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Biography |
Elisabeth Harvor has two sons and is currently living in Ottawa. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Malahat Review, The New Yorker, PRISM International, The Hudson Review, Best Canadian Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and many other periodicals and anthologies. She has been writer-in-residence at universities and libraries across Canada and has taught at Concordia University, York University, and the Humber School for Writers. She has also written essays on the work of Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, and many other writers for Our Generation Against Nuclear War, The Globe and Mail, Matrix, and a number of other periodicals. Her first novel, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, was chosen one of the ten best novels of the year by The Toronto Star in 2000, and her second novel, All Times Have Been Modern, was a finalist for the 2005 Ottawa Book Award. Fortress of Chairs, her first poetry book, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best first book of poetry written by a Canadian writer in 1992, and her most recent book of stories, Let Me Be the One, was a finalist for the Governor General's Award.
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On The Connections
Between Art & Artifact |
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I grew up on the east coast, in the Kennebecasis River Valley, the daughter of Danish immigrant artisans who made pottery by hand, using methods going back thousands of years. My parents had lived most of their lives in cities (in northern Europe) and fell completely in love with the freedom and vastness of Canada. They were also attracted to the romantic hardship of the life they hoped to lead so far out in the country: no running water, no electricity, no paved roads, no doctor.
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A few years after they bought their farm they moved its furniture, chair by chair, down to the barn in the valley, and very soon after this move bedrooms appeared among the rafters above the kiln. Now my brother and sister and I could watch our father hitch himself up onto the seat of his potter's wheel and spin balls of clay into teapots and bowls, then watch him load the kiln with clay pots before he sealed it up like a tomb. And falling asleep the nights he fired it was tremendous too, from watching him suit up in his long black rubber apron and welder's glasses, to our lying awake up in our beds and listening to the fire hugely crackling and roaring. (But
although our barn was a tinderbox, and above all a tinderbox the nights there was a firing, I have never in my life, before or since, felt more safe than I felt on the times the kiln seemed to be roaring through the nightlike an express train on fire.)
Once the firing was over and the kiln had cooled down--this seemed always to be on calm Sunday mornings, and always after a big breakfast of French toast and Dundee marmalade-- our father would draw out one of the bricks, gripped by a pair of tongs, and as the pots were giving off their weak little cooling-down tinkles--like a debilitated music box--we would be allowed to squint in through the rectangular opening to see how the bowls and jugs had been transformed by the fire.
A childhood that allowed me to witness the long and exacting process involved in making an artifact turned out to be incredibly useful to me as a writer. Above all, it was useful to see that although a bowl or story can begin in excitement (the wheel, the idea, the first image) many of the steps on the way to completion will be painstaking (the many revisions of the story; the underglazing and glazing and incising and double firings of the bowl) and that, one way or another, whatever epiphany comes will have to be earned. Even if it seems only to come when the bowl or story is transformed by a real or metaphorical fire.
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Published Books
Women and Children, eleven stories, published by Oberon Press, Ottawa,
Ontario, in 1973.
If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever, six stories and a novella
published by Penguin, Markham, Ontario, 1988. |
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Our Lady of All the Distances, a slightly revised version of the first story collection, issued under the imprint of the Oberon Library by HarperCollins, published in Toronto, 1991. |
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Fortress of Chairs, a book of poems, published by Signal Editions, Véhicule
Press, Montreal, 1992.
Let Me Be the One, a collection of stories, published by HarperCollins in
Toronto, September, 1996.
The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring, a collection of poems, published by
Signal Editions, Montreal, September, 1997.
A Room at the Heart of Things, an anthology of the work of both established
and beginning writers with a long introduction, published by Véhicule Press
in Montreal, December, 1998.
Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, a novel published by McClelland and
Stewart, in Toronto, September, 2000.
ALL TIMES HAVE BEEN MODERN, published by McClelland and
Stewart, in Toronto , 2004.
Awards & RecognitionsOttawa Book Award Finalist, ALL TIMES HAVE BEEN MODERN, 2005.
MALAHAT NOVELLA PRIZE , 2004.
Marian Engel Award , for a woman writer in mid-career, 2003.
Aldan Nowlan Award , Excellence in English-language literary arts, 2000.
Governor-General's Award, Finalist (for fiction) 1996.
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Lowther Award, Finalist, 1998
Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Fortress of Chairs, 1992.
Confederation Poets' Prize for "Do You Live Alone?", 1992.
Confederation Poets' Prize, for "Bloom, Rain", 1991.
National Magazine Award, (Poetry), 1991, for "Madam Abundance" and a selection of other poems.
Pushcart Prize nominations for "How Long Will It Last" (from The Malahat Review) and for "Night Terror" (from Prairie Fire)
The League of Canadian Poets' National Poetry Competition, (First Prize) 1991.
The Malahat Long Poem Prize, 1990, for "Afterbirth".
The League of Canadian Poets' National Poetry Competition,
(First Prize co-winner) 1989.
Ottawa Short Story Competition, 1970 (First Prize).
Writer-in-Residence, Ottawa Public Library, Summer, 1993.
Writer-in-Residence, Carleton University, Fall, 1993.
Writer-in-Residence, University of New Brunswick, Fall, 1994.
Writer-in-Residence, Concordia University, Spring, 1997.
Writer-in-Residence, Saskatoon Public Library, 1998-1999
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