home again

"Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend," wrote Wallace Stegner in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose.

I have always had an affinity for Stegner, that "Great American Author" who actually grew up in a small Saskatchewan town not too far from where I was raised. He kept returning to themes of roots and place over and over again in his books; even though he called his birthplace a "dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere," I think his writing owes much to its character. I would even go so far as to say that it, and his self-imposed exile from it, defined him as a writer.

My own artist's voice is also influenced by displacement. My family were pioneers who came to Saskatchewan at the turn of the last century to make a better life for themselves and their descendants. Four years ago (almost to the day) I moved far away from them and everything they had built in order to pursue my own dreams, only to be clawed at by guilt and homesickness. After confessing this to my grandmother over the phone, she said wisely, "Just do what you have to do." Her comforting words made me feel like a pioneer in my own right. 

Coming full circle, this spring I will revisit my home province and spend a week writing in the childhood home of Wallace Stegner himself, now a residence for artists and writers. Perhaps my work will benefit from rediscovering my roots as much as his did.

Stay tuned for my dispatches from the Great Southwest.