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).

The North Battleford Public Library

I learned to read at one of Canada’s historic Carnegie libraries: in 1975, I was the youngest person in North Battleford, Saskatchewan with a library card. North Battleford's library building is still there today (one of Canada's few Carnegie libraries left standing west of Ontario), although it's not a library anymore, apparently. I don't actually remember going to this library (I was two). What I do remember is the walk to the library, which I drew in this unpublished 2003 story:

Trinity College LIbrary

I may be the only student who actually read a book there. I still remember taking it off the shelf: Aldous Huxley's Music at Night. I was crazy about Huxley, but hadn't read this book of essays. I was sitting there getting positively electrified by his prose. (Well, I was an English major, what can I say.) And then I saw that the title of one of the essays was "Squeak and Gibber." It's a reference to Hamlet (Horatio's talking about the creepy inarticulate sounds made by the ghosts of some dead Romans). Well, I love it when authors share these kinds of semi-private jokes with those members of their audiences who get it. I got it. And that's when I knew I really had become well and truly immersed in books.

Christchurch City Library

Calgary Public Library

A later Calgary Public Library memory is going with my dad to hear Robertson Davies speak at the Central Library in about 1991. I remember he took questions from the audience in a rather bored manner. With a pounding heart I raised my hand and asked, "What do you think will be coming up next for Canadian literature?" (Or something like that.) He gave me a piercing look and said, "Now that's an interesting question." R. D. had some strong feelings about Canadian literature, and even helped to shape it. I think What's Bred in the Bone was his only really good book, though.

I don't remember going to the Memorial Library (below)- Calgary's first library, and another Carnegie gem - as a kid. I remember discovering it in my twenties, when I went in to explore it with a few Beltline-dwelling friends. I was instantly captivated by a box of "discards" for sale. My eye was caught by the classic children's book Freight Train by Donald Crews. I bought it. My friends thought I was crazy.