Local Colour: Writers Discovering Canada

Patricia Myers is a historian with the Historic Sites and Archives
Service, Alberta Community Development.

This collection of travel pieces “is intended to introduce some of the
best contemporary travel writing about Canada selected from books and
articles written over the past 30 years.” The idea for it grew out of
an exhibit prepared for the National Library of Canada on the writings
of Canadians traveling abroad. Editor Carol Martin put that exhibit
together, and in the process discovered a great deal of travel writing
that dealt with Canada.

Martin does a good job of covering the country: for example, Claire
Mowat writes richly about Newfoundland, Hugh Brody tackles northeastern
British Columbia, and Mark Abley pays a long-awaited visit to
Writing-on-Stone Park in southern Alberta. In Malcolm MacRury’s quirky
piece “The Grand Tour,” MacRury races across Canada in three weeks,
hitting the quintessential tourist spots (Green Gables, Quebec City,
Moncton’s Magnetic Hill, and Banff, to name a few); his writing is
fresh and honest.

Though Martin includes some well-written pieces (Margaret Laurence’s
exploration of small-town Ontario comes to mind), the collection is
uneven. Good travel writing needs to reveal both the places visited and
something about the author; it must balance—and separate—experience
and observation. Eugene Cloutier’s “New Brunswick by Car,” for
example, does neither. Overall, however, the collection is worthwhile
and recommended for purchase.