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Personal Essay Margaret Laurence's Long Journey Home "I Love The Damn Country, That's The Trouble", Lyall H. Powers

Great Plains Quarterly

The subtitle comes from a letter Margaret Laurence wrote to Al Purdy on 31 October 1968, when she was still vacillating over her second reconciliation with her husband.! She was also looking ahead to her return to Canada to be Writer-in Residence at the University of Toronto for the academic year 1969-70, and vacillating over that as well. There is evident reluctance in her confession to Purdy about her attitude to Canada. Resistance to any favorable attitude to that country began early in her and accounts for two persistent features of her life and career as she struggled to establish …

Notes And News- Summer 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

In Memoriam

Acsus Award And Fellowship

Frederick C. Luebke Award

The Past And Promise Of Environmental History

Rural Women's Studies Association Conference

Clements-Degolyer Library Grant

Title And Contents- Summer 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 19/ Number 3/ Summer 1999

Contents

Introduction: The Prairie Fiction Of Margaret Laurence (1926-1987)

Margaret Laurence's "Album" Songs: Divining For Missing Links And Deeper Meanings

Poetic Redress: Her Body, Her House In The Fire-Dwellers

"A Town Of The Mind": Margaret Laurence's Mythical Microcosm Of Manawaka

Personal Essay: Margaret Laurence's Long Journey Home: "I Love The Damn Country, That's The Trouble"

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes And News

Book Notes- Summer 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

Wind River Adventures: My Life in Frontier Wyoming. By Edward J. Farlow

Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western. Edited by Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson

A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West. By John D. McDermott

Growing Up in Manitoba, 1924-1941. By Harold H. Draper

Comanches and Mennonites on the Oklahoma Plains: A. J. and Magladena Becker and the Post Oak Mission. By Marvin E. Kroeker

The Law Comes to Texas: The Texas Rangers, 1870-1901. By Frederick Wilkins

Sweetie Ladd's Historic Fort Worth. Paintings by Sweetie Ladd …

Review Of The Philosophy Of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Idea In British North America By A. A. Den Otter, Keith L. Bryant Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

The Canadian Pacific Railway looms large in the history of Canada. As politicians, spokesmen for the British government, the railway's promoters, and business leaders in Toronto and Montreal touted the concept of a transcontinental line from Halifax on the Atlantic to Vancouver on the Pacific, Canadians came to believe that this private enterprise represented the national interest. The railway, its backers contended, would promote a sense of national purpose and unity, provide access to the vast reaches of the western prairies, and ensure the transnational exchange of goods and ideas. A rising sense of nationalism embraced a new technology to …

Review Of The Icelandic Voice In Canadian Letters: The Contribution Of Icelandic-Canadian Writers To Canadian Literature By Daisy L. Neijmann, Gudrun B. Gudsteins

Great Plains Quarterly

Daisy Neijmann's The Icelandic Voice in Canadian Letters is the first comprehensive study of the impressive literary output, in Icelandic and English, of the Icelandic diaspora in Canada. Briefly outlining the relevant historical and literary background, Neijmann explains that in the ninth and tenth centuries Iceland was settled "mostly, but not exclusively," by "Norwegians who came either directly from Norway or from other Viking settlements in the British Isles and elsewhere." She then proceeds with an overview of the Northern European heritage of literature and lore that the settlers of Iceland originally brought with them, its blossoming in Medieval Iceland …

Review Of The Margin Speaks: A Study Of Margaret Laurence And Robert Kroetsch From A Post-Colonial Point Of View By Gunilla Florby, Mary K. Kirtz

Great Plains Quarterly

Between the literature of "First World" nations like the United States and the literature of "Third World" nations like those in the Caribbean lie those of the "Second World." These are countries, like Canada and Australia, often glibly defined as having "First World" standards of living but "Third World" political clout and frequently ignored on the world stage. As Margaret Atwood noted wryly in a conversation with Victor Levy-Beaulieu, "it was said that Canadian literature didn't exist, that Canadian identity didn't exist, but when you wrote a novel, the Americans and the British said, 'This is too Canadian for us.'" …

Review Of The Mythology Of Native North America By David Leeming And Jake Page, Thomas H. Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly

The authors' admirable aim is to make the Native mythology of North America as accessible as that of Ancient Greece and Judea to an audience more or less ignorant of all three. To do this they anthologize themselves, taking twenty-five myths {out of a total of seventy-five} from their own works. The reader will wish to know first of all who the authors are, what they have written previously, and from what other sources they draw their material. David Leeming is a professor of English; Jake Page was an editor of a popular science magazine. They have written together on …

Review Of The Workers' Revolt In Canada, 1917-1925 Edited By Craig Heron, Bryan D. Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

Working class history is more often than not the calm before the storm. But the storms do come. With striking regularity, the quietude of class relations is shattered as workers mobilize and challenge employers and the state.

A central chapter in this narrative of class struggle is the tumultuous period of 1917-1925, which saw the rise and fall of a particular in ternational "revolt" that, in its Canadian par~ ticulars, is admirably explored in this series of essays edited by Craig Heron. Once conceptu~ alized as a western upheaval, the centerpiece of which was the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, the …

Review Of An Archaeology Of The Soul: North American Indian Belief And Ritual By Robert L. Hall, Robin Ridington

Great Plains Quarterly

This rich and complex book reminds me of Sir James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, with one big difference: Hall is a distinguished practicing archaeologist. He knows about the symbolic and ceremonial life of Native America from firsthand experience with its archaeological, ethno-historical, and ethnographic record. Archaeologists look to the earth for their information but look down upon it in order to discover meaningful patterns. Hall surveys the Native American symbolic vocabulary with an eagle's eye, discovering connections among such diverse symbols and practices as sacred poles, calumets, atlatl weights, spirit release ceremonies, and Hopewell interaction spheres.

Hall, whose …

Review Of Wright Morris Revisited By Joseph J. Wydeven, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly

A major American writer, author of thirty novels, Wright Morris is highly regarded by critics, but some readers find his work difficult. Morris himself felt that a full understanding of any of his novels required a thorough reading of them all. His style, too, is sometimes deliberately enigmatic; he did not believe in a tidy closure to the problems he introduced. Joseph J. Wydeven discusses these and other perplexities in Wright Morris Revisited, aptly titled, as the last Twayne study of Morris was published in 1964.

A number of Morris's books are set in Nebraska, where he was born. …

Review Of The Life Of Margaret Laurence By James King, Walter E. Swayze

Great Plains Quarterly

Advance publicity for James King's biography of the best-loved author in the history of Canadian literature aroused hostility among many readers who had been eager for the book to appear. With its emphasis on the revelation of Laurence's suicide and on her marital stresses, her sexual drive, and her drinking, the promotional campaign recalled the conclusion of William Watson's brilliant essay "The Punishment of Genius" (1890): "Such is the lot of the modern man of genius; living, he may escape the poisoned arrow; but dead, he is a banquet for the ghoul."

The book itself proves to be less sensational …

Margaret Laurence's ''Album'' Songs Divining For Missing Links And Deeper Meanings, Wes Mantooth

Great Plains Quarterly

While Margaret Laurence's artistic legacy rests primarily, and rightly so, on her output of novels, her memoirs and published letters reveal tantalizing glimpses into a much less known, and yet not unrelated, aspect of her artistic interests-a lifelong passion for music, which included a desire to explore song-writing as a creative outlet. Drawing on these memoirs and letters, along with my own primary research, I have tried to sketch a portrait of Laurence's musical life, with a particular focus on how her musical interests coalesced in The Diviners' "Album"-four songs included in the text of The Diviners, compiled …

Introduction The Prairie Fiction Of Margaret Laurence (1926,1987), Charlene Porsild

Great Plains Quarterly

I first read Margaret Laurence in secondary school in Gibbons, Alberta, a place similar in many ways to Margaret Laurence's hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba, the place she called Manawaka in her fiction and about which she wrote so much. I continued to read and to study Laurence as an undergraduate at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Later, I dragged along my dog-eared copies of A Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, and {my favorite} The Diviners as my life's journey took me to Ottawa, Ontario; Boulder, Colorado; Vancouver, British Columbia; and most recently, Lincoln, Nebraska.

The …

A Town Of The Mind" Margaret Laurence's Mythical Microcosm Ofmanawaka, Nora Foster Stovel

Great Plains Quarterly

This passage introduces "Where the World Began," the concluding piece in Margaret Laurence's 1976 collection of travel essays, Heart of a Stranger, which functions as an autobiography, charting her life journey. Laurence wrote a preface to this collection that exists in manuscript at McMaster University, but which was never published-unfortunately, because it illuminates the autobiographical import of the essays-perhaps because the pattern of her life was clear to her by the time she wrote it in 1976: "I saw, somewhat to my surprise, that they are all, in one way or another, travel articles. And by travel, I mean …

Review Of Discover Saskatchewan: A Guide To Historic Sites By Meika Lalone And Elton Laclare, Warren Clubb

Great Plains Quarterly

Discover Saskatchewan provides insights into the fascinating history of Canada's third westernmost province by identifying the historic sites and buildings, plus the museums, that record and present the province's storied past.

A project of the University of Regina, provincial government departments, and history/ heritage organizations, the book presents itself as a travel guide, offering quick access to information on historic sites and heritage institutions for anyone traveling by road. The information is arranged by tourism regions, eleven at the time of printing. Each chapter contains a map of the travel region covered and brief descriptions of its sites, markers, heritage …

Review Of Kate M. Cleary: A Literary Biography With Selected Works By Susanne K. George, Sharon M. Harris

Great Plains Quarterly

"Sometimes it seemed to her that she could endure everything save the silence." Thus begins Kate McPhelim Cleary's 1893 short story, "Feet of Clay"; like many of her best stories, it captures Plains settlers'-and Cleary's-pervasive sense of isolation in the harsh environment of the Midwest at the turn of the century. Having moved nine years earlier from Chicago to Hubbell, Nebraska, Cleary in her life and writings adds to our growing understanding of middle-class homesteaders who migrated to the Midwest in the late nineteenth century, and to our recognition of the important contributions of Midwestern women writers to nineteenth-century US …

Review Of Legends Of Our Times: Native Cowboy Life By Morgan Baillargeon And Leslie Tepper, Peter Iverson

Great Plains Quarterly

Growing out of work for a major exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, where Morgan Baillargeon (Metis) is Curator of Plains Ethnology and Leslie Tepper is Curator of Plateau Ethnology, Legends of Our Times centers on the Native people of the Northern Plains and Plateau. The project, say Baillargeon and Tepper, began with two goals: "to help break the stereotype of 'the Indian versus the cowboy' and through remaking that image to bring to people's attention an entire field of western history and Native culture that remains largely unknown"; and "to acknowledge the contributions Native people have made to …

Review Of Selected Letters Of Margaret Laurence And Adele Wiseman Edited By John Lennox And Ruth Panofsky, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

For various reasons, a great many more of Margaret Laurence's letters to Adele Wiseman survive than those in the opposite direction; consequently this collection gives better insight into Laurence's life and voice and work than Wiseman's. Laurence's is definitely a life and voice and work meriting insights. Wiseman is not entirely lacking, though we learn more about the details of her everyday life than of her writing or inner concerns.

What these letters demonstrate most clearly is how uncertain Laurence was about her own writing and how misjudged both writers were by critics and, at times, even their own editors. …

Review Of The Inhabited Prairie Photographs By Terry Evans, James J. Penuel

Great Plains Quarterly

The land provides constant fascination to artists: from seashore to mountain, desert, and prairie the land inspires. It is also raw material for the photographer's arranging eye. In this third book of photographs, Terry Evans offers fifty black-and-white images of central Kansas taken from the air and at ground level, images showing us that the land can be anything from the bosom of nature to the throne of majesty, sacred space, fearsome predator, or garbage dump.

The images reveal an inhabited prairie. There are farms, highways, industrial and military installations. They tease us with details, structures, patterns, lines, and curves. …

Review Of People Places: Saskatchewan And Its Names By Bill Barry, T. D. Regehr

Great Plains Quarterly

Bill Barry has collected a vast amount of information on the more than 25,000 place names in Saskatchewan and made it accessible in three publications. There is, first, a comprehensive computer database, arranged alphabetically but also sortable by location, date, or class of entry, available from the author and in many Saskatchewan libraries. Barry has always had a particular interest in a thematic approach to the study of place names, however, and People Places: Saskatchewan and Its Names provides much interesting and personalized information on the naming of many, but certainly not all of the places identified in the computer …

Review Of Challenging Territory: The Writing Of Margaret Laurence Edited By Christian Riegel, Jaqueline Mcleod-Rogers

Great Plains Quarterly

I approached this book with the hope that my past interest in reading, teaching, and writing about Margaret Laurence, coupled with my current interests in rhetoric and composition, would enable me to respond to new critical perspectives. The "Introduction" to the volume encouraged this hope by profiling articles with familiar themes embedded in a postmodern context of open-minded pluralism.

Yet in explaining the volume's purpose, editor Christian Riegel tends to over-emphasize novelty at the expense of continuity, describing essays that go beyond revisionist readings to "stake out critical territory, charting critical space never before traced" (xvii). Much of his claim …

Review Of Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place By Louis Owens

Great Plains Quarterly

In Mixedblood Messages, novelist and critic Louis Owens combines literary and film criticism with personal memoir and environmental writing. The "core subject in this book is writing by authors identified as mixedblood," he explains, and the collection "is concerned with two major issues: questions of mixed heritage ... and the way in which we relate to the natural world."

In the first of the book's four sections, Owens addresses some difficult questions, perhaps the most challenging of which deals with authenticity: if "the Indian must conform to an identity imposed from the outside" in order to be seen, what …

Review Of Fugitives From Justice: The Notebook Of Texas Ranger Sergeant James B. Gillette By James B. Gillette, Mary Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1878 the Texas Adjutant General issued each Texas Ranger a book listing all known fugitives from justice to assist in apprehending criminals. The book served as a blanket arrest warrant, listing more than 4,000 fugitives who were wanted in Texas for crimes such as murder, rape, serious assaults, and horse thefts. Organized by county, the list gave the name, crime, date of indictment, and occasionally the physical description of each fugitive. While on the move, Texas lawmen carried the book with them as a quick and easy reference tool whenever they located a suspected criminal.

Fugitives from Justice is …

Review Of Many Danes, Some Norwegians: Karen Miller's Diary, 1894 Edited By John W. Nielsen, Ann Marie Legreid

Great Plains Quarterly

Letters, diaries, and other amateur writings provide an important prospect on the immigrant experience in America. Literary expressions of this kind are valuable; while mundane and archaic-sounding, they inform us of the lives of immigrants, their perceptions, their everyday encounters with a larger world. Many Danes, Some Norwegians is the diary of Karen Miller (Moller), a Danish immigrant who wrote from her home at Elko, Scott County, rural Minnesota, in 1894, a year before her death. The original manuscript was translated by Olaf M. Norlie in 1952, then mimeographed and bound. The current version was translated by Ninna Engskow using …

Review Of An Army Of Women: Gender And Politics In Gilded Age Kansas By Michael Lewis Goldberg, Carmen Heider

Great Plains Quarterly

Michael Goldberg, a cultural historian of politics, undertakes a valuable study of the dynamic relationship between politics and gender. His argument is, simply, that to fully understand the actors and organizations in Gilded Age Kansas politics, we must "integrate gender into their story." This "cast of political players" includes the Farmer's Alliance, the Woman Movement, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Prohibitionists, and activist leaders such as Annie Diggs and Mary Lease, all of whom are situated within religious, economic, racial, and ethnic contexts. To explore the gendered relationships between and among these groups and individuals, Goldberg uses organizational records, songs, and a …

Review Of The Powder River Expedition Journals Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge Edited By Wayne R. Kime, R. Eli Paul

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard 1. Dodge served in the United States Army from 1848 to 1891. By the time of the 1876 Powder River Expedition, one of several military responses to the crushing defeat suffered at the Little Big Horn, Dodge had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. At the behest of Brig. Gen. George Crook he accepted the command of the infantry contingent of this winter campaign against SiouxCheyenne foes.

The campaign met with some success, and many historians consider it the beginning of the end of the Great Sioux War. On 25 November 1876, a Cheyenne village of Chief Dull Knife …

History And Nature Representations Of The Great Plains In The Work Of Sharon Butala And Wallace Stegner, Walter Isle

Great Plains Quarterly

When he was five, Wallace Stegner's family moved to a small town and to a homestead on the Great Plains, in the extreme southwestern corner of Saskatchewan just above the Montana border, where they lived for six years before drought and crop failures forced them to move on. Sharon Butala moved to a ranch and farm in the same short-grass prairie country in 1976 when she was thirty-six years old and newly married to Peter Butala, a rancher native to the place. Both Stegner and Butala went on to write about this land, and their representations manifest very different attitudes …

Essay On Place The Map As Big As The World, Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly

I have spent a lot of time looking at Kansas maps. Once, I memorized the shapes and names of all lOS counties. On another map, I drew in red magic marker over each highway after I had traveled it, hoping, someday, to have traveled every mile in this 200-by-400-mile rectangle. A huge old school map of Kansas, published by A. J. Nystrom & Co., Chicago, hangs in my east study windows instead of curtains or shades. On sunny mornings, it glows, and since its color comes from elevation- the "3,000 to 4,000 Feet" in western Kansas, to the "Under 1,000 …

Review Of Encyclopedia Of The American West By Charles Phillips And Alan Axelrod, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly

The goal of encyclopedias is to make knowledge readily and objectively available to a wide audience. Generally massive undertakings requiring a number of years to complete, they succeed or fail depending not only on accuracy but on their flexibility as reference works to interest a wide range of audiences, both as stopping or starting points for research. Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, no strangers to undertaking large projects such as biographical dictionaries, have compiled an excellent Encyclopedia of the American West.

Joining Howard W. Lamar's masterful Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West (1977), now available in a revised edition …