CITY/TOWN: Victoria
PLACE OF BIRTH: Winnipeg (no hospital in Gimli until 1940)
RAISED: Gimli, Manitoba
ARRIVAL IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: 1974
ANCESTRAL BACKGROUND: Icelandic
EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: Teaching at the University of Victoria. After retirement from UVic, a stint as editor of Lögberg-Heimskringla, the Icelandic Community newspaper in Canada.
AWARDS: 1971, President's Medal, U. of Waterloo;
1980, first prize fiction, CBC;
1981, Books in Canada best first novel award;
1983, CAA silver medal, drama;
1988, first prize, drama, CBC;
1992, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize;
1995, Mr. Christie prize;
1998, Vicky Metcalfe Award
BOOKS:
In Valhalla's Shadows (D&M, 2018) a gothic crime novel 978-1-77162-196-0 (print) 978-1-77162-197-7 (ebook). Release date Sept. 3.
What the Bear Said: Skald Tales from New Iceland (Turnstone, 2011). Short fiction. $19. 978-0-88801-3804
Un visage a la Botticelli (Les Heres rouges, 2001);
Frances (Groundwood, 2000);
The Divorced Kids Club (Groundwood, 1998);
Garbage Creek and Other Stories (Groundwood, 1997);
Sarah and the People of Sand River (Groundwood, 1996); Winter Rescue (Simon and Schuster, 1995);
Stulkand Med Botticelli Andlitid (Ormstunga, 1995);
Thor (Groundwood, 1994);
The Hockey Fan (The Hawthorne Society, 1995);
The Girl With the Botticelli Face (D&M, 1992);
What Can't Be Changed Shouldn't Be Mourned (D&M, 1990);
Bloodrot (Sigmar Thormar, 1989);
Gentle Sinners (Oberon Press, 1980);
Red Dust (Oberon Press, 1978);
In The Gutting Shed (Turnstone Press, 1976);
God is Not A Fish Inspector (Oberon Press, 1975);
Bloodflowers (Oberon Press, 1973)
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS:
William Dempsey Valgardson was born in 1939. Went to United College. B.A (1961), B.Ed. (1965) from U.of Manitoba. MFA (1969) from U. of Iowa. Taught high school, then at Cottey College in Missouri (1970-1974). In 1974, he starting to teach creative writing department at the University of Victoria, mentoring W.P. Kinsella. Received an honorary doctorate from U. of Winnipeg in 1995. Having been made a member of the Royal Society of Canada, Valgardson received the Joan Inga Eyolfson Cadham Award in 2017 to recognize individuals who have been outstanding in the promotion of Icelandic culture and heritage by way of literature, arts, or media.
[photo credit Janis löf Magnusson]
[BCBW 2018] "Fiction" "Interview" "Icelandic"
+++
In Valhalla's Shadow by W.D. Valgardson (D&M $32)
In norse mythology, Asgard was the dwelling place of the gods, located in another dimension, possibly the sky or a different planet. It was divided into at least twelve realms; Valhalla being one. Valhalla was the home of Odin and Norse heroes slain in earthly battle.
Valhalla is also the name of a town one hour's drive from Winnipeg, located just fifteen minutes from W.D. Valgardson's hometown of Gimli. The protagonist in Valgardson's novel, Tom Parsons, who has just arrived at Valhalla on the northern shores of Lake Winnipeg, north of Gimli, is not a warrior. If confronted with crises, he mostly does nothing or behaves foolishly.
After his RCMP career, his marriage and his family have disintegrated, Parsons just wants to escape from Winnipeg. Mind-numbingly cold in winter and searingly hot in summer, Valhalla may be the perfect setting for mosquitoes and ticks but it doesn't seem to have much to recommend it to humans. Why this place then?
Well, there's the fishing, which could have been one of the reasons Parsons' father came here in the long ago past. And then there's the fact that as an RCMP officer, Parsons has been here before, when he came to investigate a mysterious disappearance. Now he's suffering from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and its subsequent nightmares.
During my interview with W.D. Valgardson about In Valhalla's Shadow he declared that "While I'm never sure about labels, I hope it's successful as a Gothic crime novel. I think it has something worthwhile to say about a number of issues: the RCMP, old age and identity, PTSD, our treatment of Aboriginal people, the importance of the past, the need people have for a place to which they can belong; and the power, good and bad, of ambition."
Valgardson-repeatedly cited by the late W.P. Kinsella as his foremost mentor-thrusts the reader immediately into the middle of the action. Parsons finds the body of a fifteen-year-old Indigenous girl lying near the beach near the rundown home he has just purchased.
Then comes the meticulous weaving of a 'sense of place,' with the introduction of the wacky, wild and wary inhabitants of Valhalla where everyone knows everyone else's business but nobody talks about their own, where everyone threatens but also offers advice.
There's a supporting cast of drug dealers, pimps, probable murderers, chess playing intellectual recluses with killer dogs, unhappy housewives, drunks, crooks, yachters, cultists and plain old thugs.
The atmosphere is pregnant with suspicion, innuendoes, mysteries and fear but Valgardson is too good a writer to leave it so one-sided. There is also a sense of community, sharing and compassion, people making the best of their lives.
"When I taught creative writing," Valgardson says, "I taught students to graph once they reached a certain point in their narrative. I used the back of wallpaper rolls for long narratives: chapters across the top, horizontals for characters, theme, point of view, setting, etc. When there are a lot of characters, plots and subplots, there is a lot to keep track of."
A synopsis of the disparate elements in In Valhalla's Shadow will not fit easily onto a wallpaper roll. There's Parsons' PTSD, the corruption and racism in the RCMP, the privileged vs. the poor, the search for lost gold, drugs, sex and two Odin groups living near the lake, one rebelling against the other. Plus, there's all that Nordic mysticism and history of an area known as New Iceland.
In fact, the origins of this novel's protagonist can be traced back to the days when Valgardson was in graduate school in the United States and some of the Vietnam vets were returning.
"They didn't call it PTSD in those days but it was what they had. My grandfather called it 'shell shock.' As well, when I taught in Missouri, I travelled a bit with a friend who was a highway patrolman and I had the privilege of seeing the world of police from their perspective. I think Tom was forming over a long period of time. It wasn't like I sat and cogitated and said now I will make up characters like this. It was more like they wandered into the room.
"This narrative began with a man who invaded my dreams and who insisted on telling me his story. He was often not consistent, there were pieces missing, sometimes I didn't listen well. And, of course, other characters appeared. When I wrote The Girl With The Botticelli Face, I wrote it every night from 3-5 a.m., one chapter a night. One rewrite and it was done. In Valhalla's Shadows took six years."
Always interested in the effects of isolation on people in remote settings and frequently confronting what he says a Jungian would call his own shadow, William Dempsey Valgardson has written 15 books. Gentle Sinners (1980) won the Books in Canada Award for Best Novel of the Year. The Girl with the Botticelli Face (1992) won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. In addition, Valgardson served as editor of the Icelandic publication Lögberg-Heimskringla for two years and has kept an apartment in Gimli for many years, returning nearly every summer. He taught creative writing at UVic from 1974 to 2004. 978-1-77162-196-0
Review by Cherie Theissen, who reviews fiction from Pender Island.
[BCBW 2018]
PLACE OF BIRTH: Winnipeg (no hospital in Gimli until 1940)
RAISED: Gimli, Manitoba
ARRIVAL IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: 1974
ANCESTRAL BACKGROUND: Icelandic
EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: Teaching at the University of Victoria. After retirement from UVic, a stint as editor of Lögberg-Heimskringla, the Icelandic Community newspaper in Canada.
AWARDS: 1971, President's Medal, U. of Waterloo;
1980, first prize fiction, CBC;
1981, Books in Canada best first novel award;
1983, CAA silver medal, drama;
1988, first prize, drama, CBC;
1992, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize;
1995, Mr. Christie prize;
1998, Vicky Metcalfe Award
BOOKS:
In Valhalla's Shadows (D&M, 2018) a gothic crime novel 978-1-77162-196-0 (print) 978-1-77162-197-7 (ebook). Release date Sept. 3.
What the Bear Said: Skald Tales from New Iceland (Turnstone, 2011). Short fiction. $19. 978-0-88801-3804
Un visage a la Botticelli (Les Heres rouges, 2001);
Frances (Groundwood, 2000);
The Divorced Kids Club (Groundwood, 1998);
Garbage Creek and Other Stories (Groundwood, 1997);
Sarah and the People of Sand River (Groundwood, 1996); Winter Rescue (Simon and Schuster, 1995);
Stulkand Med Botticelli Andlitid (Ormstunga, 1995);
Thor (Groundwood, 1994);
The Hockey Fan (The Hawthorne Society, 1995);
The Girl With the Botticelli Face (D&M, 1992);
What Can't Be Changed Shouldn't Be Mourned (D&M, 1990);
Bloodrot (Sigmar Thormar, 1989);
Gentle Sinners (Oberon Press, 1980);
Red Dust (Oberon Press, 1978);
In The Gutting Shed (Turnstone Press, 1976);
God is Not A Fish Inspector (Oberon Press, 1975);
Bloodflowers (Oberon Press, 1973)
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS:
William Dempsey Valgardson was born in 1939. Went to United College. B.A (1961), B.Ed. (1965) from U.of Manitoba. MFA (1969) from U. of Iowa. Taught high school, then at Cottey College in Missouri (1970-1974). In 1974, he starting to teach creative writing department at the University of Victoria, mentoring W.P. Kinsella. Received an honorary doctorate from U. of Winnipeg in 1995. Having been made a member of the Royal Society of Canada, Valgardson received the Joan Inga Eyolfson Cadham Award in 2017 to recognize individuals who have been outstanding in the promotion of Icelandic culture and heritage by way of literature, arts, or media.
[photo credit Janis löf Magnusson]
[BCBW 2018] "Fiction" "Interview" "Icelandic"
+++
In Valhalla's Shadow by W.D. Valgardson (D&M $32)
In norse mythology, Asgard was the dwelling place of the gods, located in another dimension, possibly the sky or a different planet. It was divided into at least twelve realms; Valhalla being one. Valhalla was the home of Odin and Norse heroes slain in earthly battle.
Valhalla is also the name of a town one hour's drive from Winnipeg, located just fifteen minutes from W.D. Valgardson's hometown of Gimli. The protagonist in Valgardson's novel, Tom Parsons, who has just arrived at Valhalla on the northern shores of Lake Winnipeg, north of Gimli, is not a warrior. If confronted with crises, he mostly does nothing or behaves foolishly.
After his RCMP career, his marriage and his family have disintegrated, Parsons just wants to escape from Winnipeg. Mind-numbingly cold in winter and searingly hot in summer, Valhalla may be the perfect setting for mosquitoes and ticks but it doesn't seem to have much to recommend it to humans. Why this place then?
Well, there's the fishing, which could have been one of the reasons Parsons' father came here in the long ago past. And then there's the fact that as an RCMP officer, Parsons has been here before, when he came to investigate a mysterious disappearance. Now he's suffering from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and its subsequent nightmares.
During my interview with W.D. Valgardson about In Valhalla's Shadow he declared that "While I'm never sure about labels, I hope it's successful as a Gothic crime novel. I think it has something worthwhile to say about a number of issues: the RCMP, old age and identity, PTSD, our treatment of Aboriginal people, the importance of the past, the need people have for a place to which they can belong; and the power, good and bad, of ambition."
Valgardson-repeatedly cited by the late W.P. Kinsella as his foremost mentor-thrusts the reader immediately into the middle of the action. Parsons finds the body of a fifteen-year-old Indigenous girl lying near the beach near the rundown home he has just purchased.
Then comes the meticulous weaving of a 'sense of place,' with the introduction of the wacky, wild and wary inhabitants of Valhalla where everyone knows everyone else's business but nobody talks about their own, where everyone threatens but also offers advice.
There's a supporting cast of drug dealers, pimps, probable murderers, chess playing intellectual recluses with killer dogs, unhappy housewives, drunks, crooks, yachters, cultists and plain old thugs.
The atmosphere is pregnant with suspicion, innuendoes, mysteries and fear but Valgardson is too good a writer to leave it so one-sided. There is also a sense of community, sharing and compassion, people making the best of their lives.
"When I taught creative writing," Valgardson says, "I taught students to graph once they reached a certain point in their narrative. I used the back of wallpaper rolls for long narratives: chapters across the top, horizontals for characters, theme, point of view, setting, etc. When there are a lot of characters, plots and subplots, there is a lot to keep track of."
A synopsis of the disparate elements in In Valhalla's Shadow will not fit easily onto a wallpaper roll. There's Parsons' PTSD, the corruption and racism in the RCMP, the privileged vs. the poor, the search for lost gold, drugs, sex and two Odin groups living near the lake, one rebelling against the other. Plus, there's all that Nordic mysticism and history of an area known as New Iceland.
In fact, the origins of this novel's protagonist can be traced back to the days when Valgardson was in graduate school in the United States and some of the Vietnam vets were returning.
"They didn't call it PTSD in those days but it was what they had. My grandfather called it 'shell shock.' As well, when I taught in Missouri, I travelled a bit with a friend who was a highway patrolman and I had the privilege of seeing the world of police from their perspective. I think Tom was forming over a long period of time. It wasn't like I sat and cogitated and said now I will make up characters like this. It was more like they wandered into the room.
"This narrative began with a man who invaded my dreams and who insisted on telling me his story. He was often not consistent, there were pieces missing, sometimes I didn't listen well. And, of course, other characters appeared. When I wrote The Girl With The Botticelli Face, I wrote it every night from 3-5 a.m., one chapter a night. One rewrite and it was done. In Valhalla's Shadows took six years."
Always interested in the effects of isolation on people in remote settings and frequently confronting what he says a Jungian would call his own shadow, William Dempsey Valgardson has written 15 books. Gentle Sinners (1980) won the Books in Canada Award for Best Novel of the Year. The Girl with the Botticelli Face (1992) won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. In addition, Valgardson served as editor of the Icelandic publication Lögberg-Heimskringla for two years and has kept an apartment in Gimli for many years, returning nearly every summer. He taught creative writing at UVic from 1974 to 2004. 978-1-77162-196-0
Review by Cherie Theissen, who reviews fiction from Pender Island.
[BCBW 2018]
Articles: 4 Articles for this author
Review
In a beach town on Lake Winnipeg, in the heart of Manitoba's Icelandic community, golden dragonflies alight on the young heroine in Frances (Groundwood $7.95). A similar experience, the highlight of a recent summer vacation, inspired University of Victoria's creative writing instructor W.D. Valgardson's first full-length young adult novel. Woven with the drama of the author's own Icelandic heritage, the story begins with the discovery of a moldy, mouse-eaten journal, as Frances and her modern, ambitious, history-eschewing mother clean out the family homestead. Even though her grandmother warns, "Some things should just be left alone,"; Frances, with the help of a resident of the local old folks' home deciphers the journal's Icelandic entries, uncovers forbidden love, family scandal and ghosts. 0-88899-397-8
[BCBW 2000]
Sarah and the People of Sand River (Groundwood $16.95)
Info
A young Icelandic girl leaves Lake Winnipeg to board in the city in Sarah and the People of Sand River (Groundwood $16.95) by W.D. Valgardson. Only the intervention of a raven and a mysterious Native man and woman help her survive the treachery that awaits her. Illustrations are by Ian Wallace. Valgardson's previous children's book Thor was also based on his Icelandic heritage.
[BCBCW 1997]
W.D. V ALGARDSON (1981)
Interview
W.D. V ALGARDSON was born in Winnipeg in 1939. He passed most of his childhood in Gimli, Manitoba, a hardy fishing community that emphasized his Icelandic-Canadian roots. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1969 and currently teaches at the University of Victoria. A poet and scriptwriter, Valgardson is best known for his bestselling fiction collections, Bloodflowers (1973), God is Not a Fish Inspector (1975) and Red Dust (1978). His first novel, Gentle Sinners (1980), earned the Books in Canada First Novel Award and became a successful film. More complex than his dramatic short stories, Valgardson's novel is about a country boy learning to interpret the danger signs for surviving town corruption and adulthood. W.D. (William Dempsey) Valgardson lives in Victoria. He was interviewed in 1981.
T: The schoolteacher in your story "Beyond Normal Requirements" says, "Tragedy is all around us. We must get to know it so we can guard ourselves against it." Is that a fair explanation of why you write?
VALGARDSON: Yes. I would say that really sums it up. I think there is a real danger in not looking at things. Mostly yourself. For instance, I believe in the rather Jungian statement that North Americans will never deal in a successful way with the Russians until they deal with the Russians within themselves.
T: So has Bill Valgardson dealt with the Russian within himself?
VALGARDSON: I've spent a long, long time confronting what a Jungian would call my shadow. I've recorded hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dreams. I've accepted the fact that I'm capable of any crime.
T: Goethe once said exactly the same thing.
VALGARDSON: Yes, it's particularly important for writers. I tell my students that there are two journeys that every writer must take. The first journey is into the lives of others. But the second journey is the most terrifying. It is the journey into the self. I think what happens with a lot of people is that they turn away. They suddenly become aware of their motivations and they realize some of the things they are capable of. They don't understand that just because they're capable of something, they don't have to do it.
T: Gentle Sinners began with a dream you had, a dream that became the final scene in the book. How did you know enough to trust that dream?
VALGARDSON: It was just the intensity with which it came. You see, I believe in sitting down and writing out of emotion. I don't know where I'm going. For me writing is like an Eskimo carving. The form is in the stone. The trick is for me to find the form. And so it's a case of exploration. I write to discover what I think. I don't think and then write. If you think and then write, you often get propaganda. For instance, I think one of the worst things any writer can do is impose symbols. That's a dreadful thing, to nail them on. It should be like driftwood. You don't nail the knots on. The water washes and erodes and what's left are these hard knobs. That is the way that symbols should be. They should rise out of the material naturally. Then you go back over your material and see what you've got. Then you heighten it. You see connections. Because one's genius is often in spots. It's not necessarily coherent all the way through. So you try to make it coherent. It's like painting. You add touches.
T: Your characters aren't analytical and you are. Do you feel that people who lack that analytical sense are more prone to tragedy?
VALGARDSON: ...I think that people who lack that analytical sense are often drawn into tragedy like people who are drawn into a vortex. Like a helpless swimmer in a whirlpool who is only cast out by luck. But there's a danger on the other side and that is to be like Hamlet. To be so analytical that one no longer can act. I think that always what one is doing is searching for balance.
T: Is that how you've changed over the years? You've become more balanced?
VALGARDSON: Good god, how have I changed? That would take years to answer! I think maybe I've become more perceptive. And I think I've become much more accepting of other people. I can be pretty intolerant. You see, I was brought up Missouri Lutheran. I cannot say, with any sense of honesty, that the Christianity I was brought up with in any way made me into a better person.
T: Many of your stories seem to strip people of the frills of life. The characters are put into situations where they must make a difficult choice. Usually it's a choice of animal survival, of practicality.
VALGARDSON: Given the environment, yes. Where I grew up was for a long time a kind of Appalachia of Canada. People were very, very poor. And also the emotional choices people had were incredibly restricted. When Icelanders moved to Ontario from Iceland, in one year every child under the age of four died. There was nothing to be done. The helplessness and the rage got trapped inside a group of people for whom stoicism was the ultimate virtue. The poverty, the foreignness, the displacement from an ocean environment, a sense of loss of identity, an idealization of the past all those things went towards creating a society in which there weren't very many choices. So people were living, in a sense, at a pretty primitive level.
T: So what was it like to grow up in Gimli, Manitoba?
VALGARDSON: My father was a commercial fisherman who also had a barbershop. My mother was a housewife. She was seventeen when I was born, my father was twenty-two. My mother's parents were Irish from Ireland. Everybody thinks of me as being Icelandic, but that's only part of the picture.
It was small town country living in the 1940s and 1950s. Rural Canada in those days seemed to me an incredibly good time and I had the kind of parents who were always taking us on picnics in the summer. Gimli is a beautiful place in the summer. A kid could spend the evenings playing tin can cricket or going fishing at the dock. I got my first rifle when I was twelve. It was one of the high points of my life. I had my own snare line. I
loved it. It was a wonderful life. And in the winter we spent an awful lot of time skating on the lake or skating at the rink.
T: Why did you need to become a writer?
VALGARDSON: Well, I grew up in an environment in which an awful lot of emphasis was placed on physical strength and being big. People made livings as farmers and fishermen and they required tremendous physical stamina. I'm all of five-seven, five eight. I'm slightly built, light. And with poor eyesight. In prairie towns, the way to succeed and have power and be admired is to be good at hockey and football and be able to fight. I obviously don't fit those categories.
I was a dreamer and a reader. At some stage I obviously learned that you can fight with words. You can lay people wide open with words! You might have to learn to run like hell after you've said what you said...but I think there's a lot of people who become lawyers for that reason. And politicians. And writers.
T: So there's an element of revenge in success.
VALGARDSON: Yes. Now I love winning contests. I'm very, very aware of the fact that when I do win something, who I'm winning for isn't Bill Valgardson, Associate Professor. I'm winning for the guy who always got chosen last for the baseball team. When you're in school and you're the best pitcher in the grade seven class, what is so wonderful about it is that one is admired. That's the wonderful thing about being an adult and being fortunate enough to be a writer or a painter or whatever. Most people go into jobs and nobody ever knows what you do. You file stuff or something. This other kind of job means you still continue to be admired.
T: What were your ambitions as a kid? Were you always interested in being a writer?
VALGARDSON: Not really. I don't particularly remember having great aspirations. When I was sixteen I got a job in a warehouse in Winnipeg, unloading boxcars. I did that for five summers. It never occurred to me to go to university.
In those days people didn't just go to university. It was for the doctor's son or the dentist's son. I was busy working at the warehouse when a bunch of these city kids, who were much more sophisticated than me, came in with their grades one day. Everybody was showing everybody else their grades. They were all going to university. I looked and I thought, 'Jeez, my grades are higher than anybody's here." It was a real shocker.
T: So it was off to United College.
VALGARDSON: No. I went to the University of Manitoba the first year and that was a disaster. It was a bloody disaster. It was the wrong place for me. I didn't know that most country kids went off to United College because it was smaller. I was plunged from a small country school where we didn't have a real library into this huge university with classes of two hundred people. I'm sure it was a perfectly good university. It just wasn't the right place for me. The next year I went to United College and that was much better.
T: Were you writing stories by this time?
VALGARDSON: In third year I joined the Creative Writing Club and began to write poetry. I wrote a tremendous amount of poems. Finally somewhere I actually did write a short story and it got published in an Icelandic-Canadian magazine. I also got married in my third year. It was a real scandal in those days to get married so young. I went off teaching high school on a permit. By that time I was really writing a lot, evenings and
weekends, while I was teaching high school.
Teaching high school was wonderful at first because I got a chance to learn all the things I'd missed when I was a student. I mean, I didn't know any grammar, didn't know any punctuation. But I had to teach it. So you have to learn. Gerunds and participles and commas. I've talked to a lot of teachers and heard the same thing. At first they learn more than the students.
T: You said "wonderful at first."
VALGARDSON: Yes. After I got my teaching certificate I went and taught art full time at the Transcona Collegiate. That was baptism by fire. The low man on any totem is the art teacher. I didn't know that. I went from there up north to Snow Lake to teach. That was a very good year. Except that the only people paid the same amount of money as the teachers were the garbagemen. And the miners earned double the money that the teachers and the garbagemen were making. The prices in the town were controlled by the two stores. Everything was so expensive. By that time we had two kids. I ended up with a severe case of scurvy by the end of the year. We didn't know what it was. Because we were feeding the kids and we were skipping things for ourselves. ..You couldn't get fresh milk. Fruit juice was so expensive you just gave it to the kids.
When I went to Snow Lake it was the end of the world, up in the bush. I was still writing. I managed to get a story in Alphabet with James Reaney. The name James Reaney didn't mean anything to me at the time. And Fiddlehead took a story. I very wisely realized my deficiencies. I wrote away to the University of North Dakota for correspondence courses. I took those courses for the next couple of years. Things like grammar, composition and feature article writing. They were wonderful courses.
T: How did you end up studying writing in the States?
VALGARDSON: Are you into romantic stories? I'll give you a couple of romantic stories. When I went to teach in Pinowa, two very important things happened. I was in the library one day and I came across a book by an author I'd never heard of before named Al Purdy. It was Cariboo Horses. Every writer I've talked to has had this kind of experience where they have suddenly been given permission to be Canadian. And Al Purdy did that for me with Cariboo Horses. For the first time I realized I didn't have to be T.S. Eliot or Ernest Hemingway. I didn't have to be an Englishman or an American. It was okay to write like a Canadian with Canadian content, As a Canadian, what I had to say and what I had to talk about were important. It was like a logjam bursting. At university we had only studied English and American literature, so there was a whole denial of who you were. I had been trying to write "The Wasteland" for years. Suddenly I was writing a dozen poems a day.
The next thing that happened was that I was ordering books for the school library when I came across a book on how to write by Paul Engel. I'd never heard of him or the University of Iowa but it said he was the director of the Creative Writing program there. Hell, a Creative Writing program! I'd never heard of such a thing in Canada. That was like Underwater Basketweaving.
I had all these poems. And in the meantime I had sold every lesson from the correspondence course in feature article writing. So I had this coalescing of success. That was tremendous adrenalin. So I bundled up all these poems to send them to Paul Engel. But I was so bashful that when I went down to the mail I didn't mail them. I went through this three times. Finally one day I went down there, closed my eyes at the mail slot and shoved it in.
Nothing happened. A month went by. Two months went by, I thought, "Famous people like that get all kinds of people writing. Who is going to reply to a Canadian living on an island in a forest reserve?" One day this envelope came, I'd got a whole bunch of crap in the mail that day, advertisements and stuff, and this looked like an advertisement. I threw the whole goddam thing in the garbage. As I was going out the door I thought, 'Jesus, I shouldn't do that." I walked back, looked through it more carefully. I opened it. It wasn't from Paul Engel. It was a letter from George Starbuck, the Yale poet. In typical American fashion they said they really liked the poetry, we've accepted you for graduate work, we've obtained a halftime teaching position even though you haven't asked for it, but we figured you're married so you're probably going to need it, when are you arriving?
That to me is typically American. That's what I love about the Americans. That whole enthusiastic quality that if you want to do it, do it. As opposed to the Canadian defeatist attitude that has certainly existed in the past on the academic level. You'd never get Canadians getting a strange letter and responding like that. I mean, they enrolled me, they got me a job and said when are you coming?
T: So in Iowa you learned your craft. What about style? Do you see where yours comes from?
VALGARDSON: No, I don't think so. I have all these pet theories but I think that if you learn from other writers you never have to worry about becoming a copy of them. I think everybody goes through romances with other writers. You love Hemingway, you love Updike. But ultimately, time is like water. It erodes. What I learned from Updike was to really love the complex sentence. What I learned from Hemingway was to love the simple sentence. What I learned from both of them was to love an eye for detail and yet both of them use totally different details. From Jane Austen I learned to love a complexity of structure from what appears to be an easily told tale. And from Hardy, a love of description.
T: I see similarities between the world view of Hardy and your own.
VALGARDSON: Except I don't believe in fate as a determiner the way he does.
T: There's a poem of Hardy's to the effect "if only there was a God to blame all this on."
VALGARDSON: Well, I don't know that particular poem but let me give you mine. "If God is a white-haired and bearded old man, when I get to the gates of heaven or hell I'm going looking for him with a six-shooter." Maybe in the end one does not assign blame for all the suffering in the world. But if there is an old man with a white beard, I'm going looking for him.
I think my mother said recently she has now gone to my step-grandmother's fourteen times to get together before going to the church for a funeral. In one summer when I was six the baby in the family died, my grandfather died and my great-grandfather died. Two of my great-uncles were drowned on a boating trip for a picnic. Eight years ago my brother, who was first mate on a boat on the Mackenzie River, was working on a forklift and went over the side of the barge and was trapped inside, couldn't get out. Left a wife and two little children.
T: When you were confronted with death as a boy, did you have resources to help you deal with that?
VALGARDSON: No.
T: So is there a connection there to the earlier quote about the need to recognize tragedy?
VALGARDSON: Sure. It hasn't been until very recently that you have academics studying death and the needs of the survivors and what needs to be done to help people cope. Even well-intentioned people wanting to help often weren't helpful. Even today, it's amazing. You have a death and people say, "Oh, we don't want the kids to go to a funeral. It'll be too upsetting for them." Not realizing what they're really saying is that it will be too upsetting for them to have the kids there. The adults put their needs ahead of the kids' needs to participate in the grieving.
There are tremendous failures in North American society in coping with a lot of the elements of life that other societies have dealt with ritual. The use of the wake or the use of public mourning. As opposed to a kind of dismissal in our society of all ritual. Ritual exists for a reason. It didn't just happen. It happened because of people's needs. We've dismissed ritual but we haven't replaced it with anything. I guess in Gentle Sinners I said something along the lines of, "it's not whether one will have gods but which ones one worships." Often if we're too quick to dismiss the rituals of the past, we leave a kind of vacuum into which the behaviours that we substitute are not really adequate emotionally.
[STRONG VOICES by Alan Twigg (Harbour 1988)] "Interview";
What the Bear Said
Summary (2011)
After a publishing hiatus of more than a decade, W.D. Valgardson returned to adult fiction for What the Bear Said: Skald Tales from New Iceland (Turnstone 2011), a collection of short stories that was launched in Gimli, Manitoba, centre of all things Icelandic-Canadian. The stories capture the experiences of Icelandic settlers in Canada as W.P. Kinsella's mentor at UVic, Bill Valgardson, presents new myths and legends in the old style of eddas and sagas.