Subjects:
Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Tells the exuberant, ribald, elemental tale of the citizens of a town somewhere on the weather-beaten border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. After Vera Lang consorts with a swarm of bees, something changes in Big Indian. This prairie municipality -- so remote from the rest of the world that its citizens aren't sure which province they can live in -- becomes somehow locked inside its own world of patience, yearning and wilful struggle with nature. Along the way, Big Indian emerges as a place simultaneously in the past and in the present, the real and the imaginary, where a game of cards might last forever and a defeated farmer can freeze on his snowbound plough in June. With his sun-sharpened imagery, unstoppable language play, and frank intimacy with the landscape, Robert Kroetsch creates in What the Crow Said a quintessentially prairie novel.
Born in Heisler, Alberta, Robert Kroetsch published his first novel, But We are Exiles in 1965, and his book The Studhorse Man (1969) won the Governor General's Award for Fiction. Throughout his career, he steadily elaborated his indelible mark on Canadian writing with his fiction, non-fiction, poetry, teaching, and scholarship.
Robert Kroetsch has spent his life writing about his favourite place - Alberta. On this week's Trailblazers, we sit down with the famed prairie author who received one of this year's Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Awards.