A Sociology of CanLit

When you look through a peephole into the past, you hope for a clear view, but more often than not what you get is a kaleidoscopic vision. Little pieces, multifaceted and multicolored, that fit together to make a knowable pattern…—Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln

We can find one such small kaleidoscopic bead when we consider the career of Alicia Cornbury. Her precocity in Cascadia University’s creative writing program generated the early appearance of her poetry chapbook Gatherings in 1948. A subsequent garnering of a Canada Council grant in 1950, then her first novel, Deadly Nightshade, a finalist in the City of Vancouver literary competition, and a contender for Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award marked her as a comer. She won the Vancouver competition two years later with her second novel, Murderers’ Row (whose publication was subsidized by federal and provincial...