Samantha's Secret Room

Local Settings in Canadian Teen Fiction

Why I Care About All This

Mahy writes, "For a variety of reasons, partly because my own childhood reading was so predominantly British, my first stories were set in nowhere – or rather, in that place where all stories co-exist, where story is nothing but itself." However, Mahy's settings began increasingly to incorporate elements of a New Zealand setting, although initially, these elements were not necessarily apparent to readers. Mahy has said of her 1982 novel The Haunting: "In my mind the characters... lived in New Zealand, though there is no real clue to this in the story..." 

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"You'd think," says Mahy, interviewed in a 2005 article, "[that] you'd automatically be able to write about the place you've lived in all your life – but the stories I'd had read to me as a child [set predominantly in the United Kingdom] somehow disinherited me." Elsewhere, she has explained: "the landscape in which I had grown up and the idiom I heard every day seemed somehow unnatural to me..."  Mahy's changeover from a writer labouring under what she has called an "imaginative displacement" from her native New Zealand, to a writer who, decades later, was able to say that she "felt quite triumphant over writing a story set in [her] own country," has been well documented, in numerous interviews, as well as in her own book of essays and criticism, A Dissolving Ghost, and Tessa Duder's 2005 biography, Margaret Mahy: A Writer's Life.

Why Not Calgary?

So What Can We Do?

Notes... because I haven't said enough about all this

Mahy's "displacement" is accredited (in a 2004 interview) in part to "the default assumption then, [when Mahy was a child] and for a long time afterwards, ...that New Zealand experiences were less interesting and valuable than British or European ones" (Ridge 2004). Contributing to this kind of assumption was the absence of a solid oeuvre of New Zealand writing. Mahy explains elsewhere: "Other contemporary New Zealand writers also had difficulty in writing about New Zealand at that time, partly because there was so little to draw on. The indigenous writing of the 1930s and 1940s was very self-conscious" (Eccleshare). As Mahy says of her reaction to this literary climate: "I didn't imaginatively believe my own New Zealand stories in the ways I believed in the fantasies and such things that I'd been writing" (Larsen).

Some aspects of New Zealand's developing literary climate could be said to have had their parallels in Canada. Jennifer Andrews has written that the respected Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock "may have believed that Canadian humour... was better positioned to compete on the world stage when it was not overtly defined as Canadian" ("Humouring"). A traditional view of Canada's cultural output was expressed by British children's literature critic John Rowe Townsend in 1976: "Canada, in children's books as in much else [including, presumably, comics], remains in the American shadow" (210).