Where the Truth Lies: Selected Essays

by Rudy Wiebe

Overview

“The problem with writer longevity can be a complicating, even contradictory oeuvre. Hopefully.”

Where the Truth Lies collects forty years of essays and speeches that award-winning author Rudy Wiebe has crafted throughout his career. In this illuminating and wide-ranging selection, Wiebe provides a look behind the curtain, revealing his thought processes as he worked on many of his great books. Within this book, he dissects controversies that arose after publication of his early novels, meditates on words and their inherent power, explores the great Canadian North and the Canadian body politic, reckons with his family history and Mennonite faith, all while providing an engaging and enlightening commentary. Where The Truth Lies is a vital compilation of a writing life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926455761
Publisher:	NeWest Publishers, Limited
Publication date:	10/01/2016
Series:	Writer as Critic , #14
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 near Fairholme, Saskatchewan. Rudy has a B.A. in English and M.A. in Creative Writing, both from the University of Alberta. He studied under a Rotary International Fellowship at the University of Tubingen in West Germany, and in 1962 he received a Bachelor of Theology degree from the Mennonite Brethren Bible College. In 1962-1963 he was editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald, a position that he resigned because of the controversy over his first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many. From 1967 to 1992 he was Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Alberta. Wiebe has published twenty-five books, including nine novels and the non-fiction best-seller Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, co-authored with Yvonne Johnson. He was awarded the Governor General's Award for fiction for The Temptations of Big Bear in 1973, and again in 1994 for A Discovery of Strangers. He is also the winner of the Lorne Pierce Gold Metal of the Royal Society of Canada for his contribution to Canadian literature (1987). Wiebe has served as chairman of both the Writer’s Guild of Alberta and the Writers’ Union of Canada. His book of essays, Playing Dead, was the first book in NeWest's Landmark Editions series. Wiebe lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements xi

Writing a Lifetime

Terminal Disease 3

A Frontier Visit 7

With the Flow 15

Documenting a Writer's Life: An Aggravation of Quotes 21

Hold Your Peace 45

On the Trail of Big Bear 63

Where the Truth Lies: Exploring the Nature of Fact and Fiction 77

Place is a Story

In the West 105

On the Civil Right to Destroy Canada 109

Land, Language and Law 113

The Elusive Meaning of "North" 141

The Wind and the Caribou 147

On Being on the Top of the World 155

Acceptance Speech, Governor General's Award Ceremonies 175

Where I Live

Where the Black Rocks Lie In the Old Man's River 179

The Sweet Fiction of Owning Land 209

On Death and Writing 223

Killing Our Way to Peace 233

The Body Knows as Much as the Soul 263

Flowers for Approaching the Fire 281

Look to the Rock 299

Works Cited 307