The Sunshine Coast Tale Trail
The Sunshine Coast Tale Trail
by Cathalynn Labonté-Smith
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One snowy morning I woke up with the idea of connecting local authors to where they live on a map. This notion eventually became a reality in the form of the Sunshine Coast Tale Trail (taletrail.ca), not to be confused with the Sunshine Coast Trail, a grueling one hundred and eighty kilometres of hiking trails with huts in the Powell River area. This Sunshine Coast Tale Trail is a literary landmark map in both online and print form created by the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society (SCWES) reaching back one hundred years to the present.
The idea didn’t come from a dream, nor a vision of books hovering over buildings along the Sunshine Coast Highway 101, or ghosts of authors floating over their graves in the Mount Elphinstone Pioneer Cemetery. The idea was this thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a list of one hundred authors from one hundred years, then put a pin in their location on a map of the Coast.
Did summers working for Heritage BC and Alberta Historic Sites as an undergrad make a lasting impression? Or, perhaps, the idea was inspired by a public presentation of the SCWES showcasing past authors during BC Heritage Week in 2022? Matthew Lovegrove, Manager/Curator, and Allie Bartlett, Assistant Curator of the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives were hosting, assisting, and collaborating with us in our quaint village of Gibsons.
SCWES members who knew local literary history, including Jan Degrass, former Arts & Cultural Editor for the Coast Reporter, editor of Coast Life magazine, and author of Winter of Siege, Heather Conn, author of No Letter in Your Pocket andalso acontributor to Coast Life, and Mike Starr, reviewer for The British Columbia Review, worked hard researching and preparing their presentations. The esteemed founder of the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, Betty Keller, was to present her book the Pender Harbour Cowboy: The Many Lives of Bertrand Sinclair.
The museum displayed the massive canoe once used by Hubert Evans, who had an enviable career spanning seventy years as a writer. He and his wife, Ann, were based on the Coast His novel, Mist on the River (1954), set in Kitimat where Ann once taught, is known to be the first Canadian novel to give a realistic portrayal of Indigenous people, even though it was written by a settler.
A snowstorm changed the course of that day, so Matthew and Allie stepped in for speakers who were trapped in their homes by the blizzard. Despite the storm, nearly all the seats were filled, and it was a successful event. I was encouraged that there was an interest in historical authors in our community to come out in such adverse conditions to hear the words of M. Wylie Blanchet, Hubert Evans, and others.
I wasn’t so naïve as to think that literary landmark maps—highbrow equivalents to Hollywood Stars maps—didn’t already exist being such obvious visuals to acknowledge and preserve literary luminaries and their classic works. SCWES soon set upon a fruitful journey that will connect and benefit the Coast for generations to come. It’s the aspiration of this article to inspire other literary communities in BC to map their own authors before tale trails vanish.
Truthful Tales
An early literary map of Canada was published in 1926, “The Northward Map of Truthful Tales” reveals a tenuous time in history.1 It’s disconcerting that the American literary map-maker, Paul Mayo Paine, like the serving president (James K. Polk) wanted to see Canada absorbed by the U.S.A., as indicated by many of the literary works written on our country’s map being authored by Americans.
Paine created approximately twenty-three such maps nearly a century ago. Zoom into BC and the American author Emerson Hough’s title Fifty Four Forty or Fight is penned across our precious province. (Paine neglected to add author names to the books.) “The phrase [54-40 or Fight],. . . refers to the northern boundary of Oregon Country, the latitude line of 54 degrees 40 minutes north, near the southern tip of Russian-held Alaska.” At that time, BC was a part of Oregon Territory and occupied by both the British and Americans who wanted to claim British Columbia for themselves.2
President James K. Polk was driven to expand north into Canada to first be elected then as his platform for his re-election.
The second book is Sitkum: Where Stuart Came, or Arthur Murray (Bob) Chisholm’s book, When Stuart Came to Sitkum: A Western Story (Chelsea House, 1924). Chisholm (1872-1960) was born in Toronto, Ontario, graduated with a law degree from the University of Toronto in 1895. He married nurse Ethel May Stoddart and practiced law in Saskatchewan before the couple settled in Windermere, BC.
The intimate pose of a young couple in an idyllic meadow screams romance novel. Their earth-toned clothing, clean boots, and horses grazing in the background are a tip of a cowboy hat at a western theme. A brief description of the storyline from betweenthecovers.com, says a “young man falls out with his father and (spoiler alert), heads west, meets a woman, becomes a hero.” What turned a character into hero in that era’s literature would likely be upsetting to modern Canadian sensibilities.
Chisholm wrote other books with hearty adventuresome titles, like The Land of Strong Men, The Boss of Wind River, Fur Pirates, and A Thousand a Plate (1922) a novel about gold-panners and fur-trappers.
The last book on the map is Bertrand S. Sinclair’s, The Inverted Pyramid (1924) Toronto: Goodchild.3
Sinclair immigrated to Canada with his mother in 1889. At the age fifteen, he left home to become a cowboy in Montana, but returned to BC where he wrote novels about the lives of loggers, fishers, and ranchers. In 1922, he settled in Pender Harbour and became a commercial fisherman. His VHF radio broadcasts to fishermen, known as “The Sinclair Hour,” were widely known and respected. He retired from commercial fishing at the age of eighty-three.
The take-away from Paine’s map is that literary maps mark literary boundaries, just as land maps mark geopolitical borders, but more importantly they cross boundaries.
Deacon & Turner’s Lit Map
Ten years after Paine’s The Northward Map of Truthful Tales was published, a more detailed and decidedly Canadian literary map was composed by William Arthur Deacon and hand-drawn by Stanley Turner (Rous and Mann Limited, 1936).4
What a difference a decade made, with all the regions in BC now having an author listed for each book.
Deacon was Canada’s first full-time literary journalist and an outspoken literary nationalist. A popular critic and editor, he saw himself as the “‘herald’” and “prophet” of Canadian literature . . . He edited the literary pages of Saturday Night magazine, the Mail and Empire, and the Globe and Mail, and his book reviews were thought of as A Literary Map of Canada. . . ,“A nation lives by its literature. . .and the rise of Can. Lit. since 1920 has been my pride and joy.”
Even the remote Sunshine Coast is emblazoned with Poor Man’s Rock by Bertrand Sinclair, laying a template for Canadian literary maps to follow. Poor Man’s Rock is the most famous of Sinclair’s fifteen books. The title is taken from a rock off Lasqueti Island, an actual place, at Squitty Bay.
Vancouver Public Library Literary Landmark
Lacking a time machine to edit Deacon’s map, we reached out to the Vancouver Public Library about their literary map project, in hopes of finding a mentor for our project on the Coast. The original team from the 2015 project that installed plaques across Vancouver, was still working at the library and eager to assist us.
The Vancouver literary landmarks consist of twenty-six plaques with one author per plaque attached to lamp posts. VPL won’t be adding to their literary map at this time. Iron plaques are pricey as is installing them on city property. The names of the authors on the VPL literary map were selected by Alan Twigg, the founder of the abcbookworld.com that lists over 12,000 BC authors. They include literary heavy-hitters, such as:
- Joy Kogawa
- Andreas Schroeder – former residence. He now lives on the Sunshine Coast.
- David Suzuki (David Suzuki Foundation)
- Margaret Atwood – former residence. She now lives in Toronto.
- Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) – former residence
- Lee Maracle (1950-2021)
- Wayson Choy (1939-2019) – former headquarters
- Anne Cameron – former location
- Emily Carr (1871-1945) – former studio
Click on the name of an author and you get the location of their plaque but no picture of the plaque and without GPS coordinates, a photo, quote from the author, a brief bio, links to borrow the books from the library, and a link to abcbookworld.com. However, there’s no link to where their books can be purchased.
We relied heavily on abcbookworld.com with its encyclopedic database, that also has two literary maps, albeit limited. For example, for the Sunshine Coast the map pins only Betty Keller of Sechelt, Edith Iglauer (1917-2019) of Garden Bay, and Hubert Evans (1892-1986) of Roberts Creek, and in Powell River, Dean Unger, whereas taletrail.ca lists over 200 Sunshine Coast authors and growing.
Although, most of those Coast authors are found within abcbookworld.com, there isn’t a way to search the author bank by place name. Consequently, we had to compile our own list of authors, then search abcbookworld.com to for more information on individual authors. It would’ve saved countless hours of research if the search engine had that capability. Michael created a page that lists all of the authors in the database to browse, so you don’t necessarily have to do a search.
Calgary Public Library Literary Litmap
The next closest place to us that had a lit map was Calgary, Alberta, created by Shaun Hunter, historian, who also wrote a book, Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers (RMB, 2018)—the most checked out book at the Calgary Library. She selected one-hundred and fifty excerpts from authors to guide readers through the literary history of the city.
Shaun was an amazing mentor. She used Google Maps, as most literary maps across the globe do now, to create a sophisticated urban literary map, including authors’ homes, grave sites, plaques, and settings from their novels in a map of colour-coded pins.
I created a mock-up of the online map using Google Map, which was easy and fun, but not entirely what we were looking for. The Sunshine Coast is unlike urban locations as it’s spread out into villages on an 88-km long peninsula. We knew we wanted to include both living and deceased authors from a span of approximately one hundred years or more. We also wanted to protect the privacy of living authors included on the map.
Hampstead Literary Map
Jan Degrass went on vacation to London, England at the time we did our research and kindly volunteered to go on a self-guided literary tour to gain experience of such tours. She found the free walking tour on freetoursbyfoot.com/literary-London, although it offered the option of hiring a guide.
With London’s centuries-long literary history, there were designated buildings to visit. She started at Evelyn Waugh’s home in Hampstead, number one on a tantalizing tour that includes William Blake, Keats, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and T. S. Eliot.
At the end of a long day of walking with a friend and her dog, Jan’s conclusions were:
- Scenic Holly hill was a highlight and a winding path led us down to Hampstead tube station for the ride home (much to the relief of the little dog).
- Though we enjoyed ourselves, we had walked the better part of a Sunday and yet had seen only three homes of literary giants out of eighteen on the map.
—Jan Degrass, Gates & Fences: A Self-Guided Tour In Hampstead, London
The homes turned out to be privately-owned and the only indication that Evelyn Waugh, William Blake, and Robert Louis Stevenson had lived there were plaques affixed to the gates or fences of the houses. Jan found the plaques lacking in detailed information. “Info about the lives of the writer and what they wrote at each location would have been useful,” Jan noted in her presentation at an SCWES meeting.
After touring the Hampstead Literary Map her suggestions were incorporated into our design:
On the Coast we will face the same issues as there will be nothing to see at privately owned locations; however,
- We could include Coast sights that were inspiring to our authors, e.g., the Sechelt library where L.R. Wright’s character, Cassandra, worked as a librarian.
- Molly’s Reach that became the focal point of the Beachcombers.
- Hubert Evans’ boat at the SC Museum (depending upon how long the exhibit is on).
- We could produce a brochure, available online and in print, with a brief blurb about the location and links to the associated authors. A print version is essential in my view as I lost the signal to my phone on our walk, so couldn’t follow the on-line version.
—Jan Degrass, Gates & Fences: A Self-Guided Tour In Hampstead, London
Partnering with Heritage BC
This was the first literary map in the province to be developed outside of Vancouver in nearly a decade. To develop a paper map, online app, and a live event, we’d need funding, so we applied to Heritage BC. Michael and I attended Heritage BC’s conference in Chilliwack in 2023, where we attended a heritage walking tour workshop. It gave us the foundation to start the process of building a map that could be used for a walking, cycling, or driving tour.
Discoveries
Jan was our researcher, Michael, the programmer, Mike Starr, lay minister and local history buff, would search for burial sites of deceased authors with findagrave.com. Jana Curll, illustrator and map maker, who sells whimsical postcards and posters through tourism offices and online, was to create the paper map. Together, we developed the Sunshine Coast Tale Trail.
Working with Jana was new territory with a map was more representational than navigational. The team met in many times at a local coffee shop with long wooden tables to review the map. One of our concerns was getting the Indigenous spellings of the Coastal place names correct, the other was positioning the landmark icons in approximately the right places and numbering the landmarks to have a smooth visual flow. Jana hadn’t worked with a team in person before. For her fun, colourful maps her clients work with her over email.
I have experience working with technical illustrators, who initially take photos onsite of whatever they’re going to draw with an app, then we work on any edits over email. But working collaboratively on a creative map was a much longer, hands-on, and intensive experience.
Researching and entering the author database became a crash course in the literary history of the Coast. I’ve lived on the Coast for only ten years and part-time at that. I ended up purchasing many books by Coastal authors for gifts and myself and had to hold myself back from buying more. I found that Sunshine Coast authors have written about almost every topic you can imagine. For example, the co-author of the famous book, The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, Raymond Hull lived on the Coast for several years.
The more we delved into archives and websites, the more authors we found for the Tale Trail and we’re still discovering more. We quickly surpassed my original estimate of one-hundred authors.
We also included visiting authors to the Rockwood Centre for the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, Sechelt, that’s preparing for its forty-second year in operation this August, so that will be an ongoing annual update. Burial sites from early authors evaded us, at least from cemetery records on the Coast and the findagrave.com website, so that’s a headscratcher at this point.
Following the Tale Trail
Now that we have a print map to distribute at tourism offices, bookstores, landmarks on the map, and the website, how will we get the word out to the communities and across the water to the mainland and beyond? We have approaches, that depending on funding, volunteers, and community engagement will benefit everyone involved, like a weekend event, adding other BC communities to the online Tale Trail map, and a book.
First Tale Trail Event
We plan to hold an event with as many of the heritage landmarks, publishers and retailers on the Coast as possible. There will be public readings and performances of Sunshine Coast authors and playwrights over the weekend of November 8th to 10th—an otherwise quiet time on the Coast.
The response from participating venues is extremely enthusiastic. We’ve applied for a BC Arts Council grant to pay professional authors and performers, and also to rent venues. Stay tuned for the details of the Tale Trail event at scwes.ca and taletrail.ca.
Adding Literary Landmark Maps for the rest of BC
New GPS technology and the ease of using Google Map wasn’t available when VPL created their literary map (lit map), but made it possible to create a website for our small area, including:
- 995 works
- 868 authors both local and visiting to the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts
- 29 locales, including heritage landmarks, publishers, and retailers
With the Tale Trail app developed by Michael Gurney, more authors in urban and rural areas can be added to taletrail.ca to not only profile and preserve contributors to BC literature, but also to promote and sell their books.
Tale Trail the Book
Just like Shaun Hunter wrote a book with excerpts from historical books authored in Calgary, that’s something we’d like to accomplish in the future, but with our own Coastal flavour and angle.
Future of Literary Maps
It wasn’t until I added links to each book in author profiles, including book covers, descriptions, and links that go directly to where the books are available for sale, such as publisher websites, Amazon, or other bookseller websites, that I realized what a powerful sales tool Tale Trail is for local authors.
Instead of going to a bookstore to shop that one shelf set aside for a small selection of local authors, on our website you can choose from the entire inventory of locally written books from the past and present. You can then order them from your local independent bookseller, or order online. Of course, some of the books are out of print or in archives because of their age, but some of the older books can be purchased through specialty bookshops or downloaded from digital archives.
We’re so grateful to abcbookworld.com for their excellent and extensive references that have been available since 2004. Nowhere else can you find so many BC authors not only listed but with biographies, reviews, and works. A reminder to authors that your listing is only as current as you contact the administrators to keep it up-to-date. Also, if you haven’t checked to see if you’re on it, do so. If you’re not on their website, email the administrator at bookworld@telus.net to get on it.
There would be value in adding links to the local library to our author’s books to offer the option of borrowing books. Authors who sign up to the Public Lending Right (PLR) program (publiclendingright.ca/) benefit from library loans of their books—not as much as a purchase, but still it’s an annual cheque in in the mail.
AI & Literary Landmark Maps
Following authors on their author page and on Amazon, alerts you when they have new titles, but finding those authors in the first place can be difficult. With AI technology, there may be a way on the horizon to make the main work of researching and entering data (author names) for lit maps less laborious.
AI tools like ChatGPT may be able to help with the research and retrieval of author information in the future. It’s a matter of training a dataset to your needs and to get the results you’re looking for as you need to pull from many sources. At present, ChatGPT is notoriously unreliable and the information it gives has to be verified. Therefore, it has limited use in a lit map project, for example, when I asked ChatGPT to list authors from the Sunshine Coast, BC, it returned a list of four authors, of which I can immediately verify only one, Theresa Kishkan, and the message:
As of my last update in January 2022, I don’t have access to a comprehensive database that lists all authors from the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia. However, I can provide you with some suggestions and examples of authors who have lived or spent time in the area based on available information up to that point. Here are a few more authors from the Sunshine Coast:
With five more authors, including Kishkan again, and David Roche, three that must be verified, and the message:
These are just a few examples, and there may be more authors from the Sunshine Coast who have contributed to the literary scene. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive list, you may want to consult local libraries, literary organizations, or community directories for up-to-date information.
What about a larger city, like Vancouver? Would ChatGPT have access to a comprehensive database for it? Chat replied with ten authors at a time, most I could verify, but it’s not an efficient way of creating a comprehensive list.
Creating a literary map for your region, where you’re the experts takes visibility of local authorship regionally, nationally, and even internationally to the next level. If writers’ groups and/or libraries contact us, we can mentor them through the process of creating their own literary map that then could be added to our website. Also, we have team members who may be available on a contract basis to fast track a region’s literary map, both paper and online. Contact us at sunshinecoastwritersandeditors@gmail.com with the subject Tale Trail to enquire about how to add your literary community to our Tale Trail, or how to create your own literary landmark map.
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References
Degrass, Jan. Gates & Fences: A Self-Guided Tour In Hampstead, London. May 2023.
Hunter, Shaun. Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers. RMB Books. Calgary, Alberta. 2018.
shaunhunter.ca/map.
Knowledge.ca. “The Fight for 54-40: A new American president sets his sights on British Columbia,” British Columbia: An Untold History. https://bcanuntoldhistory.knowledge.ca/1840/the-fight-for-54-40
Krotz, Sarah Wylie. “Place and Memory: Rethinking the Literary Map of Canada,” University of Alberta, ESC 40.2–3, June/September 2014, pp. 133–154, https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/media-library/people/krotz/fa92be37e765494cbe46e7a992f0d2f6/25509-64553-1-sm.pdf
Wyatt, Kyle, “Findings Trouvailles: An Early Literary Map of Canada,” The Champlain Society, October 23, 2019. https://champlainsociety.utpjournals.press/findings-trouvailles/2019/10/an-early-literary-map-of-canada
Appendix
Canadian Literary Landmark Maps
https://digitalarchive.mcmaster.ca/islandora/object/macrepo%3A82219
https://archive.org/details/canadianliterary0000colo
https://champlainsociety.utpjournals.press/pb-assets/champlain/findings/2019/10/The-Northward-Map-of-Truthful-Tales-1571749451480.jpg (The Bookman, a New York monthly)
British Columbia Literary Landmark Maps
ABC BookWorld – abcbookworld.com
Lit Map of BC – literarymapofbc.ca/
Planet Earth Poetry – planetearthpoetry.com/poetscaravan
Sunshine Coast Tale Trail – taletrail.ca
Vancouver Public Library Landmarks Map – vpl.ca/literarylandmarks/ma
Alberta
Calgary Lit Map – shaunhunter.ca/map
Manitoba
mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/52/immigrantwinnipeg.shtml
Ontario
openbookontario.com/main_landmarks/
Quebec
Quebec City – morrin.org/en/lhsq-publications/ourwritings/
Montreal – rallyevieux-quebeclitteraire.ca/
New Brunswick
google.com/maps/d/viewer?msa=0&mid=1S1Oyrjv13NFBVTmgisiscX6B6FI&ll=46.581638137200414%2C-66.34454749999999&z=7
Nova Scotia
Halifax – halifaxliterarylandmarks.ca/items/browse
Prince Edward Island
Green Gables Heritage Place, Cavendish- tourismpei.com/what-to-do/anne-of-green-gables.
Yukon
Whitehorse – https://asuitcasefullofbooks.com/whitehorse-find-experience-yukon-literature/
London, England
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Cathalynn Cindy Labonté-Smith grew up in Southwestern Alberta and moved to Vancouver, BC, to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She is the fourth generation on her father’s side to live in British Columbia.
After graduation, she worked as a freelance journalist until present. She became a technical writer in wireless communication and other high-tech industries, earning a Certificate in Technical Writing from Simon Fraser University. She later went to UBC to complete a Bachelor of Education (Secondary) and taught English, journalism, and other subjects at Vancouver high schools. She currently lives in Gibsons and North Vancouver, BC. She is the founder and president of the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society. She is the director of the SCWES Art & Words Festival.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster
NOTES
- In Kyle Wyatt’s, “Findings Trouvailles: An Early Literary Map of Canada,” The Champlain Society, October 23, 2019. https://champlainsociety.utpjournals.press/findings-trouvailles/2019/10/an-early-literary-map-of-canada ↩︎
- “The Fight for 54-40: A new American president sets his sights on British Columbia,” British Columbia: An Untold History. https://bcanuntoldhistory.knowledge.ca/1840/the-fight-for-54-40 ↩︎
- From book description, “His novel explores the world of journalism and the pursuit of truth amidst political corruption and personal challenges. The story centers around John Storm, a passionate young journalist determined to expose the truth and fight for justice. As Storm becomes involved in investigating a mining accident and the subsequent cover-up, he faces resistance from powerful figures and must navigate the complexities of the newspaper industry. Sinclair delves deep into the inner workings of journalism, exploring the ethical dilemmas faced by reporters and the potential consequences of challenging the status quo. This gripping tale not only provides a riveting mystery but also offers insights into the power dynamics of the time and the role of the media in society. “The Inverted Pyramid” is a thought-provoking and engaging novel that remains relevant in today’s world, reminding readers of the importance of truth and the risks involved in pursuing it.” ↩︎
- Map download can be purchased at https://digitalarchive.mcmaster.ca/islandora/object/macrepo%3A82219 ↩︎