“I like the feel of the work that comes out of a deep understanding of a place” says author Fred Stenson. His new novel Who By Fire reads like the work of someone who knows Alberta intimately — its booms busts and echoes. It’s a generational tale grounded in social critique tragic and uncompromising and his most powerful yet.
Who By Fire weaves together two narratives. Readers first meet the Ryder family — Tom Ella and their three children — circa 1960 fighting against a sour gas well that threatens to destroy their farm. Years later we find Bill the family’s only son struggling to reconcile a career spent working in the oilsands with his family’s sorrowful past.
Like Bill Stenson was born and raised on a farm in the southern Alberta foothills and he vividly recalls his family battling with a sour gas well that was built near their home. “My family’s lawsuit resulted in a settlement a landmark one after 15 years” he says. “But as it also happens in the novel the gas company was only willing to pay for part of our farm. It had that punitive aspect where the industry didn’t want the farmers calling the shots.”
Despite the connections Stenson cautions against reading Who By Fire as straight autobiography. “I don’t really like autobiographical fiction” he says. “You tend to protect the people you’re writing about or not protect them enough.”
Much of the novel comes from Stenson’s career chronicling Alberta’s oil and gas industry including dozens of documentary films and two non-fiction books. “I feel that the information in the book is solid” he says. “Some experts might find fault with a few of the details but the main pillars are there.”
Like the Ryders in the novel Stenson’s family also kept a “Stink Diary” — a chronicle detailing the ill effects of the well on their health and livestock. “I thought I knew everything in there” he says. “Way more animals died than I had thought. I used the diary to keep me honest for people who said it couldn’t have been that bad that it’s a fantasy.”
Stenson says it has been a long time since he has written a contemporary novel. His last book The Great Karoo (nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s Award) was a period novel about Albertans fighting in the Boer War. “When people ask ‘It must be so hard to imagine history when you weren’t there’ I joke ‘Yeah the great benefit is that the reader wasn’t there either.’
“I expect to be challenged with Who By Fire” he says adding that he finds the “you’re either with us or against us” mentality of the oil and gas industry and its reverent supporters infuriating. “I find it offensive depicting environmentalists scientists and critics as crazy leftists not ‘real Albertans.’ The simple fact is protecting the rights of landowners isn’t a socialist point of view — it’s usually a right-wing deal. The government is largely to blame turning the public into the enemy.
“People have become extraordinarily thin-skinned in this province” he adds. “When Neil Young made his comments about the oilsands people were saying that his passport should be revoked. Since when did we decide that we can’t speak our minds in this province?”
However it shouldn’t be assumed that Who By Fire is a blunt anti-industry screed either. “The parts that praise the industry and the parts that criticize it probably come out the same” says Stenson. He mentions the idealism of engineers who created sour gas technology taking the sulfur recovery rate from the dismal low 80s to nearly 100 per cent. “Feeling like you’re forced to pick a side good or bad is childish. People have a right to make a living but they also have a responsibility to the people around them.”
Stenson says the industry has pushed a “team player” mentality that replaces morality by diffusing responsibility. “For Bill in the novel it’s a moral ambiguity — he can’t be pro or con industry he’s incapable of going with his conscience in either direction. He’s too close to the fire.”
While he says he can’t predict the future of the oil and gas industry in Alberta (“Like Bill says in the novel ‘Hope’s not my department’”) he believes the industry has entered a destructive phase. “It’s desperate” he says. “We shouldn’t be fracking. They’ve built some good plants in the oilsands but like Bill says in the book they’ve built too many of them. It’s created an environmental catastrophe. If we had been sensible in the last 15 years we wouldn’t be in this position.”
Stenson also believes most of the oilsands will never be produced. “They’ll run out of water. The in situ (in place) stuff makes up 75 per cent of what’s there. I have serious doubts that any more than 10 to 20 per cent of that will ever be produced — the cost will be prohibitive. So to say it’s inexhaustible that’s just the repetitive patter the oil industry has been speaking for years.”
Beyond the corporate double-speak Stenson says the increasing hostility between the oil industry and the public is the most insidious part of Alberta’s enduring energy saga. “There’s always been some conflict there but the level of hostility that exists now….
“Industry has the upper hand and it’s called progress but I’m not getting it” says Stenson. “The individual has become unimportant to the grand narrative of progress and profit and it’s getting worse.”
Fred Stenson launches Who By Fire on Thursday September 25 at Shelf Life Books. He will also appear at Wordfest on Saturday October 18 at Theatre Junction Grand.
TELLING ALBERTA’S TRUTHS
“I think writers have to make a choice about what they’re going to write about and their territory” says author Fred Stenson. “In the early ’80s I had to make a decision to work from here or move to a bigger centre like Toronto. I said no I want to live here to be the kind of writer who lives where and what they write about.”
Stenson’s latest novel Who By Fire is a familial saga rooted in Alberta history taking readers from a rural farm in the ’60s to the modern oilsands in Fort McMurray. Stenson says he welcomes being called an Alberta writer having created many films novels and non-fiction accounts detailing life and industry on the Prairies including The Trade Lightning and The Great Karoo.
Just what an “Alberta writer” is however can be harder to pin down. At Alberta Views (where Stenson has written a monthly column since the magazine’s inception) editor Evan Osenton says Stenson’s greatest strength is his “fearlessness and honesty” with Who By Fire having quickly become his favourite novel. “It combines the storytelling his historical novels are renowned for with the trenchant social commentary of his column” he says. “Fred says what many Albertans know to be true but won’t say or can’t say. His writing inspires me to think ask questions and laugh. Sometimes bitterly — but that’s healthy too.”
Author Aritha van Herk (Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta) doesn’t see the value in emphasizing regionalism. “The tendency to pigeon-hole writers by where they live or what they write ‘about’ is a malaise that hampers our literature and the way we talk about it” she says.
“What the hell is an Alberta writer? I defy anyone to identify that” she adds. “Fred is a Canadian writer a western writer a writer who writes about Alberta but whose focus is much more resonant. He writes about the imaginative spaces of the West our history our resistance to being colonized our strange national obsessions whether that be hockey the fur trade or cowboys. His work is as wide-ranging as Canada. If it is typically Albertan it is so in its risk-taking and its willingness to travel beyond our borders — witness The Great Karoo.”
