Robert Kroetsch has often recounted the story of the New York editor who took him out for a lavish lunch in 1970 to celebrate the success of The Studhorse Man. After a few libations, the editor leaned across the table and asked our Alberta writer, as if in search of confidential information, “Say, does this place called Alberta really exist, or did you make it up?”

There in a New York minute is the effect of Alberta on Robert Kroetsch, and the effect of Robert Kroetsch on Alberta. Although many fine writers live and work in this province, none have captured this mad, restless place as effectively as Kroetsch has, or with his particular combination of tenderness and perceptive irony.

Kroetsch embodies the Alberta zeitgeist in a way that few can claim. Born here, and now returned here to practice, he says, “being old,” he has, more than anyone, articulated the strange and irrepressible spirit of this province. His nine novels and fourteen books of poetry, along with seven works of non-fiction, focus on an Alberta that seems extraordinary, elusive, elementally distinctive, but that is profoundly recognizable to those who call it home. Over the summer I talked with him about his return, about growing old and about changeable Alberta.

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As a fish lives and moves and has its being in water with no awareness of water, humans swim in their culture with no necessary awareness of what it is. Sociologists define culture as the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to the next. culture is the group’s shared assumptions about what is true and good—the common language, customs, attitudes, values and behaviours that enable them to get along with each other—and which, unfortunately, can hamper them in accepting those of different cultures. Ethnocentricity, the almost inevitable belief in the superiority of one’s own culture, can lead to conflict.

Alberta has been populated by successive waves of immigrants from many different countries in the world, speaking different languages, having different customs and religious beliefs. What force holds us together? Some might say our political institutions, our laws and their enforcement, our education system. But surely the deeper bond is the land itself, our experience of living on it and a shared language to communicate with each other. As soon as people name the features in a landscape and tell stories about their experiences there, the place takes on human significance. Others who have battled the same wind and snow can identify. Whatever our differences, we know we have something in common.

What’s in a name? The Aboriginal peoples who lived closest to the land knew it best. Their sustenance was the buffalo. They observed “the contour of the mountains… different ridges, valleys, peaks,” and they called one special mountain “Sleeping Buffalo.” Now known as Tunnel mountain—though it has no tunnel—it does, indeed, look like a buffalo. Don Hill (“On Sleeping Buffalo” p. 36) argues for a return to the name given by the indigenous people. For Hill, as for the Aboriginal peoples, certain places are sacred. A return to their original names might restore the right attitude toward these places.

Our writers continue the naming. It’s been said that a place doesn’t really exist until a great writer sets a novel there and it enters our imagination. Robert Kroetsch lived most of his adult life away from Alberta, but set his entire oeuvre in a kind of mythical version of this place. Now he’s come back to the real thing. “The landscape is more important than any kind of idea, that sense of a physical landscape,” he says. In “Our Odysseus” (p. 26), Aritha van Herk celebrates his return. Kroetsch’s writing explores the binaries of horse/house, domestic/wild, male/female, winner/loser. Recalling his childhood he says, “Then we knew we were part of nature. Now we think we’re in control.” Having to win has become part of our identity. “That’s why we’re willing to destroy landscapes and natural habitats, in the name of winning.”

Our institutions reinforce the idea of winners and losers: in our courts, the prosecution and the defence; in our parliament, the party in power and the opposition; in our economy, the battle between environmentalists and industry. Our very language and thought modes operate on oppositional binaries: good/bad, right/wrong, beauty/ugliness. In “Beauty in a Clear-cut” (p. 40), Meagan Smith-Windsor describes the struggle of some activists to get beyond the game of oppositional thinking to find some way to unify consciousness.

It is also true that our institutions protect difference and safeguard freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and the values of multiculturalism. (See David Liepert’s “The Imaginary divide” p. 32.) This may save us from the error and potential violence of ethnocentricity, even as we forge our own unique culture. But ultimately it is the work of the wordsmiths, the storytellers, the artists that brings us together.

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