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Sandra Djwa’s Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page was recently named the 2013 winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. An awards ceremony will be held tomorrow at Ottawa’s Rideau Hall, where His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, will present the awards.
Journey with No Maps is the first biography of P.K. Page, a brilliant twentieth-century poet and a fine artist. The product of over a decade’s research and writing, the book follows Page as she becomes one of Canada’s best-loved and most influential writers. “A borderline being,” as she called herself, she recognized the new choices offered to women by modern life but followed only those related to her quest for self-discovery.
The following excerpt is from The Walrus Magazine‘s interview with Sandra Djwa.
“I am traveller. I have a destination but no maps. Others perhaps have reached that destination already, still others are on their way. But none has had to go from here before—nor will again. One’s route is one’s own. One’s journey unique. What I will find at the end I can barely guess. What lies on the way is unknown.”
—P. K. Page, “Traveller, Conjuror, Journeyman”
Canadian poet and visual artist P. K. Page wrote that in 1970, after living in Mexico for four years with her husband, the diplomat Arthur Irwin. It was around that time when she met the writer and scholar Sandra Djwa, who invited Page to give her first public poetry reading to a group of students at Simon Fraser University.
Djwa grew up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, left the province for the West Coast in her late teens, and now lives in Vancouver. She taught English at SFU from 1968 through the turn of this century, and is the author of three biographies, includingThe Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F. R. Scott and Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells. Her study of Page—Journey with No Maps: A Life of P. K. Page— was recently named this year’s winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for (English-language) Non-fiction.
Julien Russell Brunet: How did you respond to Page’s poetry when you first read it?
Sandra Djwa: I liked it very much. There was a crispness to it. She was so precise in her language and metaphors. Her images were sharp. They were almost metaphysical. She had this way of beginning a poem. It wasn’t quite “For God’s sake hold your tongue,” but it was conversational and quick.
JRB: Page passed away in 2010. How has your understanding of her changed over the years?
SD: I did not initially recognize how strongly she influenced such a large group of people. Some years ago, a Scandinavian professor wrote toThe Times Literary Supplement something to the effect that P. K. Page is to Canadian poetry what Alice Munro is to Canadian fiction or Canadian writing. It’s like that, except Munro’s influence, I think, is primarily through her published work. P. K.’s influence is through her person, as well as her published work. It’s the fact that she existed.
JRB: I think Munro herself says something similar in the book.
SD: When Munro first met P. K. in her bookstore in Victoria [in the mid-’60s], she was overwhelmed: this person standing in front of her, in flesh and blood, had given her a sense that it was possible to live a literary life, to be a woman of letters. Page did that for a number of people.
Click here for the rest of the interview
To learn more about Journey with No Maps, or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.
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