I Am YEG Arts: Alice Major

Born in Scotland and raised in Toronto, it was only after moving to Edmonton for work that Alice Major joined the writing circle that sparked her poetry career. The author of a dozen poetry collections, two novels and a book of essays exploring the intersection of poetry and science, Alice has left an indelible mark on Edmonton with her writing, but also through her support of the writing community. Alice is past president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and the League of Canadian Poets, and former chair of the Edmonton Arts Council. During her tenure as Edmonton’s first Poet Laureate, she founded the Edmonton Poetry Festival, which is currently celebrating its 20^th anniversary with events running until the end of April. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts story, Alice tells us about her early days as a poet, the founding of the Poetry Festival, and her new works in progress, including a book about what it means to be local. 

Tell us about an influential figure early in your writing journey who helped shape your career path. 

I can’t say that there was any single figure who shaped it. There was nobody who took my hand and set my foot on the yellow brick road. It was more the accident of finding myself in Edmonton. I grew up in a working-class family, and the idea of being a writer was just not part of the landscape. (Although my father always made up poetry and recited it around the dinner table.) I thought poetry was normal, even though it wasn’t normal for a teenager in 60s Scarborough, Ontario. It always seemed to be a way that I wanted to express myself. But in all those years in Toronto, I never actually found a writing circle or another poet. 

I ended up accidentally coming to Alberta. I needed to pay off a Visa card, and I was offered a very good job in Edmonton, so I was going to scrape the gold off the sidewalk and go home again. But it was here that I first found a poetry circle. I was the girl from public relations at the electric company, and it turned out that the girl from public relations at the sister gas company was also a poet. Her name is Shirley Serviss and she was part of a writing circle that had emerged out of a class at the university. I went to this writing circle and, all of a sudden, I had found the beginning of the yellow brick road; people that took what I was trying to do seriously. I was never very good at being told what to do, but the capacity to hear other people and to see what they were doing — that kind of dialogue is really critical for an artist. 

Edmonton has become your chosen home. Can you share more about how you’ve created a community and writing practice here in Edmonton for yourself? 

I arrived in 1981. A poetry community had been burbling for a couple of decades at least for a group at the University of Alberta. It was kind of a town-and-gown situation that didn’t really have that much connection to the larger circle outside the university. That didn’t really jive with my sense of what poetry was; I always felt that poetry was about a connection to other people. 

However, people were starting to do other things, and to a large extent, I tagged along and then I started to get excited about things. For instance, in the 80s, there was the Celebration of Women in the Arts, where poets’ work would be performed by theatre artists; it was usually a fairly large production. I also got involved in the Writers’ Guild of Alberta around this time. Then a strange kind of Rube Goldberg publishing organization called the Books Collective got started back in the 90s. It was basically a whole bunch of Edmonton writers who couldn’t get work published anywhere, so we thought we’d start our own publishing house. We had poets and fiction writers and young adult writers, there was also a group doing graphic novel-type stuff. We liked making the books, but we didn’t actually want to get out and distribute them and sell them. So we set up a kind of umbrella organization to do those tasks. We did put out a surprising number of books! That was how I got my first book published.

As the City of Edmonton’s first Poet Laureate, you founded the Edmonton Poetry Festival, which is currently celebrating its 20^th anniversary. Tell us about what inspired you to create the festival. What mark has it left on Edmonton’s literary landscape? 

I can’t say that I was personally inspired to create a festival. The Poet Laureate position had been established by Mayor Mandel. During that time, there was an initiative called Random Acts of Poetry (that I wasn’t involved in). He was taken by one ​‘random act’, thought it was fun and said ​“We should have a poetry festival here!” It was the time when ​“Edmonton Festival City” was really the thing. I sort of thought, OK, I feel like I’ve been handed a football at the 10-yard line.

It was a very busy two years. We managed to get Telus to join as a sponsor and it was a Cultural Capital year in 2007. There was a lot of attention and support, and the Edmonton Arts Council was very much behind it. When I think back on the projects and the connections that people were able to bring in, it was really impressive. Then year three came, I was done as Poet Laureate, and I thought that was the end of the festival. Then of course, that’s when the community stepped up. The third festival happened with three months’ notice and very little cash. It was very local, I don’t know if we had any outside guests that year. But it provided an impetus for carrying on. We were able to get more stable funding, which made a huge difference. For the first six years or so, the festival had been almost entirely volunteer-run. But funding helped us bring in a paid ED – and Rayanne Haines was brilliant! I get the credit for being the founder, and I won’t say that I don’t deserve a pat on the head for doing a lot of work. But it carried on because other people did the lion’s share.

We started out as a fairly homogeneous group from a diversity point of view. Although we weren’t consciously keeping people out, it was not knowing there were other people to be brought in. However, that very first year we did have several projects like the Honour Songs, coordinated by Anna Marie Sewell and Marilyn Dumont, who worked with Indigenous women on a beautiful event. They put together this fabulous performance that involved movement and words. We were recognizing the potential of bringing a wider section of the community in. 

Another thing I remember from that first year was walking along Jasper Ave, going from one reading to another, and somebody races up and says she’s just heard this amazing poet at one of our open-mic café readings, Titilope Sonuga. Titilope, Ahmed​“Knowmadic” Ali and Anna Marie were right there at the beginning and have all become poets laureate themselves.

We tried to keep the door open and always have. I think that the open door is going to have to be widened and bring in more people. 

As a storyteller, what themes or inspirations do you find yourself returning to time and time again in your work? 

I’m going to resist the term storyteller. It’s not like I don’t tell stories in my poems; I write a lot of narrative poetry. But essentially, what I want to do with my work is explore patterns, and in particular, I’m always interested in the patterns that scientists are making in their discoveries about the world and their analysis of phenomena. I sometimes think that if they could really get their act together and explain to me what the universe is made of, I’d die happy. I’m just fascinated by cosmology and geology. We tend to think Edmonton is not terribly interesting from a landscape point of view. We don’t have the Rockies right down the road, but we sit on rock that goes back to the founding continents of this planet. We exist on this tiny layer at the top, and in fact the past is much deeper. Then there is cognitive science, how do our brains work the way they do?

Then, of course, the real thing I work with as a poet is the patterns you can make with sound. Sound is so innate, but we spend the first months and few years of our lives learning to make the most incredibly complex patterns of sound and to interpret them and use them to communicate. I always want to get back to that childlike joy in just making interesting sounds, even though I’m what they call a page poet, not a performance poet as such, I want every line to have some pattern of sound that you could pull out of it, and that’s sort of what moves it over the line from prose to poetry, I think. 

What do you see as the biggest challenges facing writers and poets today? And what advice would you give to those wishing to thrive in their practice. 

I think the biggest challenge is probably much of what it’s always been. How do you do what you want to do in a world that will only pay you to do other things? I don’t know if there’s been a generation that’s been able to say that they automatically get paid for doing what they love. As a general rule, what we do as artists has to start with understanding ourselves for ourselves. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be commercially successful too, although as a poet, I’ve never expected to be financially successful. 

There’s this tension between what the world wants from you and what you need to do for yourself. Finding the space for that to happen is very difficult, and I think now in our very fractured media landscape, it is probably even more difficult. I am personally grateful that I did not start out when social media was what it is now. I’ve been trying to master things like Instagram. I loathe the process because it takes you away from creation and into this strange marketing world. Some people master it well. But for a lot of us as artists, we can’t. It’s not a good place for us to be, and it doesn’t encourage your creativity. So for me, that remains a challenge. 

Tell us about what you’re currently working on and what you’re hoping explore next. 

I’m working on two writing projects. Some years ago, I published a book called Essays on Poetry and Science. I’m doing another book of essays on poetry and science, but I’m adding a third line of spirituality to the triangle. How do we make sense of the world through those very different lenses? Especially as many of us don’t subscribe to any religious sect but still feel the need for a sense of something that goes beyond our human selves. 

I’m also working on another book of poems, which is more of a slow drip kind of process. The last two books I have written have been fairly ​‘big picture’—Welcome to the Anthropocene is about humanity’s role in the world, and Knife on Snow is about climate change and conflict. For this one, I’m thinking about what it means to be local. There’s a physics principle called the principle of locality, which basically says that nothing can happen between two objects unless there’s a medium to carry the force between them. I’m writing about what it is to be in this particular city at this particular time. Travel has become in both senses a right — a rite of passage and a right to personal freedom. In today’s culture, it has become expected, something we ought to want. However, if you just want to stay in one place, how do you justify that? Wherever we are on the planet, our lives entail the whole world. Those are the ideas I’m playing with.

About Alice Major

Alice Major has published twelve collections of poetry, two novels for young adults, and an award-winning collection of essays about poetry and science. 

Alice came to Edmonton the long way round. She grew up in Dumbarton, Scotland — a small town on the banks of the Clyde, not far from Glasgow. Her family came to Canada when she was eight, and she grew up in Toronto. 

After graduating with a BA (English, history) from Trinity College, Toronto at the University of Toronto, Alice moved west to work as a reporter with The Williams Lake Tribune in British Columbia. 

She is an active supporter of the arts and writing community and has lived in Edmonton, Alberta since 1981. Alice is past-president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and the League of Canadian Poets, and former chair of the Edmonton Arts Council. 

She was the City of Edmonton’s first poet laureate and served a two-year term from 2005 until 2007. During her tenure, she founded the Edmonton Poetry Festival in 2006. Alice went on to receive the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award in 2017 and an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Alberta in 2019.