Interview: Novelist and Academic Lisa Grekul

Lisa Grekul teaches Canadian literature at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. She is the author of the Kobzar-Award- nominated novel, Kalyna’s Song, a coming-of-age story about a young Ukrainian woman in Alberta. Grekul’s second book, Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians, was published in late 2005. The New Pathway’s Olena Wawryshyn speaks to Grekul about her books and fiction by Ukrainian-Canadian writers.

NP:  The protagonist in your novel Kalyna’s Song, Colleen, shares, to a large extent, a biography with you.  To what extent is Kalyna’s Song autobiographical?

LG: I call it semi-autobiographical because there’s a lot of common ground between Colleen, the narrator’s, and my background.  We grew up in St. Paul (Alberta.).  We both have parents who are teachers and a younger brother and older sister. We’re both Ukrainian-Canadians and studied in Africa. But I’ve taken a lot of liberty in the story.

The book becomes more fictional as it goes along.  For example, the opening scene, set in Dauphin at the Ukrainian festival–something fairly close to that happened to me. But by the end there’s a huge discrepancy between Colleen’s story and mine.

NP: Were both of your parents Ukrainian speakers like Colleen’s in the book?

LG: My grandparents, except for one grandfather, who was one when he came to Canada, were born in Canada. My parents’ first language was Ukrainian, as was their parents’.  However, I could never communicate with my grandparents. Since my grandparents died, I rarely hear my parents and never hear my aunts and uncles speak Ukrainian. The language died with that generation. It’s tragic.

NP: Colleen gives her Ukrainian identity a lot of thought. Was this also your experience when you were growing up?

LG: Yes, and no. It was always a part of my life. I remember feeling angry and, I might say, outraged when I had to change from Ukrainian to French because the Ukrainian program in school was being cut. I felt wronged. I felt loss over the language when whatever learning I had started had to be curtailed.

I danced Ukrainian with great pride. I had an awareness of my ethnicity. But, I did concentrated thinking about my ethnicity as an adult. It was not until my fourth year  in university when it all came together for me as a living, breathing problem. 

I was going to go to grad school to do a Masters in English, focusing on Canadian Literature. I had just finished a course where we had studied all these “minority” voices, and I was pissed off because there were no Ukrainians represented in the course. That moment was my real political awakening.

NP: In the book, Colleen is interested in Ukrainian folk music and then takes up Sister Maria’s interest in Ukrainian classical music. Is there a message in this?

LG: I’m using Colleen as a vehicle for various messages about how Ukrainian myths can be kept alive and nurtured in various conventional and non-conventional ways.  Classical music is serious cultural work and Colleen needs to do that. She’s not giving up the interest in folk music, which is a different kind of cultural expression. She is going to write her own compositions that borrow from the Ukrainian folk tradition and from the African music that she’s learned about.  Music is going to be her creative outlet for her hybrid identity.

NP: How were you drawn to fiction?

LG: I was always a very avid writer, as a child and adolescent. I don’t ever remember saying I wanted to be writer. I wanted to be a musician. But my creative outlet changed. I started writing out of anger. I wrote a really unfortunate term paper [in university] and had a wonderful professor who said, that “it’s a terrible essay but it’s the beginning of a book. You really should write this book about your identity. I think you’ve got it in you.”

I was going to write the great Ukrainian-Canadian novel, convinced at that point that there was no Ukrainian-Canadian literature in English…I just assumed if it wasn’t taught to me, it doesn’t exist, so it’s got to be done. I had no idea of how to write a novel but I jumped in with all four feet.

NP: Leaving Shadows was published in 2005; Kalyna’s Song in 2003. Were you writing them simultaneously?

LG: No. Kalyna’s Song doubled as my MA thesis. The first draft was done by 1999. I didn’t start writing Leaving Shadows, which was my PhD dissertation, until three years later. When I was writing the first draft of Leaving Shadows I was revising Kalyna’s Song so they did overlap.

NP: Where would you place Kalyna’s Song within the history of Ukrainian Canadian literature?

LG: Kalyna’s Song does something a little bit different than the writers I write about in Leaving Shadows.  I end that book by talking about Janet Kulyk Keefer and Myrna Kostash who were fixated by a return to Ukraine as a motif.  I’m writing from a different generation.  There are not a lot of writers of the fourth-generation who are writing fiction about being Ukrainian and Canadian. 

It is also a very regional, Western Canadian experience. It’s coming from the first wave of immigration, which would set me apart from a lot of Ukrainian Canadians, writers.  The story I’m telling is very, very different from theirs.

NP: How did you know which writers to discuss in Leaving Shadows?

LG: I wanted to talk about writers who were prolific. So, [I included] George Ryga, Andrew Suknaski, Myrna Kostash, Janet Kulyk Keefer. Of course, I had to start with Vera Lysenko because she was such an important pioneer writing in English about the Ukrainian experience.

I was looking for ‘literariness’ as well as work that was esthetically interesting. And, I limited the study to writers who were writing in English.

NP: It strikes me how few Ukrainian-fiction writers there are. Why is this so?

LG: I think compared to other ethnic groups, i.e. the non-racialized minority groups, for example, the Hungarian-Canadian literary tradition or Polish, we have an impressive body of work. The exception is Mennonite writers; they have a very strong literary tradition.

I argue in Leaving Shadows that ‘racialized’ minority groups, like Native Canadians, Japanese Canadians, South East Canadians have really been very productive over the last, 10-20 years, and it’s only getting stronger for them, and it’s not the case [for Ukrainians].

In the heyday of multiculturalism, in the late 70s, early 80s, in Canada, that’s when we see the most activity among Ukrainian-Canadian writers. That’s when Andrew Suknaski and Maara Haas were writing.

At that time, Myrna Kostash felt at the leading edge of cultural debate and that’s when Yarmarok comes out. There’s all of this energy around ethnicity and funding for it. Plays are being written by Larry Zaharko and Ted Galay. Then it drops off in the early 90s.

I think it has very much to do with trends in the literary institutions. At that point race comes to the forefront and “racialized” writers are saying “we have suffered,” “we have stories to tell,” and everybody who is white gets stuck in the same category. It’s not right to homogenize whiteness in that way. There’s so much cultural diversity within that category. The race debates and all that talk around race really effectively silenced what could have been a long-term productive era for Ukrainian Canadian writers.

When I was looking for a publisher for Kalyna’s Song, the message that I got from one literary agent was, “it’s a fine manuscript, but the Ukrainian thing is not sexy, so next time, be Japanese.”

NP:What about Ukrainian themselves, do they feel motivated to write?

LG: A large number of Ukrainian-Canadians especially in the West, especially descendants of the first wave, by the 1990s and even the 1980s, have been so effectively assimilated that many of us don’t walk around with an ethnic consciousness or a politicized ethnic-consciousness–we’re just Canadians and only nominally Ukrainian Canadians. I don’t want to pass judgment on this group of people but it hasn’t been a concern for a lot of Ukrainian-Canadians, so the stories aren’t there.

And, I think the immigrant experience, even generations down the line has a profound effect on who we are. My great grandparents’ work ethic is in my blood. I’m really aware of this nagging sense that it’s so important to be successful; my parents passed that on to us. ‘You have to have a good profession and you need a good professional man.’ Writing is risky and it doesn’t pay well, and the publishing industry is not warm to these [Ukrainian-Canadian] stories.