A summer sunset at West Hawk Lake
I remember driving into Vancouver for the first time as an adult. A U-Haul trailer filled with possessions. I had already begun to tell myself stories about what life would be like on the west coast. The hill that I had to drive up was so steep that I worried my car wouldn’t make it. To my surprise though, aside from the hills and restricted view of the sky, life on the west coast was not really that different from life in the prairies. Home is a movable thing.
I was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It still feels like home in some ways. My parents are still there, I miss the vibrant cultural scene, and I miss the friends that I have there. My family has a cottage at West Hawk Lake (a lake that formed inside and around a meteorite impact crater) which is located in the Whiteshell Provincial Park. We spent whole summers at the lake growing up. It has always felt like my real home. The trees, the loons calling on the lake at night, midnight star-gazing on the dock. My happiest memories are at the lake.
Now I live in Vancouver where I am an actor. Storytelling is therefore an integral part of the way I participate in the world arena. As my Grandmother says, acting is “a hard racket,” so I work a number of odd jobs to pay the rent. I am a third year English literature major. My two favourite places in Vancouver (so far) are Pacific Spirit Regional Park and the strip of West 10th Avenue between Yukon and Quebec. I love the old houses along that street.
In this course we will examine the Canadian literary canon to investigate what kinds of stories we tell ourselves about this country, whose voices are heard in those stories, and the relationship between colonization and canonization. The theme of intersections and departures seems particularly relevant to me at this point in my life as I reflect on my time here in Vancouver and assess where my next home might be.
I think it is very fitting to study the stories we tell and the stories we hear about life in Canada through each others’ words on our respective blogs. What better way to comprehend the very many different versions of Canada than through our varied experiences. I have never experienced a course in this format so I look forward to a digital conversation with all of you. I am interested to hear your thoughts and reflections on the course material and I hope to gain a better understanding of the breadth of Canadian experience through my interaction with you. To my embarrassment my knowledge of the Canadian literary canon is limited. I look forward to expanding my Canadian literary horizons with all of you as my guides and companions.
WORKS CITED:
“101 Things to Do in Fall/Winter.” Tourism Winnipeg. Economic Development Winnipeg Inc, n.d. Web. 8 Jan. 2014.
“About the Area.” Falcon West Hawk Chamber of Commerce. Falcon, West Hawk and Caddy Lakes Chamber of Commerce, 2011. Web. 8 Jan. 2014.
Bunnell, Pille. “About the Park.” Pacific Spirit Park Society. Pacific Spirit Park Society, 2009. Web. 8 Jan. 2014.
“Whiteshell Provincial Park.” Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship: Parks and Natural Areas. Manitoba Government, n.d. Web. 8 Jan. 2014.
“Winnipeg Information.” Tourism Winnipeg. Economic Development Winnipeg Inc, n.d. Web. 8 Jan. 2014.
Hi Lauren, thanks for the wonderful introduction – I can hear your story-telling voice. Winnipeg is certainly a cultural hot-bed in the summer. For a number of years, I toured the Fringe Festival circuit (1981-1996) across Canada, indeed I attended the inaugural Fringes in every city. Perhaps you have performed on the Fringe yourself? The Canadian Fringe was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation: Ordering Chaos, the Fringe Phenomenon (1998). I look forward to working with you this semester – I’ll be back. Erika
Hi,
Happy to hear you made it up hills with a U-haul in tow! I’m from New Brunswick, and I am pretty excited that you hail from Manitoba because I have a couple of ridiculous questions for you. On a cross Canada trip in 2010 I had nothing but great encounters with hilarious people from Manitoba. Although we are from pretty different backgrounds, we shared common ground in Tim Hortins, weather, flooding, multicultural populations, and bad jokes. I like your comment that “Home is a moveable thing”, and though I avoid singing praises to Tim’s it remains a comfortable connection to “home” for me.
Question: Are you familiar with the following film?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDUKRftcq6s
(Blogging media is new to me, I was unable to figure out how to hyperlink this as text, maybe next time)
I first encountered this short movie in a film festival out east and really enjoyed the cheeky and determined attitude of these gentlemen from Manitoba when encountering outdoor enthusiasts from the mountain provinces. In a nutshell, they epitomize the friendliness and jovial attitude of the people I met in my travels. If you do not have time to watch the whole thing check out minute 4:00-4:20.
Only now I realize that this film represents a style of storytelling. Back in the East Coast, we often use humour to help convey our emotions to put a positive spin almost any situation (For example, The Great Big Sea song Night that Paddy Murphy died). In general, I have that found stories from the West Coasters I have encountered seem to be more focused on majesty and describing natural beauty (and using the word “Awesome”) rather than joking or self-effacing humour. I realize that generalizations are dangerous and can create “Us” vs. “Them” dichotomies but really I am just trying to understand and contextualize how to better communicate in this cultural mileu. My sarcastic sense of humour has resulted miscommunication leading to a difficult encounter or two when I first arrived in Vancouver, but that is another story.
This notion of cultural bound story telling norms brings me to a couple of questions. Have you noticed any cultural differences in storytelling here compared to your hometown? Do you find people in Manitoba use humour to communicate in storytelling?
All the best!
Duncan
Hi Lauren,
There are things that work in one’s brain that one does not know. Connections that are made that at first sight do not seem that obvious. One of the things that caught my attention on your post was the missing of “the vibrant cultural scene.” Like you I moved to Bogota a few years ago and that is one of the things that I still have not been able to shake off from me. One night could go to listen to Jose Saramago and Rigoberta Menchu within the same city, without having to move that much. There was also on your post an air of nostalgia in your description and that brought to me a song that I love dearly from Tom Waits called “whistle down the wind”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpnnMb1WtZM
It is one of the most beautiful songs I have stumbled upon. It essentially talks about the issue of staying and the anxiousness of leaving and how one is on an interregnum that is not that easy to shake off. And it is precisely the point at which you talk about your summers at the lake growing up and how it has always felt like your real home that echoed portions of the song. However, I do have a small question, if I may. You did say in your introduction that “home is a movable thing”, but at the point at which you talk about lake you said that “It has always felt like my real home.” So I was wondering if you expand a bit on the definition or understanding of home between those two axes mentioned above.
Hi Hollman,
Home is a complex thing. I speak of going “home” when I visit my family in Winnipeg for Christmas and then tell friends what life will be like when I come back “home” to Vancouver. I’m sure you yourself have multiple homes. I would apply the same logic of “if this is your land, where are your stories?” to home. I have stories about Vancouver now. It has been kind to me, it has been cruel to me. I have stories about Winnipeg. And then there is a feeling of home. I think the lake feels like home to me because there is a sense of coming back to the land. The trees, the water, the sky. The stories about the lake are my favourite stories. Something that is separate from the facts.
Moving away from “home” to make my own way in the world made clear to me how resilient we are as human beings. It is possible to leave everything you know to be true and safe and to venture out into the world and eke out a relatively comfortable existence. When you move away people make a number of anxious statements about what it will be like away from home. And what I realized is, no matter where you are, you make a home for yourself. It will likely be different from your other homes, and it may not be your favourite, but in order to live with some degree of comfort it is ingrained in us as beings to make it home in whatever way.
So yes, I have a number of different homes. Home is moveable. Right now it is Vancouver but that will change. Winnipeg will be my factual birth home and family home as long as my parents stay there. And time at the lake, time in the trees will always feel like my real home because that is the space that I connect with and feel most at ease in.
Hi Duncan,
I can absolutely emphasize with your homey association with Tim Hortons. It’s entertaining to me when I go back to Winnipeg to observe how many more Tim Hortons there are per capita in comparison to Vancouver and Starbucks.
It is difficult to go into the differences in storytelling without creating an Us vs. Them perspective and I wish to avoid that. Ultimately I would say that we are all Canadians so in that respect our stories are connected. I do find that people can be dismissive of prairie stories as simple or less refined. I encounter a lot of that snobbery but I wouldn’t situate it specifically within west coast society, but rather, it is situated within the individual and the way that individual has come to explain the world to himself/herself. Some of the most artistic individuals I know are in Winnipeg. In the cold, dead of winter you need to get creative in how you see the world and where you find beauty and how you interpret the ugly. It is the only way to survive. Here in Vancouver, the beauty is pretty obvious, year-round. It takes less artist work to tell stories about the land because the stories are right in front of you.
Self-deprecating humor is something I notice in myself but I have always attributed it to my British roots not so much a prairie trait. That said, British Columbia declares itself “The Best Place on Earth” on its license plates. I do think that prairie folk are more self-conscious. If I refer to a place in Manitoba that isn’t Winnipeg, I assume that I will need to provide a bit more context, to situate my listener in the story space. Also, Winnipeggers must brace themselves against the onslaught of negative comments about our city from people who likely have never been there at all. “Oh, you’re from Winterpeg.” “You escaped.” “Well no wonder you left!” And then we have to defend Winnipeg, participate in the verbal pollution about the city, or choose to ignore the comments.
It is always interesting to me to hear the stories people tell themselves about places they have never been. And the ignorance that becomes apparent when people make decisions about an entire population based on those misshapen, hazy stories. Winnipeg is not somewhere I want to live for the rest of my life but it has shaped my worldview for the better. I have a very different perspective and I can find beauty in the cracked pavement of a suburban basketball court or a rusting bridge that crosses a graveyard of abandoned train cars. So when people begin to tell the negative stories about Winnipeg that they have heard and perpetuate, I just think to myself, “you have no idea the views you are missing out on.”
Thank you for the short film. I will watch it on the weekend when my pile of schoolwork has dwindled. And I am so glad that you encountered such lovely Manitobans on your travels. Thank you for sharing.
Lauren
Going out on a bit of a limb here… Winnipeg is often noted for its strong contingent of Indigenous peoples, and with this often comes mixed connotations. Given the class’ emphasis examining the culture of the indigenous peoples, did you find your childhood in Winnipeg offered you a unique look into Indigenous peoples culture, perhaps exposing you to perspectives you may not have seen had you grown up elsewhere in Canada? Do you find many differences in this regard between Winnipeg and Vancouver? Having spent time working in rural Alberta, several of my co-workers were Native and I was exposed to new perspectives on their culture, perspectives I would not have seen in many other places in Canada, and that definitely changed my perception of them.
Hi Shephea,
Honestly, I don’t really know how the perspective differs between Winnipeg and Vancouver because I am not as familiar with how things work out here.
I know that Indigenous people have a lot of obstacles to overcome in Manitoba. There’s a lot of racism still prevalent. There’s life on the reserves and there’s life in the city. Both are fraught with potential pitfalls. In Winnipeg I think the social issues and poverty affecting First Nations people are more visible. In Vancouver I see a lot of First Nations art but I don’t see the people as much.
Also, in Manitoba, we learn have a lot more exposure to Metis people and their culture. Metis people are descended from a mix of European and First Nations people. We have a yearly festival called Festival du Voyageur (http://festivalvoyageur.mb.ca/en/) which celebrates Francophone/Metis culture. It primarily reflects the French “settlers” perspective but it also reflects aspects of Metis life.
I hope that answers your question a bit.
Hi Lauren
I enjoyed reading your blog. Winnipeg certainly seems like an interesting place to grow up. As a music fan, I feel a strong connection to Winnipeg as the home of Propagandhi, one of Canada’s most successful punk bands. Propagandhi’s lyrics are very issue-oriented, and indigenous history is discussed in particular in this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OFwCLcajbk
The song is dedicated to members of the Saskatoon indigenous community who were murdered by police. From what I can deduce, the band believes that these murders are symptomatic of a large scale mistreatment of indigenous peoples which stretches across centuries, and across continents. I think this is a very interesting viewpoint to consider.
It’s interesting that you consider life on the West Coast and on the Prairies not that different, and that you write that “home is a moveable thing”. For me, music has always been away to connect with people across geographical spaces, and a way to feel at home in different places, as well. I’m sure that your passion for acting has a similar function – a way to communicate ideas or feelings across different types of spaces. I look forward to reading more of your Blogs!
Thanks!
-Stepan