Last night I gave a speech to a group of men and women who write and publish biographies of people who’ve shaped the city of Regina. I’d agreed to do this talk sometime last fall, when the end of March seemed at least 6 years away. Of course, the end of March arrived just when it always does, and the speech was due. I’d just finished the final edits for “The Nesting Dolls”. The weather was finally gorgeous. I didn’t want to work. I wanted to go out and play. However, a promise is a promise and so I set to work.
I once read a bleak description of the art of biography. The writer said ‘every biography begins with a cradle and ends with a grave’. Somehow, I didn’t think those words would have my audience rolling in the aisles. Fortunately, I’d been reading “The Inner Voice”, soprano Renee Fleming’s biography, and she said something that I thought I could build on. She wrote that children who are given a daily dose of the arts learn how “to imagine a better world and then create it”.
Regina is not a city of natural beauty. Someone (it might have been me) once said that Saskatchewan is the plain, flat-chested sister of the beautiful and voluptuous Alberta. The original name for our city was “Pile O’ bones”. There’s not a tree here that wasn’t planted, but it’s a lovely city because of a decision made over a hundred years ago and built upon by subsequent generations. In the centre of our city is 120-hectare man-made lake; it is surrounded by 930 hectares of parkland development, and it’s a knockout.
Wascana Centre figures in every single one of the Joanne Kilbourn novels. In the course of the 12 novels, Joanne has lived in two houses: both have been within a two-minute walk from the creek that runs into Wascana Lake. I, too, live within a two minute walk of the creek. Regina is on a migration path, so we have an amazing number and variety of visitors in spring and fall; we also have beavers and muskrats and great public art and fireworks and flowering trees and waterfalls and places to fall in love and out of love.
We have all this beauty because, to paraphrase Renee Fleming, Regina has had citizens who knew how to imagine a better world and then create it. Yesterday I really would have preferred going for a walk to staying cooped up in my office working on a speech for the biographers. But a promise is a promise. Besides if it hadn’t been for those visionaries, I would have been walking on the bald prairie.