“[…] The English knew the lake, you see, and the French, the French would be more familiar with the river.”
“Yes,” said Jerome. “Yes, I like that idea. Geographical allegiances.” (URQUHART 2005, 110)
1Jane Urquhart, one of Canada’s most celebrated writers, is both a poet and a fiction writer. She has written three volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories and eight internationally acclaimed novels to date. Jane has also edited the Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007) and has written a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadian Series (2009) and an ingenious historical-cultural book entitled A Number of Things: Stories of Canada Through 50 Objects (2016).
2In recognition of her literary achievements, she received The Marian Engle Award (1994), was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada; she has been a writer-in-residence multiple times and has been granted honorary doctorates from several universities. Her work has been nominated for a number of prizes: her first published novel, The Whirlpool (1986), received the French award Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, her third novel, Away (1993), won the Trillium Award while her next published novel, The Underpainter (1997) won the Governor General Award. These novels, as well as her other novels, have often been finalists for several other prizes, including the Orange, the Giller and the Booker Prizes.
3Jane Urquhart’s “geographical allegiances” are multiple. More than a “regional” writer, Jane Urquhart is a writer of regions. Her writing often draws us into a specific region, then beyond its boundaries into another region, and often beyond the boundaries of Canada.
4As our special guest during the conference, Jane Urquhart agreed to discuss her fiction writing, notably through her novels Away, The Underpainter, A Map of Glass, Sanctuary Line, and The Night Stages. Evoking certain childhood memories, various themes that inform her writing, and various practices of colonization and resource exploitation, Jane Urquhart speaks of her attachment to specific regions of Ontario.
L-A R Your fiction often explores the regions of Southern Ontario, but you were born up north, that is in the far north of Northern Ontario. Can you tell us how the north, its specific landscape, its culture and history, have affected you and your writing?
J U In several ways. First of all, I have set one of my novels in the north: The Underpainter. I was intrigued by the kind of settlements that would pop in the north, and particularly in Northern Ontario, around industrial endeavours such as mining settlements and things of that nature, because that was the kind of settlement that I was born in. In fact, I was born in a tiny log hospital in the middle of one of these settlements next to my log house. It’s almost what we used to think of the traditional Canadian experience. However, I have to say that in recent years I have come to understand that whole experience in a very different way, partly because of the fact that my novel Away was shortlisted for Canada Reads, an event organized every year by CBC Radio to choose the book that all Canadians should be reading, and I was shortlisted along with Richard Wagamese, a brilliant Anishnaabe writer of huge scope and enormous depth. He is, alas, now dead. Richard Wagamese was born on a reserve, not far away from the little mining settlement where I was born, and that was an eye-opening experience for me.
L-A R Was that at the time when Wagamese’s novel Indian Horse was also a finalist?
J U Yes, and we gave a number of events together around Northern Ontario, and so we had an audience comprised of very many young Anishinaabe students, who were there for Richard, but I had the privilege of getting to know some of them, and it was a life-changing moment for me.
L-A R The Underpainter significantly begins with a description of the Sleeping Giant, a huge formation of rock in the shape of a giant man sleeping in the water with an underground silver mine at his feet. This site, which is attached to an Ojibway legend involving the Trickster figure Nanabozho (or Nana Bijou or Nanabush), is an Indigenous landscape that characterizes Thunder Bay.
J U That’s very true. And yet, it is interesting how one’s perception of landscape changes in relation to the kinds of stories one is being told, and so to answer your first question, being born in the north had a major effect on me, and it was a direct result, I believe, of the kind of tall tales that were told by people such as prospectors who spent a long time in the woods (one of whom was my father) and various cultures that had settled in and around the mining community. One thinks of it as a sort of standard English-Irish-Scots community, but that was not in fact the case. There were many northern Europeans who were working in the mines.
L-A R Yes, the Finnish community for example.
JU Exactly, and so it was a much more multicultural experience than people stereotypically believe it to be. But the one culture that affected us only tangentially was the Indigenous culture that remained very separate from the experiences of the mining community. I left there when I was six, so I only have those early childhood memories. Essentially, what I walked away with, in my pockets shall we say, from the north was a sense of isolation and enormously still landscapes that seem to go on forever. And since the landscapes and the settings of the books I was reading in no way resembled the place I was living in, I was experiencing European fairy tales in the middle of a place where you would never even imagine a palace or a castle or any other suggestions of European architecture.
L-A R The landscape up north had its own tales to tell, like the myth of the Sleeping Giant of Lake Superior with which you open The Underpainter. Did you know that the Sleeping Giant was voted as Canada’s number 1 Wonders in 2007?
JU I didn’t, but it should very well be. It’s a very powerful piece of landscape. There is no doubt that it is animated. It’s not that we are just looking at a great big mountain or a cliff. Even without understanding the spiritual element of the Sleeping Giant and all of its Indigenous legends, I don’t think it would be possible to be human and be in its vicinity without knowing that this is somehow a sacred space.
L-A R At the beginning of The Underpainter, you describe the landscape as a “human-shaped peninsula” and then you evoke the Anishinaabe Ojibway myth of the Sleeping Giant. I thought it was really fascinating how in your novel Away the Trickster figure announces “the curse” of the gold mines to come, and then how, in The Underpainter, the silver mine is under the curse of the Anishinaabe figure, preventing the settlers from exploiting the mine seeing that no one could get to the silver which lies in the water underneath the Giant’s feet. Your father worked in the mines up north as an engineer, didn’t he?
JU Yes, he was an engineer and a prospector. And as a mining engineer he was a bit responsible, if not fully responsible, for the actual structure of the mine, which was underneath the lake.
L-A R Which region of Ontario do you live in now?
J U I now live in Southeastern Ontario, Northumberland County, in the land of my settler ancestors. We have lived here for over ten years now. I’m living in a two-hundred-year-old house that was owed by my parents. I really have come home.
L-A R Would that be the beautiful heritage home known as the Keeler house?
J U That’s it. And it’s a good place to live. And a wonderful house in which to write because it’s filled with material in the true sense of the word. Because this was my parents’ house, it also has photographs, papers and letters not only from my parents’ generation, but also from my grandparents’ generation, because everything eventually ended up in this house, and so if I become tired or bored, all I have to do is open a drawer and I’m going to find something that interests me.
L-A R Could you tell us a bit more about Joseph A. Keeler?
J U He was the founder of a place called Cramahe Township, a township within Northumberland County. He probably was a United Empire Loyalist in that he came up from Vermont, but he came later than most United Empire Loyalists, so it is very difficult to say for sure whether he was or not. He founded not just the village of Colborne, but also other villages in the neighbourhood such as Castleton and Morganston, and built this house in fact. His son was one of the first MPs in one of the first governments of Canada in the late 1860s. In fact, he used the room that I’m sitting in as a sort of office when he wasn’t in Ottawa, and of course he went back and forth to Ottawa by stagecoach. So there is a lot of what is now called “settler history” in this house; it’s fascinating from that point of view and then added to it of course is the fascinating kind of conflict that would have come with my mother’s family, and that of course is the conflict of the Irish who had nothing but full-on and, I would say, earned disdain for the British, and for the British Empire generally.
L-A R And the Orangemen.
J U And the Orangemen who were running the province of Ontario in those days, and those were Protestants who were devoted to making certain that Irish Catholics didn’t succeed in any number of ways. So I always think of how interesting it is that my mother who inherited all of the disdain for the British Empire ended up in a colonial British Empire-like house.
L-A R How ironical. And, your father owned another heritage home, didn’t it?
J U There’s one in A Map of Glass that is buried by sand.
L-A R Oh yes, the Evergreen Hotel, isn’t it?
J U Yes, and in fact that’s based on a true story as well. An ecological disaster resulted in its burial by sand. The whole county was devoted to growing barley for the American market, and as they didn’t rotate their crops, they eventually destroyed the soil that turned to sand, and joined the sand bars coming in from Lake Ontario. They actually destroyed the entire economy of Prince Edward County. They refer to the good times as “the barley days” and the bad times as “the days after the barley days”.
L-A R Has that house completely disappeared? Has it been reclaimed? Is it part of the Provincial Park now?
J U It has disappeared underneath the sand of the Sandbanks Provincial Park. But it’s a fascinating metaphor as you can imagine. It called me to write about it. My brothers who were older than me could play on the roof, but by the time I was born, it was buried completely. My father claimed that one of his great uncles owned that hotel.
L-A R The house buried by sand is briefly mentioned in Away as well. But the important house is “the white house” in Port Hope that is owned by the two Irish sea captains in the novel. Does it still exist?
J U It does. It’s called the Seaman’s Inn, and as far as I now, it’s still there, near the water of Lake Ontario in Port Hope because that was the place where most of the Irish immigrants, who were coming to Canada would be brought by lake boat. They would then start to move inland to take up the properties that had been sold to them by the Canada Company. Actually, that’s one of the things I hadn’t known until recently: the Canada Company was a massive multi-national corporation that had been in existence for some time by the time my Irish great great-great-grandfather would have purchased his plot of land near Hastings, Ontario. The shareholders and the directors of the Canada Company had never once set foot in Canada: the whole thing was being run out of London.
L-A R There is often a sense of loss that comes with these remnants of the past.
J U Yes, and I think that this applies universally in that one becomes attached to beloved landscapes in childhood, or streetscapes for that matter, or neighbourhoods. I’ve often wondered whether it would be possible to become as attached were there no human beings involved in the attachment. In other words, without the narrative, without the interpersonal relationships, would the landscape itself become as meaningful to us as it does in childhood? Or perhaps transience would change things as well if one were to move from place to place. What happened in my case was that I was very closely attached to an agricultural people who were from an oral tradition originally. They could read and write, but their idea of entertainment was talk, so they delivered stories. They told an enormous number of stories, and they located those stories in the landscape, and I think that part of the reason the landscape became so beautiful and resonant as it did for me in Northumberland County was because of the narratives that were emplaced on it by a particular bunch of people. Now that could have changed utterly for a different family, a family with a different background, but in the case of my family, they had never really fully recovered from the loss of Ireland, and so they not only overlaid their own narratives on the landscape that they were in, they constantly hearkened back to the land that had been left behind. None of them had ever seen that land, but they inherited a propensity for romanticizing about that land — and the politics that went with it.
L-A R To sum up, we can then say that your part of rural Ontario is the Southeastern part, and more specifically Northumberland County. And this is where your memories of childhood are located as you moved from the north to the south when you were six. But you moved to Toronto, didn’t you?
J U Yes, we did, but I spent my summers in Northumberland County. I spent them on a variety of farms that were run by my Irish uncles and also down at a lake in a very modest lakeside cottage that had been purchased by the only two members of the family who had migrated to a city. They wanted us to know our cousins and to be able to experience the same landscape that they had. So, they spent two hundred dollars on a cottage down at the lake… That was my mother and my uncle and their spouses. But my uncle who was a teacher couldn’t afford his one hundred dollars, so my father paid the entire sum and my uncle worked off his hundred dollars by doing repairs and fixing things. He was from a farm so he knew how to do that kind of things.
L-A R These childhood stories help us understand your writing. And yet, you chose to set some of your novels in Southwestern Ontario.
J U Yes, especially Essex County and Waterloo County.
L-A R In her introduction to Alice Munro’s Carried Away, Margaret Atwood provides a definition of Southwestern Ontario that I’d like to read to you:
Ontario is a huge and varied space, but South-western Ontario is a distinct part of it. It was named Sowesto by the painter Greg Curnoe, a name that has stuck. Curnoe’s view was that Sowesto was an area of considerable interest, but also of considerable psychic murkiness and oddity, a view shared by many. Robertson Davies, also from Sowesto, used to say, ‘I know the dark ways of my people,’ and Alice Munro knows them, too. (2006, x)
To begin with, I’d like your opinion on the acronym Sowesto that is associated with Alice Munro country. Being from Northern Ontario myself, I would never in everyday life refer to Southwestern Ontario as Sowesto, nor would anyone else I know in Northern Ontario. Is it then a term that goes without saying or is it used only by insiders, by people from Southwestern Ontario?
J U I knew Greg Curnoe, and I think that Greg Curnoe himself was instrumental in creating the oddity that comes along with Sowesto as well as the term, but it is a term that stuck, for sure. My husband, for instance, would never refer to Southwestern Ontario, he would always say Sowesto. He of course lived there for a very long period of time and was part of a whole community of artists, including Greg Curnoe and Jack Chambers who became figureheads or forerunners in the idea of regionalism. Greg Curnoe was very attached to the notion of regionalism and I think it was Tony, my husband, who pointed out that London, Ontario was exactly the same size as Florence, Italy when Florence was at its height of artistic achievements. I always thought of them as so much older than me, but now that I’m a little older myself, I think back that they were having an enormous amount of fun. They were in their thirties and were developing this whole world, they were showing the rest of the world through the national gallery and various other places what a Sowesto experience might look like and they were inventing things such as the Nihilist Spasm Band that played music loudly and obnoxiously, and performed every Friday night, and people came. So it was a kind of zany period and one that was very creatively alive and I was lucky enough to actually come into that at a time when I was really starting to think about writing rather than publishing. I was perhaps writing a little bit on the sly, but I didn’t have very much ambition at that point, and also I was timid about showing my writing to anyone else. I found that with the atmosphere around that was devil-may-care, you were able to do almost anything that you wanted without fear of being humiliated. I really got a start from all of that, and at that point I was living in Sowesto, where my husband was teaching, first at Western, but not when he was in my life, and then he taught at the University of Waterloo.
L-A R Your husband Tony Urquhart was also a major part of the regionalist movement along with the artist Greg Curnoe who embraced the term regionalism as you said.
J U He definitely was. And what it did for me was that it familiarised me with another landscape, a different landscape with which I had grown up so I was able to come to know its bridges and its roads. I placed The Stone Carvers in Southwestern Ontario, not far from where we lived, and had a character who was a wanderer, Tilman, who was very useful for landscape. He was always out walking the roads and finding bridges to live under and things of that nature, so, it was a kind of expansion of the landscape inside my own mind to be able to write about Sowesto.
L-A R Seeing that you are familiar with both regions, how distinct is Southwestern Ontario from Southeastern Ontario?
JU Physically it’s very different in terms of geographical terrain with the beautiful hills of Northumberland etc., and, as my mother would always say when she went to Southwestern Ontario: “too flat”. So it has a sort of American Midwestern feel to it, not just in terms of landscape (and it is quite beautiful too), but also in terms of how people think. And I think that’s when we move into Alice Munro’s “who do you think you are” syndrome. For there is a sense, or rather there was a sense — things are constantly changing in Canada, which is one of the things that is wonderful about it— there was a sense in Southwestern Ontario that one should never call attention to oneself, and that conflict is sometimes at the heart of some of Alice Munro’s work, which is so extraordinary and so compelling, and has that sort of tension of whether we will be or revealing or whether we will be withholding, and with the public sanction of the withholding side of that conflict.
But Alice, of course, is a writer of enormous depth, and really interestingly, although again everyone says she sets her work in Southwestern Ontario, some of her most thrilling and largest stories are set elsewhere, for instance “Too Much Happiness”, which is partly set in Russia or “The Albanian Virgin”, which is set in Albania. I remember talking to Alice Munro about that when she was writing the story and she explained that she wanted to write this story about Albania, and she would say “but I don’t think I can do it, I don’t know anything about Albania”, and it became this phenomenal short story.
Perhaps a little bit of knowledge of a place is better than too much knowledge because I feel that I could never have written the novel Away had I known then what I now know about Ireland. So much of that book was my imaginary Ireland. It was the Ireland of all the tales of people who had never been there, what the people descended from there told me when I was growing up. There was also my own imaginative overlay because I really had only been there for about a week when I wrote Away. Now, I have of course lived in Ireland, taught at UCD for a year, I have spent a lot of time in Ireland, and I know so much more from the point of view of the Irish language, I know way more about that. So, it was a novel of the imagination.
L-A R To come back to southwestern Ontario, your novel Sanctuary Line takes place in Essex County. Is there a relationship with the bird sanctuary there?
J U Yes, of course, there’s a road leading to the bird sanctuary. The protagonist is an entomologist studying in particular the monarch butterfly. I think I can now release a piece of information about Sanctuary Line without getting into too much trouble and that is that the book was actually written about Northumberland County, but because there were so many cousins in it, I felt there might be some problems on the home front. There is also a bird sanctuary here in Northumberland County, and I knew about Essex County, and I thought I could transpose the novel to Essex County. And of course it’s a massive fruit and tomato growing area in Canada. So for multigenerational farmers of the successful type, it worked better, because here in Northumberland County, the farms are smaller and were never as successful as they would have been in Essex County. I think that really Sanctuary Line was about the disappearance of the agricultural world to a certain extent and a kind of corruption of agriculture just when it was on the verge of moving into what we now call agro-industry and when foreign and migrant workers were brought up to Canada to work in the fields, which was a moment of enormous change. It’s still extremely problematic in that those migrant workers do not share the same kind of rights as Canadian citizens. The situation has of course been made clearer recently by the corona virus because migrant workers are forced to live in congregate settings, which makes it very difficult for migrant workers. And yet, the industrial and capitalist side of farming, which used to be contented with the mixed farm, now demands more and more and it needs enormous numbers of laborers, and this is a problem that continues to be discussed here.
L-A R The monarch butterflies migrate at the end of August to Mexico, which draws a parallel with the migrant workers in your novel.
J U Yes, most of the migrant workers are Mexican, and that’s true in Northumberland County as well, and I had noted that the migration of the butterflies was in sync with the arrival and departure of the migrant workers.
L-A R Arrivals and departures are a recurrent theme in your novels.
J U I think that migration happens a lot in my novels. I believe that we are living on — I guess the gentlest way of saying this is — borrowed land unless we are Indigenous, and so migration is probably the largest element of Canadian life in the sense that you may be two or three generations away from it, or you might be even six or seven generations away from the migration that brought you here, but you are nevertheless always going to be a migrant. It’s one thing that I am absolutely certain about is that the theme of migration is probably the most important political theme that is being addressed in literature, and it has always been, even if people were unaware that they were addressing it previously.
L-A R Your last novel, The Night Stages, stands out from your other novels because your character is in a waiting zone at an airport. She’s an English woman living in Ireland, County Kerry that you know so well, on her way to New York, but she gets stranded at Gander Airport. The novel is set neither in Southeastern nor Southwestern Ontario, but in Newfoundland.
J U That’s true. Newfoundland was one of my second homes as well. I went out there in 1990 as writer-in-residence at Memorial, and never fully recovered from Newfoundland. It felt as if I was going home when I was there. It was while I was there that I heard that Simone de Beauvoir was stranded at Gander airport for three days when she had been left by Nelson Algren; she had landed to refuel in Gander and then the fog came in, and so there she was for three days in Gander. I’ve always thought about that and how horrific it would be to be at the end of a love affair trying to get back to Paris and you end up in Newfoundland. That’s one of the inspirations. The other one, of course, has to do with the mural that she looks at while she sits there and that was a mural that was completed by a very dear friend of my husband’s back in the fifties. It is one of those works of art that just never gets looked at because it’s in an underused airport now that the planes don’t need to refuel in Newfoundland and can fly right over Gander. So those were the ingredients that make up The Night Stages.
L-A R Gander Airport has become quite popular now, hasn’t it, thanks to the musical that went to Broadway?
J U That’s very true, and the mural by the way has now been designated a historic site. For a while, the Americans were taking troops through Gander, which meant that the mural was in a room that was inaccessible, but they’ve made the room accessible now for tourists. Yes, the musical was just wonderful, and it really was quite an experience for the world to be stranded in Gander because Gander is a small place.
L-A R Thank you for sharing these memories and stories with us.