Author Fred Stenson read from four of his books Oct. 6 at the Fort Macleod Library.
Fred Stenson was 22 years old and a recent university graduate when his career as a writer got an unexpected start.
With university in his rearview mirror, Stenson planned to backpack around Europe and was on his way when he spotted a poster in Lethbridge advertising a writing contest.
Stenson, who grew up on his family’s homestead in southern Alberta, spent months writing in youth hostels, on trains and in other unlikely places as he made his way around Europe.
With four school notebooks filled, Stenson sent them home with instructions to his family that he needed them typed.
“It was a community effort,” Stenson said of his family enlisting other people in and around Pincher Creek to transcribe his handwriting into a typed manuscript.
Although his entry didn’t win, Stenson’s manuscript was one of three chosen by the contest sponsor to be published in 1974.
Lonesome Hero became the first of 15 books written by Stenson in his award-winning career.
Stenson was at Fort Macleod Library on Oct. 6 to read from four of his books and to talk about writing and southern Alberta with an audience of about 12 people.
“I’m quite excited,” Stenson said with a laugh at the outset of his talk. “I’ve been trying to get my own books from the publisher for two years. They arrived last week.”
The 71-year-old Stenson moved back to his home town of Pincher Creek three years ago.
“I think it’s something that often happens,” Stenson said of returning to his family roots. “People kind of cycle around and then come back. I’ve always enjoyed where I’m from. I like it a lot.”
Stenson started is presentation by reading from The Trade, which was nominated for the 2000 Giller Prize and won the inaugural Grant MacEwan Writer’s Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize, and the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Georges Bugnet Novel Award.
Stenson said there was unprecedented media attention on the Giller Prize nominees, which that year was presented to Michael Ondaatje for Anil’s Ghost and David Adams Richards for Mercy Among the Children.
“It put a lot of attention on this book, which felt good because it had taken me 15 years to write,” Stenson said of The Trade, which is about the fur trade in western Canada.
Stenson said his first effort at historical fiction took 15 years to write in part because he wanted to encompass the entire history of the fur trade.
Each character in The Trade has historical basis, which caused some to question the ethics of putting real people in a work of fiction.
Stenson easily defended that decision.
“I’m dealing with people who were kind of on the fringe of history,” Stenson said. “Their names will be utterly forgotten . . . and so if a few of those people are mentioned again in a book, I’m not sure I understand how that could be a bad thing. I’m fairly serious about trying to verify that anything I used in the book is true.”
Stenson also read from Lightning, another work of historical fiction about an 1881 drive of 7,000 cattle to the newly-formed Cochrane Ranche from Montana.
“In many ways I was as pleased with this book as anything I wrote,” Stenson said.
The Great Karoo was Stenson’s eighth book of fiction, one that was inspired by the stories oldtimers told of their great adventures in the early days of Alberta.
At the end of the 19th century there were two big events in the Klondike gold rush, which Stenson felt had been explored extensively, and the Boer War.
Stenson based The Great Karoo on the Canadian Mounted Rifles, a real life military unit formed of men from southern Alberta.
“My theory is that all of these young men were desperate for some sort of wild experience of their own,” Stenson said.
The story opens with a scene describing the hanging in Fort Macleod of Charcoal, who was convicted of killing Sgt. William Brock Wild of the North West Mounted Police.
Stenson closed out the night with a reading from Who By Fire, about a man dealing with problems caused by the arrival of a sour gas plant on the border of his southern Alberta farm in the early 1960s.
That story draws from the experiences of Stenson’s own family with sour gas development near their home.
Some of his research came from files his own family saved detailing their experiences with the sour gas plant and the company that owned it.
“In fact our parents had kept all sorts of things from us, thinking I suppose that we would be frightened,” Stenson said. “I knew it was bad — I still remember being sick and the house shaking and times when we were thrown in the car and driven to town.”
“Then when I saw it in that level of detail it was so, so much more.”
In addition to writing books, Stenson has written scripts for films and videos and contributes a regular humour column for Alberta Views Magazine.
