The Current - The literary power couple who fell in love with Saskatoon

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Literary power couple Yann Martel and Alice Kuipers only intended to live and work in Saskatoon for a year, but they fell in love with the “land of living skies” — and never left.

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On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. One of the many things that this city is known for is its incredible literary scene. We got here on Sunday in the midst of that storm, and we're lucky enough to have Guy Vanderhaeg as our tour guide. We had to go to him because he couldn't get out of his driveway because there was so much snow, but we managed to get him out and drive him around.

Tonight, we are lucky to have with us two best-selling authors who make their lives here together. He is the author of novels including Self, Beatrice and Virgil, and Life of Pi, winner, of of course of the Booker Prize. She is a best-selling author of five novels, seven for younger readers. Her latest is a guide to writing for young people. It's called Spark. Please welcome to the stage of the Broadway Theatre, Yann Martel and Alice Kepers. The story goes, Yann, that you came here as a writer in residence at the public library in Saskatoon. And then you never left.

Why did you stay? I thought I'd only stay a year, and finally what kept me here were the people and the skies. I love the skies here. You know, you look on our license plates, it says Land of Living Skies, which is frankly a lot more poetic than La Belle Province or beautiful British Columbia, which say the same thing. Land of Living Skies is absolutely true. The skies here are extraordinary.

First thing I'd suggest someone visiting Saskatoon is just look up. It's the sunniest province in Saskatoon, first of all. We own the sun here. And then there's no sun. It's cold. Who cares? Just dress for it. And then the clouds here are magnificent. Honestly, in the spring and the summer,

these cloud ships, they're just extraordinary. So it's that. It's the weather. It's the people. It's that landscape. I like that flatness. It doesn't bother me. To me, it's like a Rothko painting. It's the subtle beauty of lichen. Yeah, it's a beautiful place, and it's a lovely city. What about for you, Alice? I mean, you grew up in London, England.

That's right. It's a big change to come here. Did you imagine yourself living out in the prairies? He's laughing because I don't think I even knew where Saskatoon, Saskatchewan was, and my family certainly didn't. Jan can be quite poetic, as you can hear, and he was very convincing that we wanted to build a life here.

He had the residency at the public library for that first nine months and we met so many people who took time to introduce us to this community. We found ourselves curling in Rosetown and we skied you across the prairies at one point. We did things that we don't do so much now we have children um and decided to see what it would be like if we stayed a little longer and the longer we stayed the more enmeshed we became with other people with all the amazing things

there are to do here and we realized this is actually a great place to raise a family and to write books what surprised you most about this place well minus 40 is a real thing cowboys are also real i didn't know that either growing up in london like what surprised me is how you can step outside and say hi to someone you know within a couple minutes but also every time you go somewhere and tonight is a good example there's lots of people i know here lots of people i love in this room and lots of people i've never seen before because it's got that big city small city feeling so there's always something really fun happening i mean i talked about the the literary scene in the city and what is that about guy van der haag was speaking about that earlier and that

there's a long tradition of that of this city supporting writers and it's not just writers but writers in particular seem to get some sort of injection some little boost from from the town what is that about do you think well i think the fact that it's so isolated means there's lots of time to spend with other people and that will yield stories i think i read somewhere about because there are no mountains the highest thing on the prairie is someone standing and so you focus on that You focus on the thing that's tallest, that's the person next to you, maybe, if they're taller. And I think a lot of places that are isolated generate stories. Because, you know, if you don't tell your own stories, no one else will.

So I think it's a product of the isolation, the ferocious weather, that's quite exhilarating, and it creates community because you're indoors but you're right there is a peculiar strong literary tradition in the prairies that's very very very strong. Alice how has the landscape filtered into your writing? Well when I first came here I didn't really think about setting at all in fact I discussed with writer David Carpenter how setting just wasn't important my first book is written with no setting. It's written on a fridge door. And then as I lived here longer and got to know this territory, Treaty 6 territory,

homeland of the Métis, the storytelling culture, traditions, the people who live here, the way people look at the land, the latest book I've written, the editor who just read it and said nice things, which is exciting, said that it's imbued with a sense of place, a place she's never known. And so I think it's slowly shifted and really filtered through to everything I'm doing. You surprised by that? Very. I'm endlessly surprised by stuff. I find lots of things surprising about this place. I've learned to do something that I call micro-travelling.

With four kids, it's not as easy to jump on a plane, although we still do, luckily. But just taking time to pay attention to that changing, shifting landscape. Like you would have seen as you were running along the trails, which I was very impressed by, that you ran at minus 20 today or whatever. Perhaps not the smartest thing I've ever done. But yeah, to know that you've done that, like to see that landscape, to know there was a coyote on the trail just the day before,

like it's really interesting when you pay attention to this. Yeah, this is a city, I mean we said earlier on that there's so much energy here, people are working toward the idea of the city, but it's also a city that faces some big wicked problems. I mean the homelessness crisis we talked about in our program at length. It becomes much more acute when it is so cold and you see people who are just struggling to get by when you know that you can go somewhere warm and they can't. How have you engaged with that?

I'll say that's nothing that, in a sense, oddly enough, is attractive about Saskatoon. Because it's a town of only 300,000, you see everything, you live everything. It is a real community. So the homelessness challenge is not something far away, you know, on the other side of the city. It's prevalent, you see it everywhere.

You go to the Miwasan where you see coyotes, you also see homeless people. And yeah, the ferocious weather means it really matters to us because people die. And it's a result of a racist cleavage here. It's also, this is a wonderful place. It's also a terribly racist place, and you can't escape that, and nor should you want to. We have to live the ugliness of our societies

to get through them, and so it's present there, and yeah, work needs to be done. It's getting worse, and these are fellow citizens who are less lucky than us, and so yeah, it's something that both Alice and I have been involved with

through an organization called Sanctum, for example, because it's not something that you can just wish away. You have to find concrete solutions for these fellow citizens who are far less lucky than us. Part of the reason that we come out to do events like this is to tell people about a place that they might not know about or that they have an idea of that maybe should be interrogated. What do you think the rest of the country should know about this city? Well, you know, when I first moved here, the number of people would ask me,

why do you live in Saskatoon? And they were obviously from Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver. And I'd say, why do you live in your place where you have to endlessly commute? You don't know your neighbors. You know, Saskatoon is like a decathlete. You know, the decathlete is not the best at any single discipline, but overall it's good enough to win a gold medal at the Olympics. That's fantastic. So, for example, Little Saskatoon, Middle Nowhere, has the largest art gallery between Winnipeg and Vancouver. The Ramey has a terrific Ukrainian museum.

There's a large Ukrainian population here. There's wonderful theatre here at the university, at the refinery, at the Persephone, the SSO. Middle of nowhere, the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra pulls way above its weight. So there's a lot here. Alice, you talk about micro-travelling. Where's the place that you go in the city to feel like you have that connection with this town? I always like to go to Delish, the coffee shop just by our house,

to take a moment to go right. Mornes-Gayman is a World Heritage site, so it's a little bit more of a drive, but it's worth it. And I think just seeing the energy that continues in this place, in this building right here, we've been to loads of things. So it's just really, there's lots of choices. There's a lot of energy in this city. Thank you both for being here.

Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having us. Jan Martell and Alice Kuypers, bestselling authors, philanthropists, and as you heard, proud Saskatooners. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.