Voices & Visions: Interviews with Saskatchewan Writers

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

I am not sure whether, as a Torontonian who has only occasionally visited Saskatchewan, I am an appropriate reviewer for Voices & Visions. Is this a book for local consumption or one with national ambitions? Of the 13 writers interviewed by Doris Hillis, the poet Pat Lane has firmly established a reputation across Canada, while the fiction-writer Guy Vanderhaeghe has been receiving wide attention since Man Descending won a Governor General’s Award for 1982. A few others, including Lorna Crozier and Ken Mitchell, will be known to devotees of Canadian literature; the names of the rest are likely, if known at all, to be associated with occasional poems and short stories in magazines or anthologies.

I must confess that, when I first glanced through it, Voices & Visions seemed less a book than a public-relations job: glossy cover, good paper, attractive design, carefully posed photographs. And there are some embarrassing parochial moments:

Mitchell: ... it’s been a great disappointment to me that I haven’t been able to develop a relationship with a theatre like the Globe ... because I think that’s how the best plays are written.

Hillis: Well, I guess that’s the way Shakespeare did it.

But most of the book is on a decidedly higher lever and deserves more serious attention. Canada, as we know, has always been strongly regional in its organization, and it may well be that, with this (in the main) new crop of energetic writers, Saskatchewan is destined to become prominent in the literature of the immediate future.

The regional challenge is well articulated by Terrence Heath:

I think there are an amazing number of powerful voices emanating from the prairies, especially from Saskatchewan. ... I think the writing in this region has come to the end of phase one. By that I mean, in the past, prairie writers have needed to speak of their place, their roots in Western Canada. ... Now that has been done and prairie writers are free to deal with other subject matter.

If Heath is right, this book will be justified. It all depends on the subsequent development of the writers interviewed here, and of those to appear in a subsequent volume upon which Doris Hillis is already working.