Lögberg-Heimskringla - 24.09.1999, Side 2

2 » Lögberg-Heimskringla • Friday 24 September 1999
The NACS Conference
Betty Jane Wylie
The sixth triennial conference
of the Nordic Association of
Canadian Studies (NACS) was
held from August 5 to 8 in Iceland for
the first time in its history. I was among
the 180 participants from the five
Scandinavian countries and Canada in
attendance. Parallel sessions compris-
ing three or four papers each presented
frustrating choices to people rushing
around the halls of Oddi, the building
on the University of Reykjavík campus
where almost all of the events were
located. Through it all the conference
chair, Dr. Guðrun Guðsteins(dóttir),
Department of Literature, University of
Reykjavík, kept her cool and gracious
demeanour.
Conflicting schedules are best han-
dled in front of a TV set with a swiftly
responsive clicker; in real life one is
resigned to missing a lot and risks
insulting a presenter on whom one
walks out in order to go and hear some-
one else. The sad result in Reykjavík
was that it was impossible to listen to
more than a fraction of the material pre-
sented and when o'ne’s own session
competed with another desirable pres-
entation, one had to give up entirely.
The other dismaying consequence was
that no single session, with the excep-
tion of the keynote lectures which had
no competition, enjoyed more than a
dozen people in attendance, if that. The
Canadian writers who read (five min-
utes each) at an evening event reached a
larger audience than our forrnal ses-
sions afforded.
As for the information and ideas
that we missed, the compensating factor
was that the participants were alerted
ahead of time to a website carrying
abstracts of all the presentations. I
downloaded all 56 pages and read them
before I Ieft Canada. This also enabled
me to make my often difficult choices.
The other compensations were, as 1
mentioned, that the keynote lectures
were scheduled singly so that no one
need miss them; Carol Shields and
David Amason did us proud!
It’s a little-known fact that I was in on
the conception, though not the birth,
of the NACS and its ambitious goals. In
March, 1983, External Affairs Canada
discovered that it had some inoney in its
budget it had to dispose of before its
new fiscal year, April 1. A hardship tour
was scrambled together—hardship
because not many people could be per-
suaded to travel to Denmark, Finland,
Norway, and Sweden in the cold, dark
month of March. A trio of eamest but
little-known Canadian writers was mus-
tered: one poet, Francis Sparshott; one
novelist, David Williams; and one play-
wright, Betty Jane Wylie. It certainly
was cold and dark. I bought a silk-knit
wool undershirt and an Icewool poncho
to go over my winter coat as soon as I
had a moment to shop in Copenhagen
and although I swam and hit a sauna
every moming wherever we went, I
caught a doozy of a cold which made
the speaking more difficult. And boy,
did we speak!
We had been given little or no
instruction, just bookings and contacts.
At each place, before each new lecture,
we were like a vaudeville team deciding
what to do just before we went on: a lit-
tle ring toss, a soft shoe dance, a joke or
two, and some reading. Thank goodness
our audiences understood English as
our mastery of Danish, Finnish,
Norwegian, and Swedish was limited to
“hello” and “thank you.” I said we were
(relatively) little known. Francis
Sparshott had, I think, one volume of
poetry to his credit at that time and
David Williams one novel. Although
my reputation as a writer had been
established with Beginnings, my book
for widows, as a playwright I’d had
about three plays produced and pub-
lished (by Playwrights Canada Press,
bless its play script program!). We
bored each other with our repetitive
readings and kept trying new ways of
pitching old material—lots of tap danc-
ing. In all, we lectured at eight universi-
ties: Aarhus and Copenhagen in
Denmark; Helsinki, Tampere, and
Turku in Finland; and Stockholm,
Uppsala, and Umeo in Sweden. In
Norway we were seconded by Per
Seyerstad, professor of American
Literature at the University in Oslo, and
spirited away, six hours’ drive north of
the city in the mountains on the west
side, for a weekend-long seminar in a
seventeenth-century farmhouse called
Hovda, to discuss CanLit with the grad-
uate class. That’s where David
Williams and I had a drag-out fight
about Sinclair Ross’s book, As For Me
and My House (he taught it; I had writ-
ten an adaptation for the stage based on
it, with Ross’s input)—to the delighted
and awed shock of the students. And
that’s where, I’m sure, the idea began to
germinate to make this CanLit study a
regular thing. That weekend became
known as Hovda I; my friend, the
American feminist icon, Tillie Olsen,
was the big draw at Hovda II a couple
of years later.
I was told later by someone in the
department at External that the funny
little hardship tour we three obscure
Canadian writers conducted tumed out
to be one of the most successful CanLit
invasions of any European
country/countries. The professors we
met became the key people in the for-
mation of the Nordic Association of
Canadian Studies; I have kept on meet-
ing them at the.conferences I have been
fortunate enough to attend, although lit-
tle by little they have been retiring. At
the end of the conference, Bengt
Streijffert, from Sweden, stepped down
as chair, and Danish Ulla Amsinck, the
executive secretary, retired, both people
to standing ovations at the final meet-
ing. Another key figure, Jprn Carlsen,
from the University of Aarhus in
Denmark, retires this year. He and his
wife Jonna were our first hosts—lo,
these many years ago now. I’ 11 miss
them in Stockholm, but maybe I won’t
be there either.
David Williams was invited to the
first two: at Aarhus in 1984, and
Stockholm in 1987.1 was invited to the
next two: Oslo in 1990, and Turku in
1993. By the tiine I went to Finland,
though, money was becoming scarce.
Both governments (Canadian and
Finnish, in that case) were cutting back
on arts funding. Without subsidy, I had
to resort to a student registration with
no meals (I stole lunch at the breakfast
buffet each morning), no banquet, and
no help with transportation. Although
invited to Aarhus in 1996, without
financial assistance I was unable to
attend. Reykjavík was a different mat-
ter.
As you all know, Iceland cherishes
its Western Icelanders, the name it has
given those of us whose ancestors left
Iceland at whatever time in the past. A
strong contingent of Western Icelandic
Canadian writers attended and we were
warmly welcomed, among them
Kristjana Gunnars, Bill Valgardson,
David Arnason, and me. Carol Shields
(whose husband, Don, has Icelandic
roots) was a keynote speaker, as already
mentioned. Joan Clark, author of
Eiriksdottir, which makes her an hon-
orary Western Icelander; novelist
Aritha van Herk; and other Canadian
writers such as novelist Ray Smith,
archaeologist Birgitta Wallace, histori-
an Anne Hart (whose edited book of
Mina Hubbard’s diaries I can hardly
wait for!) were also there, as was Gene
Walz, the Winnipeg filmmaker whose
book about Charlie Thorson, creator of
Bugs Bunny (with collaborators), Snow
White, Keeko, and “Punkinhead,” was
published in the spring. Visual artist
Susan Gold Smith always tums up;
she’s not a Westem Icelander but has
made herself so by her intense interest
in northern subjects. I’m just reporting
on the literary aspects of the confer-
ence. Other presentations covered polit-
ical, economic, and geographical facets
of Canada.
The closing banquet was Viking
kitsch, a Nordic equivalent of one of
those Dinner-with-Henry-the-Eighth
kind of affairs, with beer and Brennivín
(Icelandic Black Death—not the plague
but an equivalent of schnapps), and all
the food that has kept Iceland off the
Please see NACS on page 5
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