The Current - Why Saskatoon has always been a haven for writers

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Award-winning author Guy Vanderhaeghe takes us on a tour of Saskatoon to share what people love about the city, and explain why it’s long been a haven for writers and artists.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

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. Instant winter. It is winter, that's for sure. Instant winter. It is winter, that's for sure. And looking in this direction, you can see the Ramey Art Gallery, which is new.

And on both sides of the riverbank here, there's the Mewasin Trail. In Saskatoon, I'm here on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River. They got smoked with a big storm over the last couple of days. We flew into a blizzard. It's about minus 15. There's a lot of snow here on the ground. I'm with Guy Vanderhaag, one of this country's great writers, an author who has, for most of his life, made his home right here in Saskatoon.

Those clump of bushes there, a character in my novel, my present age, he would go and hunker down there when his married life was not going particularly well. What does the river mean to this place? You said it divides it, but it brings the city together too. Yeah. So the river is the ribbon that goes through the city, but the riverbank is where people meet. What happens in this river in the winter? I mean, it's freezing up. Well, in the old days, one of the big events in the city was when the water on the river broke up. And people would be awakened by the sound of the ice crashing.

And people would rush down to the riverbanks to watch it break up. Down there, there's a weir. And now everybody checks the weir out for when the pelicans come back. Because then you kind of know that it's it's spring people be waiting for that for a long time exactly we're back in the broadway district of saskatoon my guide to this neighborhood is guy vanderheg he's a two-time winner of the governor in general's award for fiction his 2004 novel the last crossing was the winner of Canada Reads. And we're here in this great community. He's kind of walking us around, showing us an historic district, but also a place that's

really personal to him. Very close to here was where Joni Mitchell apparently had her first public appearance in a coffee shop called Louis Riel. Do people have great affection for her? It's mixed. Yeah. Because I think everybody recognizes what a great artist she is, right? But she said some things that, you know, push people's nose out of joint. So what? You know, it's not a niceness competition. it's not a niceness competition. So just if you hang a left at the end of this block and go down a little ways, we're standing right outside of the Broadway Theatre,

which when I first came to Saskatoon, it specialized in soft porn. Is that why it says we got that scummy magic on the... No, it's evolved. Mostly it's a venue for live performance. And that's where we'll be on stage. Yeah. And then we go up just a little ways.

Calories will be up here. And this is your local... Yeah. For years, Guy has been a regular at this restaurant. Calories, when it opened in 1986, it was one of the first outposts in an area that has become really trendy and vibrant.

I'm coming with more people than I usually do. I know, I'm happy about that. You've lived in Saskatoon for how long? You said you came when you were at university. Yeah, I came from a small town called Esterhazy, Saskatchewan in 1968. I've lived virtually all my life in Saskatoon. And why Saskatoon?

Well, one of the things for me was, first of all, I developed a very strong attachment to it through the university. Because for me, the university was a huge eye-opener. I came from a very small town, working class. My father was also a part-time farmer and I still remember walking to the university library and seeing these rows and rows of books and thinking, I can read anything that I want here. The city also has a long association with art of all kinds. And it was cheap. You could make it here.

A lot of people could do art here that would have trouble doing it someplace else. Now all of these costs have risen. I was going to say, have you seen all of that change? I mean, this population has popped up and it's a city that's now facing all the problems that a big city faces. Do you know what I mean? It's hard, harder. I don't want to sound like too utopian or too blissful about everything because... Well, I mean, that's the other thing. Like, we're here talking to, like, the mayor and the new mayor and other folks who are helping people who are out on the street. I mean, winter has just kind of arrived and a wall up and it's freezing cold and there's people.

On our way over here, we saw folks who are trying to get by. Those are big problems that are kind of nibbling around the edges, if not at the edges, do you know what I mean? I mean, this city has a lot of those kinds of problems. Homelessness, racism, all sorts of things that you would wish that a city doesn't have, but it's wrong to pretend that they don't exist. have, but it's wrong to pretend that they don't exist. But I also think, I get a sense that there's a fairly concerted effort to make some changes. Do you worry about this country in terms of how, not politically, but it's almost regionally, the way that people... The idea of Canada feels like it's under threat to some people. Do you know what I mean?

That we are atomized in individual, not even provinces, but areas, and that people don't understand and may not be even curious about people who live in a different part of the country or have a different way of life than they do here. Do you worry about that you're nodding away as I say that? This is a historical problem of Canada. I think it's gotten worse.

But at one time the country, like in the earliest days, were divided up between French and English, Catholic and Protestant. And those were big dividing lines. When the West got settled, then the question

became feelings of the West being exploited by Bay Street bankers, famous cartoons of the cow being fed in Saskatchewan and being milked in Ontario, all those sorts of things. now is that I think that politicians are willing to exploit these differences in a way that I don't think they would have countenanced before. They really press hot button issues. I think of that as a failure of liberal democracy, which is part of the division between rural Canada. Like, if you take Saskatchewan, in the last election, the cities, two major cities, Regina and Saskatoon, went to NDP, countryside solidly Saskatchewan party. What do you do about that? I think what you have to do is you have to... I keep on thinking about that old Rooseveltian coalition, right? Where you put people together who maybe don't rub up against each other the way they should, but you find some sort of common ground for them.

And that means, okay, that everybody tones it down a bit. That the whole business about identity politics, cultural politics, and it's not that they're not important, but that they can be exploited. That maybe we need to talk less about those kinds of things and about issues that most people are attempting to live with. And those are largely economic, I think. What do you think people in the East, what don't they understand about this place,

about Saskatoon and about Saskatchewan? What don't they understand about this place, about Saskatoon and about Saskatchewan? Now, I'm going to be displaying my own touchiness here, right? The sort of sense that we're all kind of stupid, that there aren't thoughtful people here, or that there aren't things being accomplished outside of areas of being hewers of wood and drawers of water and again i'm going back to the past but if you you know if you look back to the glory days of of progressive politics in saskatchewan

many of the ideas that were resisted by central Canada and now become staples of how we think about this country, like Medicare, etc., etc. Came from here. Came from here. Saskatchewan had the first arts board in the country long before the Canada Council. There were Canadian writers coming from all over the country. And that was kind of like the beginning, in a sense, of the writing community here that stayed here, who made, you know, a mark and can lit. What would you tell, we're going to go back out into the snow and stomp around a little bit,

but what would you tell people from the rest of the country about this place, about Saskatoon? I think it's a good place to live. It's physically beautiful, that the river makes a huge difference to this city. And I think that the history of the city itself, for anyone who connects with it, like the English prophet at the University of Saskatchewan, who George Bernard Shaw wrote an introduction to his history of the English language saying that, and again, this is going to sound like boosters, I'm saying, you know, I thought all the smart people were at Cambridge and Oxford, but they don't hold a candle to this guy.

You know, so there's artists of all kinds who've, you know, most famously, I suppose Joni Mitchell was probably the most famous performer to come out of Saskatoon. But not too far from here, Gordie Howe, you know, played hockey on an outdoor rink. And it's not a wasteland, you know. I once had a line in a story about people driving through Saskatchewan deploring its flatness and the condition of its washrooms. So I don't think that's the case.

And you never know if people visiting, if they're sucking up to you. But I remember like Leonard Cohen doing a concert and saying, I'm so glad to be in the Paris of the Prairies. I don't know what he really thought, but he knew what button to push. And the Paris of the Prairies is kind of the button, I think. Thank you for having us. And bringing us to your local as well. I hope you have a good time here.

Guy Vanderhaag's latest book is a collection of essays called Because Somebody Asked Me To. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.