Fred Stenson is the accomplished, prolific, versatile and astute writer of short stories, fiction, non-fiction, film and magazine commentary from southern Alberta who has just celebrated four decades of being in the writing biz.
Fred Stenson is the accomplished, prolific, versatile and astute writer of short stories, fiction, non-fiction, film and magazine commentary from southern Alberta who has just celebrated four decades of being in the writing biz. He has made his career on tales that are indelibly set in this very prairie province.
The question begs to be asked: is it his firm intention to write out all of the most Albertan stories that he can think up?
“It's a funny thing,” he began. “I've been at this a very long time; my first novel came out in 1974. Sometime in the early 1980s, I had this vision that I would try and write a cycle of novels that would cover the history of Western Canada (with a bit of a particular focus on Alberta) that would march forward from the point of contact between Europeans and First Nations and would move ahead through the economic horizons.”
The first title in that unofficial series was The Trade, regarding the fur trade. The book was nominated for that year's Giller Prize. Well-known for writing thick, 500 page-busting tomes, he said that The Trade took him 15 years to complete, forcing him to step up his game somewhat. “I had to rethink the whole plan because, at that rate, I'd have to live till I was 300 years old to finish what I had planned.”
Since then, he's published other books like Lightning, which was set during the early days of open range ranch frontier in the province, and The Great Karoo, which dealt with Western Canadian cowboys going off to fight in South Africa during the Boer War at the close of the 19th century. Both The Trade and Lightning won the Grant MacEwan's Author's Prize and were nominated for the prestigious Giller and Dublin IMPAC Prizes.
He then stepped off the platform to pen a non-fiction book about the craft of writing called Thing Feigned or Imagined. He thought that title would create a natural shift in his provincial stories. “It's funny … I thought I was getting away from that project,” he said, admitting his folly.
Who By Fire, his new book, is another ‘made in Alberta' epic about one family's fight with an oil and gas company and how it has created conflicts with rural residents, a “collision between community and industry.”
“Much of our history as a province has been about this resource,” he stated. “Maybe we haven't had enough of a dialogue about it.”
He's had a lot of experience with that industry, both on the inside and the outside, throughout his life. Not once did he feel leery about the task, like taking on a Goliath that could rally economic and political forces against him. Stenson bears no small resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt, right down to the moustache and toothy grin. Even in this attitude of artistic integrity, he seems much like the rugged figure from history.
“Somebody has to feel the freedom to do that. I think I'm the logical person to do it because I was born into a family that did have a lot of suffering, a lot of problems, with a frontier sour gas plant,” he explained, referring to how his family sued the oil industry back some 50 or 60 years ago. “That's a matter of history.”
That history didn't stop the Canadian Gas Processors Association from hiring him to write a history of the gas processing industry. His integrity as a writer kept that door open. It didn't hurt that he has even worked “the clean-up, the turnaround at a couple of gas plants … I know what they're like on the inside.”
“I've been at this from all sorts of different angles. I think we've slumped into some kind of really narrow-minded brittleness in Alberta in the last few years,” he said, bristling about the fuss made when Neil Young went to Fort McMurray to make some critical statements on the environmental effects of the oil and gas industry.
“I just thought, ‘Have we really become the kind of society where people are not welcome to state their opinion?' I was deeply saddened with that. I just thought that we sound like something I didn't think we were: people that can't stand to hear a free opinion stated. We go around saying that we care about rights, well, demonstrate that you care about rights by allowing people to talk.”
“If that's the challenge, I'm happy to take it on. I've lived here all my life. I think I've been a good Albertan. I think I've contributed in my various ways. Ultimately, I just wanted to write a good novel, a good story and I wanted to write it from the inside of a family that had to deal with oil and gas at its worst.”
Fiction, he continued, is the perfect method for putting a voice to people's concerns.
“The one thing that fiction can do better than almost anything is to put you – the reader – inside an experience which either they can't experience themselves or aren't experiencing when they could. The whole principle that fiction stands on is the reader experiences as if it were happening to them. I think what fiction does is much more intimate and personal. You're always writing not for a group of people but for a series of individual people. I think once we've been moved by a novel, it becomes part of our experience. It's a different kind of social change. If writing be activism, it's a different and very personal kind of activism both on the writing and the receiving end.”
He has enjoyed taking this new book to audiences across the provinces. This won't be his first time in St. Albert as he researched the mission for a past project.
Stenson has a collegial friendship with his forthcoming host, Curtis Gillespie, through their work at the Banff Centre for the Arts. They have yet to talk in person about Who By Fire, so the conversation during the event will undoubtedly be quite frank and spontaneous.
