Emma Hooper is one young writer who left the region prior to publishing her first book, the novel Etta and Otto and Russell and James (Hamish Hamilton Canada). Born in Alberta, Hooper now makes her home in the U.K. Quoted in the U.K. trade publication The Bookseller, Hooper calls her novel “a love letter to my homeland, the Canadian Prairies.” But, interestingly, the author felt she had to leave home before she could bring herself to write about it.

“I left long before I started writing this book,” Hooper tells Q&Q. “I left in 2004. So, I didn’t leave with this book brimming in my mind. But I think being away from Alberta, from Saskatchewan, allowed me to think of it with the objectivity needed to write about it.”

Relocating seems to have worked out for Hooper. The novel has sold in 23 territories and 18 languages, including being picked up by Simon & Schuster in the U.S. Meanwhile, she has just purchased property – a converted 1836 schoolhouse (“That’s the kind of thing you can do in England,” she says) – and has no immediate plans to return to the Prairies to live. “For now, I’m happy here.”

If Hooper represents the James Joyce–like artist in exile, poet and food writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith more closely resembles William Faulkner or Mark Twain – writers who never strayed far from the land their fiction came to inhabit. “I absolutely think of myself as a Prairie writer,” says Hobsbawn-Smith, who has just published her debut collection of short stories, What Can’t Be Undone, with Thistledown. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to be published by Prairie-based presses. Like any poet and fiction writer, or writer of any genre, I hope to have a big press notice my work. But, if that never happens, I feel that the Prairies are in my bones, and if I only am ever published by Prairie-based houses, I guess I would be okay with that.”

“Writers, wherever they live, can create a new look at the same subjects.” – Connie Gault

Though she diverges from Hobsbawn-Smith on the issue of categorization, Gault echoes the idea that what writers want, no matter where they come from or whom they publish with, is for readers to notice their work. Outside of the Prairies, that means national media exposure. And how does one go about getting that?

“I have to say that possibly a special issue every 10 years or a special festival held in Ontario every 10 years to celebrate each region is probably not the best answer,” says Gault. “I think that a better approach is an open attitude, one that doesn’t prejudge books and authors.”

This is especially germane where Prairie fiction is concerned, given the fact that many critics (myself included) have been historically reluctant to revise their opinion of work from the region in accordance with its evident diversity and range.

Icelandic-Canadian author and poet Kristjana Gunnars defined Prairie fiction as a genre this way: “The setting is the Prairie. The characters are immigrant homesteaders … [P]eople live far away from each other in rural areas and they do not often get together…. Family takes on great importance…. Family may mean the difference between sanity and insanity, and ultimately life and death. For people who are too isolated and wrapped up in silence are, in Prairie fiction, often reduced to suicide or even murder.” Gunnars provides a fairly accurate summary of the prejudicial idea of Prairie writing, but it should be noted that the book she was referring to, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, was first published in 1925. It’s safe to say that quite a lot has changed since then.

“What I sometimes fear,” says Gault, “is that there is an old-fashioned idea of what Prairie writing is. You know, that sort of, oh, the old kitchen-sink realism and so on. But writers, wherever they live, can create a new look at the same subjects.”