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\nTo become a farmer — that\u2019s what I wanted.\u00a0 Of course, at age 12, my vision of farming was The Old Swimming Hole, not 16-hour work days during harvest or calving season.\u00a0 Growing up in Winnipeg made it easy to idealize the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Growing up in a German Pentecostal church, where The Word was central, opened up a very different interest:\u00a0 literature.\u00a0 I loved Danny Orliss, the Hardy boys, and, when I got to high school, Agatha Christie and Isaac Asimov. \u00a0Although math was my strongest subject and English one of my weakest, I read Frank Herbert\u2019s Dune<\/em> under my desk in Mr. Funk\u2019s math class.\u00a0 He graciously let my reading addiction bloom so long as I kept my math mark up.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0I initially had no interest in whatshisname, Shakespeare, but at some point\u2014I think it was when I picked Alan Garner\u2019s little-known Red Shift <\/em>off the library shelf in the mistaken belief that the novel was science fiction\u2014I realized that there were writers who could do magic in a way that Agatha Christie couldn\u2019t.\u00a0 My teachers at Grant Park High School helped a lot.\u00a0 Mr. Coyle, an alcoholic Scotsman, drummed into us how to write a logically coherent essay and allowed us (i.e. forced us) to read widely.\u00a0 He\u2019s dead now, but I still pass on his advice to first-year students, and I hear the echo of his no-nonsense voice:\u00a0 \u201cKrrrhaymarh, step fohrward.\u00a0 Due nat throuw<\/em> yer gahrbadge inta tha weyste besket froom tha beck rhouw.\u201d\u00a0 Mr. Schwetz, conversely, was one for new ideas and linguistic experiments.\u00a0 It was in Mr. Schwetz\u2019s class that I refused to write the city-wide exam on Hamlet <\/em>and wrote, instead, an essay on how utterly wrong it was to dissect a great work of literature.\u00a0 I should have gotten a zero, but the kindly Mr. Schwetz gave me 8 out of 20, salvaging my term mark.\u00a0 Would I have tried such na\u00efve romanticism with Mr. Coyle?\u00a0 No.<\/p>\n I determined to major in English at the University of Winnipeg, and when second-year registration came around, I asked the English advisor exactly how one could go about majoring in English while studying only contemporary literature.\u00a0 She was a medievalist.\u00a0 She glared at me.\u00a0 Then she said, \u201cThe first thing you\u2019ll do is to register for Shakespeare.\u201d\u00a0 I did.\u00a0 Soon I rejoiced.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n After my B.A., I married Rita Flaig.\u00a0 For two years I worked in a group home for delinquent and emotionally-disturbed adolescents, but that taste of real-world disaffection soon made me long for the peacefulness of the academy again.\u00a0 Rita went along with my decision to return to university, even though it meant many sacrifices.\u00a0 She gave birth to three dear children\u2014Madeline, Stephanie, and Michelle\u2014during my graduate years, as we struggled together to earn enough to survive.<\/p>\n At the University of Manitoba I met the novelist and scholar Dr. David Williams, whose influence and mentorship have guided me for many years.\u00a0 I told him that I wanted him as an advisor for an M.A. thesis on Leonard Cohen, but Williams wasn\u2019t eager to work on Cohen.\u00a0 Okay, I said, give me another subject.\u00a0 We settled on the Trickster\u2019s role in three Amerindian writers.\u00a0 For my PhD a few years later, I broadened my notion of The Word somewhat to write on the Canadian novel and scatology (the study of bodily excretions).\u00a0 Although the Graduate committee was initially reluctant to approve such a topic, I was allowed to pursue it, and eventually I published Scatology and Civility in the English-Canadian Novel<\/em> with the University of Toronto Press.\u00a0 Despite the jokes it elicited at home and among friends at my Mennonite church here in Brandon, the book is a serious work, focusing on the relations between body and text in about 70 Canadian novels.\u00a0<\/p>\n When former BU archivist Tom Mitchell asked me to collaborate on a book centred on Hilda Blake, a Brandon servant who murdered her employer\u2019s wife 100 years ago, I leapt at the opportunity.\u00a0 Together we wrote Walk Towards the Gallows,<\/em>\u00a0combining the story of Hilda\u2019s life with social history.\u00a0 That primed me to write a literary biography, Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain<\/em>, about the controversial Canadian writer whose life was as intriguing as his novels.\u00a0 Tom and I then wrote a second book together, When the State Trembled<\/em>, this time working on Tom\u2019s reinterpretation of the Winnipeg General Strike by investigating the shadowy Citizens\u2019 Committee of 1000.\u00a0 Presently, I\u2019m working on a book about the relations between postmodern life and contemporary literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To become a farmer — that\u2019s what I wanted.\u00a0 Of course, at age 12, my vision of farming was The Old Swimming Hole, not 16-hour work days during harvest or calving season.\u00a0 Growing up in Winnipeg made it easy to idealize the country.\u00a0 Growing up in a German Pentecostal church, where The Word was central, 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