A Writer's Journey

My mother once, after reading one of my short stories, said, “How did you know that?”

“That” was a description of ice forming on rocks under the water on the edge of Lake Winnipeg. The ice formed before the surface froze. She, of course, had seen it many times at the fish camp. I had observed it one weekend when I was there.

Writers are like crows or ravens, collectors of shiny objects, secrets, observing, like Odin’s ravens, everything and anything. A detail that might seem of no importance, until it is needed in a short story or novel or play. There are two parts to this. The one is the acuteness of observation. The other is the vocabulary necessary to describe what has been seen.

What we observe depends on where we are. When I first started to write as a teenager, I

thought I needed to write about exotic places to capture readers’ attention. Even though the furthest I’d ever been from my home town, Gimli, was Grafton, North Dakota. And, later, Mountain, North Dakota. I made the beginner’s mistake of thinking that I needed an exotic location to be interesting. I didn’t know yet that Gimli and New Iceland were exotic and interesting to people if I could describe them well enough to make them come alive.

It was a revelation when I realized that the Icelandic settlement, layered later with Ukrainians and their culture, intermingled with the indigenous population, the fur traders, the explorers, was complex and filled with every emotion imaginable. When I realized that commercial fishing on Lake Winnipeg with all its drama caused by the dangers of the weather, of the struggle to lift nets, to process fish, to survive, would be exotic to people beyond the limits of New Iceland.

Of course, there were social forces at work, as there always are in ethnic societies. I received a book every Christmas, every birthday. Robin Hood, Black Arrow, Swiss Family Robinson, The Hardy Boys. My mother and father bought a set of "The Books of Knowledge". I didn’t know that those gifted books were part of an Icelandic tradition. Surprisingly, and unfortunately, we didn’t have copies of the sagas.

I grew up believing that poetry mattered. I heard stories of fishermen reciting poetry about the beauties of Iceland. I heard poetry read at the annual festival, Islendingadagurinn. An Icelandic Celebration included story telling, not so much on the main stage, but around our kitchen table. Stories and stories about people’s adventures in the previous year. Stories that were particularly good being retold again and again. The story of my parents struggle to safety over an impassible mud road, my mother and father, Red Magnusson, our dog, Laddie, slogging forward until it was dark and then spending the night sleeping in the rain in the wilderness, was published in The Saturday Evening Post, full page spread. That swamp was about as exotic as any place, as filled with conflict and survival as any story set in distant lands.

There was a tradition of storytelling. I had many uncles and aunts, innumerable cousins. One of them was "Snooky" (Frank) Bristow. He was Fredrikka Gotskalksdottir’s son. He was a superb story teller. He’d led a hard life, had a thousand, thousand stories to tell. These weren’t other people’s stories. They were our stories. They were about family conflict, about conflict with nature, about internal conflict. There was lots of those. Many of the stories made us laugh. But many stories made us sad. The stories we told were meant to entertain, to instruct, to demonstrate. There were those historic stories of the community, and these were resurrected because our history was all around us, reminding us. When I was in Iceland the first time, Finboggi Gudmundson showed me that there were stories under nearly every rock, at every turn of a river. I realized the same was true of New Iceland. We just needed to learn to value them.

Making a living from the land was hard. The Icelandic settlers were not grain farmers, or

vegetable farmers. They were herders and fishermen. They had milk cows and sheep. Their situation in Iceland provided little in the way of opportunity. And, yet, they had the Eddas and the Sagas. I only became aware of them when I took a course in the short sagas with Haraldur Besasson. He was at the University of Manitoba because the community thought that Icelandic and Icelandic literature mattered enough to fund a professorship.

When I went to university, I was put on the board of The Icelandic Canadian. I had the privilege of being at board meetings with Judge Lindal, Caroline Gunnarson, Wilhelm Kristjanson. Lindal and Kristjanson had published books about the Manitoba and Saskatchewan Icelandic communities. Gunnarson was the editor of a newspaper. There was also Lögberg-Heimskringla, the Icelandic newspaper that had already started to publish in English as the community changed. Every ethnic group should have a newspaper to give its young people an opportunity to learn how to write publishable material. The New Yorker is a fine publication, so is The Atlantic, but they don’t publish aspiring writers who are writing about their communities.

When I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to earn my MFA, my treasure was that I had

something unique to write about. I had a history, a culture, a society that was a group that I cared about. I fell in love with the work of Flannery O’Connor, the short story writer from Georgia. She knew that rural life in Georgia would provide her with a lifetime of stories. I knew that the Icelandic people in Canada would provide me with a lifetime of stories.

I had a certainty. Writing mattered. And the more I learned about the Icelandic part of my family, the more I understood how much writing mattered. Not just the sagas. I started to read Laxness. I started to search out and read books that helped me understand us.

I think the major lesson of the sagas is that we matter. Yes, these were events in the distant past. But they make clear how important it is to know our literature, the mirror of our soul.

I wrote a story called "The Man From Snæfellsnes". It was published in one of my collections. It was translated and published in Iceland. Who would write such a story except someone who thinks the emotional and mental state of welfare cases whose way was paid to Canada to get rid of them matter? Who cares about the mixed feelings, the sense of rejection, the effects of people being auctioned off when they became dependent on society, finally being sent away because the well-to-do farmers in Iceland didn’t want to have to support them.

This fall season, Birna Bjarnadóttir is coming to offer a course in Icelandic North American literature and that story is going to be on the curriculum.

No writer can survive without an audience. Audiences are hard to come by. There is lots of competition. A writer has to write something that doesn’t just entertain but also matters. I have been very fortunate because I have had a supportive audience in the Icelandic North American community. That is, they bought my books. Not just my books but the books of David Arnason, of Ryan Eyford, Kristjana Gunnars, Nelson Gerrard, Bill Holm, Glenn Sigurdson, etc. They have come to readings. They have provided encouragement. After I retired, I was editor of Lögberg-Heimskringla for a while. It was a great experience. Again and again, I been asked to speak at Icelandic Canadian events. Being part of the Icelandic Canadian community hasn’t just been an

influence on my writing, but on my life.

I never thought I should quit writing and do something else. Writing for publication can be very discouraging. Long periods of work, never knowing if the work will be published. The pay, unless you hit a big winner like my former student, W. P. Kinsella (Field of Dreams) usually is minimal. I was lucky as my stories found good publishers and I wrote not just fiction but articles and drama. Currently, In Valhalla’s Shadows has a film option on it. You see that name. Valhalla. That is because of that background, because of all the Icelandic-Canadian culture.

None of this is to minimize the rich mix of people that have populated New Iceland since it was opened up to other settlers. When our ancestors arrived, they received help from the local aboriginals, there were Scots and Orkneymen travelling and trading up and down Lake Winnipeg, lumber operations were busy because of all the building of houses and businesses. I ate Bannock and plum pudding, scones with strawberry jam, venison and moose meat, rabbit, excellent Cantonese cooking. This was my world. I was not Icelandic. I was Canadian but I had a heritage that affected and informed everything I did. The way I wrote and what I wrote about was permeated with that Icelandic heritage.