreisel was an inspiring and beloved teacher who taught generations of students to love literature and was one of the first people to bring the experience of the immigrant to modern Canadian literature. He died in Edmonton in 1991. His works include two novels, The Rich Man (1948) and The Betrayal (1964), and a collection of short stories, The Almost Meeting (1981). His internment diary, alongside critical essays on his writing, appears in Another Country: Writings By and About Henry Kreisel (1985). The generosity of Professor Kreisels teaching at the University of Alberta profoundly inspires the CLC in its public outreach, research pursuits, and continued commitment to the ever-growing richness and diversity of Canadas writings. The Centre embraces Henry Kreisels no less than pioneering focus on the knowledge of ones own literatures. The CLC seeks and fosters a better understanding of a complicated and difficult world, which literature can reimagine and perhaps even transform.

To return to my parental metaphor, it takes a whole village to raise a child. So goes the Igbo and Yoruba proverb. The values of community, relationship, care, and hospitality contained in this Nigerian proverb could not better conjure the ways in which the CLC has grown into adulthood. With the continued generosity of CLC founder and benefactor Dr. Eric Schloss, the steadfast support from the Deans Office in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, and donations from our friends who believe in our mission, the CLC simply would not exist. Ongoing programming with community partners, such as Edmontons Poetry Festival and LitFest: Edmontons Nonfiction Festival which marked its own tenth anniversary in 2016, has been paramount to the Centres public outreach, which is indeed at the heart and soul of its research mandate.