Guy Vanderhaeghe on finding his writer's voice and the Sask. literary scene

Guy Vanderhaeghe doesn't want to write a memoir, but the celebrated Saskatchewan author says his new book reveals all a reader needs to know about his life of letters.

Because Somebody Asked Me To collects Vanderhaeghe's non-fiction writing — book reviews, lectures, essays — that examines his career and craft, CanLit and the novelists that influenced his own work, such as Man Descending, which in 1982 won his first of three Governor General's Award for Fiction, and The Last Crossing, which won Canada Reads 2004.

"Maybe 10 years ago, someone suggested that I write a memoir. And I thought, no, because first of all, I've had a pretty boring life, right? So there wasn't too much excitement to inject into a memoir," Vanderhaeghe told Blue Sky host Leisha Grebinski in a new feature interview.

"But when I was looking back over these pieces, I started to think it did. All of these different pieces said something about me. It said something about the place that I was born in, that I grew up in, that I was educated in … so this is probably the closest I will ever come to writing a memoir."

Vanderhaeghe said his mother and her brothers were great storytellers, which fuelled his desire to write at a young age while growing up in Esterhazy, Sask. He credits his mother for encouraging his reading habits and recalls teachers scolding him for his book choices.

"We had one of those libraries where you signed out books yourself. There wasn't a librarian. Teachers used to say I was reading things that were far too adult, but [my mother] didn't care what I read," Vanderhaeghe says.

His father, though, was functionally illiterate. Vanderhaeghe said the hardscrabble farmer would take him to buy cattle so he could write the cheques his father couldn't. While his mother nurtured his nascent artistry, Vanderhaeghe thinks his father would have been happier to see his son stay on the farm.

"He didn't certainly put himself in the way of what I did, but I don't think he ever got it," Vanderhaeghe said. "I don't blame him when I say he never got it. He never read anything that I wrote, because he couldn't."

Except for a brief stint in Ottawa, Vanderhaeghe has always lived in his home province and was part of a new generation of writers forging Saskatchewan's contemporary literary scene. His first published short story was in the second-ever issue of the long-running Grain literary magazine based in Saskatoon.

He said the emerging writers were eager to explore the "empty spaces in the literary map of Saskatchewan" neglected by the publishing tastemakers in Toronto.

"I don't want to suggest that the map is complete or ever going to be completed," Vanderhaeghe said. "For instance, in the early 1970s, the time I'm talking about, there was virtually no Indigenous writing. And now there's a huge surge of Indigenous writers and literature. So that's another part of the map that was neglected that's now getting filled in."

Check out the full interview on CBC Listen to hear Vanderhaeghe's thoughts on writing, historical novels, Saskatchewan literary history, and his story about a special letter from iconic Canadian author Margaret Laurence.

This interview was produced by Nichole Huck.

Vanderhaeghe's new book Because Somebody Asked Me To: Observations on History, Literature and the Passing Scene is published by Thistledown Press and is available now.