I grew up reading the Margarets. Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood, whom I admire for her intellect and prescience, and Margaret Laurence, who wrote about small-town life in Neepawa, Manitoba. There was also Carol Shields, Mordecai Richer, and L.M. Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame.
And then I moved south, and turned to a dizzying plethora of American writers to make sense of my adopted country. Since I was living in Los Angeles, California writers figured largely. John Fante and Charles Bukowski, John Steinback and Octavia Butler. Joan Didion of course. And later Wanda Coleman and T.C. Boyle and my favorite unheralded writer of all time, Kate Braverman.
Now and again, I’d catch wind of an exciting new Canadian author, such as Katherena Vermette, who hails from my hometown of Winnipeg. But when her first book, The Break, was published, it wasn’t in American bookstores, and the only way I could read it was by ordering a Kindle version on Amazon.
When I moved back to Canada two years ago, I had a lot of catching up to do. Four decades of it. Turning to books to get me reacquainted with the country I left, I looked for the little red maple leaves affixed to book spines when I frequented libraries and bookstores. I dug into the outpouring of Indigenous and Metis writing. Billy-Ray Belcourt. David A. Robertson. Eden Robinson. The delightful horror writer Cherie Dimaline. I read Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s memoir, The Reason You Walk. Vermette’s follow-up novel, The Strangers. I didn’t realize this until Conor Kerr, author of Prairie Edge, a novel about buffalo running loose in Edmonton, said during a book talk, the goal is to build a canon of Metis and Indigenous literature.
In Manitoba, there are also a significant number of Mennonite writers, among them, David Bergen, Sandra Birdsell, and Di Brandt. I delved into the writing of Miriam Toews, whose novel Women Talking was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 2022 directed by Sarah Polley. Then moved on to other local writers, such as Lauren Carter and Joan Thomas. Short-story writers Caroline Adderson, Shashi Bhat, and Souvankhan Thammavongsa. I scoured the lists of Giller and Governor’s General Prize winners, devoured the lists of Canadian writers to watch on CBC Books.
At the same time, I was still trying to keep up with my favorite American authors: Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Rachel Kushner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ocean Vuong. And still trying to keep up with new authors popping up with interesting-sounding books. When I moved back, I didn’t realize I’d have to keep up with the literary output of two countries.