I had written a book about my home town, Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, and now I had come back there to read from it.  We were in the town library, across the street from the IGA store, a few doors down from my dad’s old office, less than a block from the house where I lived for nine of my first ten years.  The tiny reading room was jammed with dozens of my fellow citizens and former neighbours:  teachers, farmers, mill workers, newspaper reporters, members of the local writers’ group, the book club, the historical society.  I had described many of these people in the book, along with their relatives and friends and co-workers.  I had written about the exuberant charm and beauty of the place, but also about the murders, the injustices, the pervasive culture of racism in the town when I was growing up.  And now these Meadow Lakers wanted to hear what I had said about them.  It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life.  If I had pictured this scene even once in the previous four years, I would never have written the book. 

None of them seemed to notice my distress.  More people were still crowding in, lining up in the hallway outside.  Someone was searching for more chairs.  Everyone was gabbing and joking, catching up on neighbourhood news, as if they were waiting for a church service to begin.  Or a court session.  I wavered on uncertain legs at the front of the oxygenless room, stepping instinctively behind the hillock of my own books on the signing table, as if for fortification.

            They didn’t look like an unruly crowd, but what did I know about judging such things?   All I knew was that their air of expectancy -- of an impending spectacle or miracle -- was dizzying to me.  I didn’t know what they were expecting, but I doubted I was going to deliver.  I thought of all the writers who had been blacklisted in their home towns, frozen out, driven away.  I imagined what these neighbours of mine would be saying in half an hour, as they filed out past the magazine-stand full of Harlequins and Sports Illustrateds at the door.

            “Did you HEAR what he WROTE?”

            “And he hasn’t lived here in, what, seventeen years!”

            “What’s he know about us?”

            “Lies.  Fabrications.”

            “Talkin’ out his ass.”

            “City boy.”

            Or they might even challenge me directly, during the reading or afterward at the inevitable question-and-answer session.  Someone might shout, “You make us sound like idiots!” or “It isn’t like that, it never was!” They might rise up to denounce me en masse.  And how would I respond?

            Even more troubling than all this was seeing their faces there in the crowd, which made me wonder if maybe I really had misrepresented them.  While I was writing Lake of the Prairies, these people had existed for me largely in my imaginings and memories.  But now they were there before me—alive, protean, and by their very presence defying the brief sketches I had made of them.  It was every author’s nightmare:  being confronted by my own characters.

There was no question in my mind that Lake of the Prairies was written in a spirit of love, for the place and for its people.  But I didn’t know if this audience would see it that way, because I had written about the community’s secrets and its blemishes as well as its more endearing qualities.  And also I knew that there is sensitivity in small towns about those who have left, a fear that they will develop a citified snobbery about their origins.  My dad had lectured me about that more than once, long before I ever left.  I remember once when I was twelve or thirteen, I made fun of a country kid’s accent, saying, “He talks like a farmer.”  Dad overheard me and set me straight with a quick question:

“Where d’you think you come from?  That’s one thing you can’t afford to forget, wherever you end up in this world.”

Unfortunately there is evidence that such forgetting occurs with too much regularity among those of us who have left our homes.

            I thought of Wallace Stegner’s beautiful and uncompromising study of his own home town in Wolf Willow.  In the latter chapters of the book, a current of scorn creeps into Stegner’s treatment of the town, Whitemud (his name for Eastend, Saskatchewan).  He celebrates the community’s outlaw past, making much of the frontier town that it once was, but then he admits his frank disappointment at its current state.  In the years since he has left Whitemud, Stegner himself has become cultured, educated and successful -- but  the town hasn’t, and he seems unwilling to forgive it for that.  He calls it “As good a place to be a boy and as unsatisfying a place to be a man as one could well imagine” (306).

I can trace the beginnings of Lake of the Prairies to my first reading of Wolf Willow, when I was back home for Christmas in 1995.  I was enthralled by the stories Stegner unearthed there, but I also closed the book with a sense that an injustice had been done to those latter-day residents of Whitemud, who through no fault of their own didn’t measure up to Stegner’s ideas of progress and civilization.  Surely, I thought, there is room for a book which expresses love for a place not only for what it once was, but for what it continues to be.  Surely our sense of belonging to a place need not be something relegated to childhood, something we outgrow.

If I wrote a book about my relationship to Meadow Lake, I decided, I wouldn’t want it to be about that trajectory of disconnection -- from childhood to adulthood, from being at home in a place to being an outsider.  I would write a story of belonging that showed how we can remain connected long after we leave a place, a story that didn’t adopt the detachment of the grown-up, civilized, educated outsider.  Was it not possible to continue to negotiate belonging with a place long after you had left?

In that moment of annoyance at Stegner’s undeniably great book, I could sense the germ of something that would live in me for a long time, a bug in my ear, as my mom would say.  The story I was going to write, I knew, would not be about leaving home. It would instead be about returning, about how I always come back to the place, and how it also returns to me again and again, even when I don’t go there physically.

Meadow Lake never did lose its magic for me after I went away and saw the wonders of the city, of high art and culture and all of civilization’s benefits.  In fact, when I went away it allowed me to see all the more clearly the vibrant charm of Meadow Lake’s own culture.  Of course it made me see the injustices and biases and pettinesses of Meadow Lake more clearly too.  I will certainly admit that there are many things to dislike in Meadow Lake, but I have never felt I could judge these things from a distance, because I know I am implicated in them.  I see the town in the same way that most of us see our families:  recognizing that they are imperfect, but loving them anyway, because they are so much a part of us that making a break with them would be discarding a part of ourselves.

I didn’t want to reject my home town.  I felt that I still belonged there, despite the fact that I hadn’t lived there for half my life, and I would probably never live there again.  Writing Lake of the Prairies was in a sense the means of proving that to myself.

And now, this reading from the book was a test of that belonging.  Until now I had for the most part imagined my relationship to the place, created it, nurtured it in my own little office room a thousand kilometers away.  But of course belonging is a two-way proposition, and that was the root of my terror at giving this reading.  If they rejected my portrayal of our shared community, then where would I be?  Where would I belong?

            But there was no more time to worry, to contemplate escape.  They were ready, and I was being introduced.  There was nothing I could do but read.

            I began with the part about Mr. Fontaine, who used to ride his rototiller through town, and the one about Story Time in the library with Mrs. Gorst, who was sitting now in the front row, dressed in her cerise suit and fully made up, as if ready for the prom of 1922.  I read a few stories that everyone already knew, and others that were particular to my own experience of the place.  And after a while I got lost in the stories myself and I forgot that the whole thing was the most grueling examination I had ever undergone.

            Of course my fears were exaggerated:  they hadn’t read the book yet, so they could do little other than applaud at the end of the reading, which they did with a warmth that reassured me a little.  Then there was no question period at all, because the whole great mass of them was lining up at the book table, where they proceeded to do what Meadow Lakers have always done best, which is visit -- intensely and hilariously.  Before I knew it, the mountain of books was gone and my fellow citizens had filtered back out the door and into their Meadow Lake lives.  It was over.

            But not really.  In the weeks following the reading I received many comments from people in town who had read Lake of the Prairies, and my Mom heard many more as she went about her daily life there.  Two Métis women told me that I had written what needed to be said about the town’s history of racism.  A Cree leader phoned my mom to tell her how much the book had moved him.  Several of my dad’s old friends phoned me up to tell me about his antics of previous eras, and numerous townspeople wrote to tell me how they had laughed and cried, how they thought I had gotten a certain story “just right,” and how they were glad that I was preserving something about the place for the children and grandchildren.  I heard about a woman in town who was reading the book in bed late at night, when she suddenly turned to her husband and woke him out of a sound sleep.  “Hey,” she said, “wake up!  You’re in this book!”  At a different reading I overheard the ultimate compliment:  one of my uncles saying to his kids, “Yep, that Warren, he’s quite the bullshitter.  Just like his dad.”

            All of it added up to a different kind of applause, a benediction that I treasure now and that I think I always will, because it was evidence that Lake of the Prairies, whatever its faults and partialities, had showed these people something of themselves that they recognized.  And even more so because those myriad responses in fact comprised a precious gift to me from these people who were and are my neighbours.  They reminded me, quietly, that I am indeed blessed with belonging.