CBC Radio | Ideas | Features | A Literary Atlas of Canada

It’s October, 2004, and I’m driving through the foothills of the Rockies with the Albertan author Fred Stenson. He’s taking me west of Cochrane and the Ghost Dam, to the site of Peigan Post, a Hudson’s Bay Company trading fort that operated here during the early 1830s. It features in The Trade, Stenson’s novel of the fur trade set in the years following the Hudson’s Bay Company’s absorption of its rival, the Northwest Fur Company, in 1821. The Hudson’s Bay Company of Adventurers established the very foundations of the country on the back of its lucrative hat and felt business—and with it some of our worst social and political habits. Air Canada, Chapters, liquor stores, cable providers or the Liberal Party—you can blame our crippling propensity for monopoly and the habits of dependence it encourages on the legacy of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s system of trading posts and Company Towns. If not before. Talk to Inuit, and many will still point to the land and describe it as 'the Company Store.' The truth about life in Canada is that you have to know what you’re looking for and where to find it. Berries behind a rock. Booze or maybe a rifle at York Factory. Our sparse population and nearly insufferable winters have made us lousy comparison shoppers right from the start.

— Noah Richler

Fred Stenson by the Ghost Dam, near the site of the old Hudson's Bay fort, Piegan Post.

Fred Stenson was born in Pincher Creek, Alberta, and based his novel The Trade on the only known account of the 19th century Canadian fur trade by a non-officer, a memoir that William Gladstone published in The Rocky Mountain Echo, at the turn of the century. His most recent novel, Lightning, tells the story of the migration of American ranchers north to Alberta. At one point, the cowboys circle their horses round a mystifying cairn of rocks. It marks the border, an idea of ambiguous meaning in Fred Stenson's novels.

Alistair MacLeod is the author of one of the finest stories ever to be written on the idea of work. In The Closing Down of Summer, a miner yearns to be able to adequately explain the work he has put himself through as a "shaft-sinker." He wants to be able to communicate the pride and sorrow he has known, the deaths of relatives and friends, even as he knows that his success means the progeny of his generation will move on to "gentler deaths" — as dentists, or lawyers, exerting themselves at the gym and no longer in the mine.

Alistair MacLeod in conversation with Michael Winter at the Eastport Literary Festival in Newfoundland.

Miriam Toews at the tourist model village outside her hometown of Steinbach, Manitoba.

Work is a subject for the novelist, but more often a means to an end. Work explains character, situtaions, and the ways in which they change. In Miriam Toews' best-selling novel, A Complicated Kindness, Nomi is a disaffected teenager slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms. "Happy," is exactly what she is not. The odour of death wafting from the chicken slaughterhouses, and the way in which the birds accept their fate is a grim reminder to her of the incarceration she feels is her lot in the fictional mennonite community of "East Village." Nomi is desperate to find a way out.

Audio Excerpt

Michael Crummey remembers the Company
and the way it governed life in Buchans, Newfoundland
(clip runs: 3:30)

RealPlayer is required to listen to audio files.
Download the RealPlayer plug-in
for your browser.