Until doing the reading for this unit, I regret to say that I was unaware of the category of Canadian children’s literature. I found Picturing Canada: a history of Canadian children’s illustrated books and publishing an eye-opener: I wasn’t aware of the long history or the dedicated writers, illustrators, publishers and librarians who created and promoted that literature.

If I were going to create children’s literature, or any kind of literature for that matter, I would definitely consider myself a Canadian creator. I love stories about specifically Canadian places, such as told by Mordecai Richler writing about Montreal, or Miriam Toews about Mennonites in Manitoba, or L. M Montgomery about PEI. I think one reason Anne of Green Gables continues to be so popular is because of the sense of a particular Canadian place and time it portrays.

One of my favourite books by a Canadian is a nonfiction book by prairie writer and naturalist Trevor Herriot called River in a Dry Land: a Prairie Passage. It is the story of the Qu’Appelle Valley told from natural and social history perspectives. It is slow and patient and beautiful: each chapter tells about a different location in the Qu’Appelle Valley where Herriot settles in for the day and reports on exactly what he sees around him—the plants and animals and insects he notices, the weather, the breeze, the sun on his back. You get a true sense of the place. And then he tells what he knows of the early pre-contact aboriginal uses of the land; and then about the impact of the European settlers. He concludes the book by offering his vision of how the two cultures mingled to produce a third thing—the Metis—and of how this amalgamation could serve us well in the future. John Ralston Saul subsequently wrote a similarly-themed book called A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, but I like Herriot’s version better. I think a sense of place is one of the most important things a story teller brings to the story.

However, because I am unfamiliar with contemporary Canadian literature for children, for this research I relied on the list of winning books from the 2016 Canadian Children’s Book Centre Awards, four of which I have described here: