Must Write

Christl Verduyn, Edna Staebler

Description

Long before she became the renowned author of the best-selling Schmecks cookbooks, an award-winning journalist for magazines such as Macleans, and a creative non-fiction mentor, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen and continued to write for over eighty years. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries draws from these diaries selections that map Staebler’s construction of herself as a writer and documents her frustrations and struggles, along with her desire to express herself, in writing. She felt she must write—that not to write was a “denial of life”—while at the same time she doubted the value of her scribblings.

Spanning much of the twentieth century—each decade is introduced by an overview of key events in the author’s life during that period—the diaries vividly illuminate both her intensely personal experiences and her broader social world. The volume also presents four key examples of Staebler’s public writing: her first published magazine article; her first award-winning publication; the opening chapter of her book Cape Breton Harbour; and her lively account of the Great Cookie War. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries portrays an ordinary woman’s struggle to write in the context of her lived experience. “All my life I have talked about writing and kept scribbling in my notebook, as if that makes me a writer,” wrote Staebler in 1986. This volume argues that the very act of writing the diaries, with all their contradictory accounts of writerly ambition, success, and conflict, made Staebler the writer she yearned to be.

Sujets

• Life writing
• Regional Municipality of Waterloo

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 03 août 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554588114
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

must write
Edna Staebler s Diaries
must write
Edna Staebler s Diaries
edited by Christi Verduyn
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Waterloo Regional Heritage Foundation.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Staebler, Edna, 1906-
Must write: Edna Staebler s diaries / edited by Christl Verduyn.
(Life writing series) ISBN 0-88920-481-0
1. Staebler, Edna, 1906--Diaries. 2. Authors, Canadian (English)-20th century-Diaries. I. Verduyn, Christl, 1953- II. Title. III. Series.
FC 601.S69A3 2005 C818 .5403 C2005-903941-8
2005 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover photograph courtesy of Edna Staebler. Cover and interior design by P.J. Woodland.
To Youth, from In American by John V. A. Weaver, 1939. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Life as Writing
Edna s Chronology
Family Lines
1 1920s Words to Express
2 1930s Longing to Make Something
3 1940s Must Write
4 Duellists of the Deep 1948
5 How to Live without Wars and Wedding Rings 1950
6 1950s Writing
7 1960s Must Work
8 1970s Something to Write About
9 Cape Breton Harbour (excerpt) 1972
10 The Great Cookie War 1987
11 1980s The Business of Publishing
12 1990s Must Do
13 2000 Still Interested and Interesting
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE and thank a number of individuals and institutions for their support of this project.
First and foremost, thanks to Edna Staebler, whose diary writing is at the heart of this book. I am extremely grateful for her permission to publish material from her archives and for her generous cooperation throughout. Thanks to Sandra Woolfrey, former director of Wilfrid Laurier University Press, who introduced me to Edna and who encouraged my conception of the project. Thanks as well to Brian Henderson, current director of Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and to his staff at WLUP, in particular Jacqueline Larson, Carroll Klein, and Pamela Woodland, for seeing the book through production to publication.
An agreement between the University of Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier University, approved by Edna Staebler, enabled the transfer of her diaries from the University of Guelph Library Archives to Wilfrid Laurier University Archives during the summer of 2001. This arrangement allowed for much easier access to the materials for transcription by two student assistants, Lisa Butler and Sally Heath. For facilitating the agreement, thanks to Lorne Bruce, Head of Archival and Special Collections at the University of Guelph, as well as Tim Sauer, Head of Collections Services, University of Guelph Library, and at Wilfrid Laurier University, Virginia Gillham, former University Librarian. For their helpful and friendly assistance in the archives, thanks to Ellen Morrison and Darlene Wiltsie at the University of Guelph and to Joan Mitchell and Cindy Preece at Wilfrid Laurier University.
For conversations about Edna s diaries and for her help with photographs for the book, thanks to Kathryn Wardropper. Thanks as well as to Sally Heath, who stayed on as a research assistant for the duration of the project and to whose trusty transcription work I am enormously indebted. Sylvia Hoang helpfully scanned Staebler s journalism articles for the volume and Kerry Cannon lent a welcome hand with some elusive footnote material. Ann Wood and Sheila Bauman of the Kitchener Public Library tracked down an obituary notice for Yvonne Craig. Early on in the project, I spoke with Judith Miller, who excerpted a passage from Edna s diaries for the collection The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada 1830-1996 , edited by Kathryn Carter (2002). Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge Veronica Ross, whose biography of Staebler appeared as I was nearing the end of my work and presents a wonderful companion volume to this one.
A Wilfrid Laurier University short-term grant was helpful at the outset of this project and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant supported the completion of the work. I am grateful to the council for its support of my work over the years and I sincerely hope it will continue to fund research in the humanities for many years to come. Throughout this and other research projects, I have had the steady, good-humoured support of my family, and my final thanks and deepest appreciation belong as always to Robert Campbell and our four children.
Introduction Life as Writing Edna Staebler s Diaries
L ONG BEFORE SHE BECAME a renowned author of best-selling cookbooks, an award-winning journalist, a published author, and a mentor of creative non-fiction, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. She was a prodigious diarist. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen in 1922 and continued for over eighty years until she suffered a mild stroke in 2003. 1 Approaching her centenary in 2006, Edna Staebler is the author of a voluminous body of diary writing. Housed in Archival and Special Collections at the University of Guelph, the Staebler diaries comprise thousands of handwritten, single-spaced, double-sided pages. This book presents excerpts from that substantial literary corpus, creating a portrait of Edna Staebler as a writer and the author of this volume of life writing.
It is tempting to see the Staebler diaries as biography, and indeed the diaries contain a great deal of information about Edna s life. 2 However, they do not provide an uninterrupted record and this volume is not presented as biography in the traditional sense of the genre. When Staebler travelled to Europe, for instance, letters home replaced diary writing. And when she was in the throes of her cookbook work and journalism, her diary writing slowed down noticeably. Rather than biography, this book proposes that the Staebler diaries constitute a compelling example of life writing as well as the literary work that the author longed to achieve throughout her life. This introduction briefly situates Staebler s diaries in the context of her published work and also within the genre and practice of life writing as well as the larger related frame of autobiographical writing. It provides an overview of the material and the structure of the book and addresses the question of the literary value of diary writing. It is followed by a chronology of Staebler s life that includes a segment of family tree relevant to the diaries.
The Public Writer
Cookbook readers readily recognize Edna Staebler as the author of the enormously successful series that began with Food That Really Schmecks . 3 The series offers readers not only recipes but also stories and anecdotes about the people and places linked to the recipes. Described by Edith Fowke as folklore literature, Staebler s cookbooks have earned her national acclaim and local fame. 4 Although it is as a cookbook author that she is best known today, Edna Staebler initially made her mark as a writer through journalism. Her first published piece, Duellists of the Deep, appeared in Maclean s magazine in 1948. Based on a fishing expedition on which Staebler joined Cape Bretoners fishing for swordfish, it caught the attention of Scott Young, Maclean s magazine editor at the time. Journalism put Staebler in touch with a host of Canadian writers, starting with W.O. Mitchell, who introduced her to another Maclean s editor, Pierre Berton. Berton invited Staebler to write an article about Mennonites. The resulting How to Live without Wars and Wedding Rings, published in July 1950, earned her the Canadian Women s Press Award for Outstanding Journalism. To prepare this piece, Edna took her journalism into the field. She stayed with a Mennonite family and prepared meals alongside the community women who became lifelong friends. This experience later inspired and shaped the unique nature of Staebler s cookbooks.
The opportunities presented by journalism, and later by the success of her cookbooks, took Staebler from one side of the country to the other. This was an exceptional experience for her in an era when 1950s middleclass women in North America lived fairly house-bound existences. Still, Staebler s writing ambitions lay elsewhere. Although she longed to write fiction, she had little idea of how to proceed, for as she told the audience at Queen s University in May 1997 in her Margaret Laurence Memorial Address to the Writers Union of Canada, growing up in southwestern Ontario during the Depression, she knew no writers, there were no local colleges or universities where writing was taught. 5 Staebler eventually published creative non-fiction, a genre that she pioneered through her own book about the small, east-coast fishing community of Neil s Harbour- Cape Breton Harbour (1972). Inspir