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Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries
Long before she became the renowned author of the best-selling Schmecks cookbooks, an award-winning journalist for magazines such as Macleans, and a creative non-fiction mentor, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen and continued to write for over eighty years. Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries draws from these diaries selections that map Staebler's construction of herself as a writer and documents her frustrations and struggles, along with her desire to express herself, in writing. She felt she must write--that not to write was a "denial of life"--while at the same time she doubted the value of her scribblings.
Spanning much of the twentieth century--each decade is introduced by an overview of key events in the author's life during that period--the diaries vividly illuminate both her intensely personal experiences and her broader social world. The volume also presents four key examples of Staebler's public writing: her first published magazine article; her first award-winning publication; the opening chapter of her book Cape Breton Harbour; and her lively account of the Great Cookie War. Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries portrays an ordinary woman's struggle to write in the context of her lived experience. "All my life I have talked about writing and kept scribbling in my notebook, as if that makes me a writer," wrote Staebler in 1986. This volume argues that the very act of writing the diaries, with all their contradictory accounts of writerly ambition, success, and conflict, made Staebler the writer she yearned to be.
Spanning much of the twentieth century--each decade is introduced by an overview of key events in the author's life during that period--the diaries vividly illuminate both her intensely personal experiences and her broader social world. The volume also presents four key examples of Staebler's public writing: her first published magazine article; her first award-winning publication; the opening chapter of her book Cape Breton Harbour; and her lively account of the Great Cookie War. Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries portrays an ordinary woman's struggle to write in the context of her lived experience. "All my life I have talked about writing and kept scribbling in my notebook, as if that makes me a writer," wrote Staebler in 1986. This volume argues that the very act of writing the diaries, with all their contradictory accounts of writerly ambition, success, and conflict, made Staebler the writer she yearned to be.
312 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2005
14 people want to read
About the author
Christl Verduyn
18 books2 followersChristl Verduyn is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, where she holds the Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies and is the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. Publications include Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, co-edited with Eleanor Ty (WLU Press, 2008), Archival Narratives for Canada: Re-Telling Stories in a Changing Landscape, co-edited with Kathleen Garay (2011), and Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis, co-edited with Jane Koustas (2012).
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 17, 2020
Please do note that my one star ranking for Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries is NOT because Edna Staebler's diaries are in ANY MANNER either unreadable or problematic, but totally due to the fact that I simply have found too many annoying and frustrating academic issues with how chief editor Christl Verduyn has presented and published Staebler's diaries for me to consider more than one star.
And first and foremost, I do happen to find the book title of Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries to be totally and utterly misleading. For yes, I did in fact purchase the book for my Kindle for iPad because the title sure seems to imply and suggest that Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries would contain ALL (or at least the vast majority) of Edna Staebler's diaries and thus present a hopefully thorough and all encompassing enough portrait of not only Edna Staebler (both before and after she became a Canadian cultural icon because of her famous and delightful Ontario Mennonite cookbooks) but also of the Kitchener and Waterloo areas of Southern Ontario from 1922 until the beginning of the 21st century (since Edna Staebler almost religiously wrote in her diary on a daily basis until she suffered a mild stroke in 2003 and post her recovery decided to stop writing altogether).
And indeed, I soon and with very much frustration and disappointment had to realise that not only is Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries very much a book of just selected diary and journal excerpts but that furthermore, Christl Verduyn has also specifically chosen those parts of the diaries that are dealing with in particular Edna Staebler’s development as a writer, something that is interesting, of course, but also something that I certainly was not expecting since the book title, because Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries certainly does not (in my opinion) suggest that it would ONLY contain diary passages that tend to deal with Edna Staebler the writer and not so much with Edna Staebler the all round person (and yes, Christl Verduyn focussing on mostly "writing" has definitely made the diary selections in Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries appear as rather one-sided at best and as such much of what I was actually wanting to read and discover about Edna Staebler, well, it just seems totally missing in action so to speak).
Combined with the fact that Christl Verduyn's introduction is also tediously and dryly academic in scope, that it reads more like a PhD dissertation and that there are also (in my opinion) far too many potential content spoilers contained in the introduction (so that by the time one finally does get to the main diary excerpt section of Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries, most of what is shown is neither all that novel in any way nor even unexpected), I really and truly have been massively disappointed with and by Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries (and yes, my one star rating absolutely does reflect this and how annoyed I have been with this book).
And first and foremost, I do happen to find the book title of Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries to be totally and utterly misleading. For yes, I did in fact purchase the book for my Kindle for iPad because the title sure seems to imply and suggest that Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries would contain ALL (or at least the vast majority) of Edna Staebler's diaries and thus present a hopefully thorough and all encompassing enough portrait of not only Edna Staebler (both before and after she became a Canadian cultural icon because of her famous and delightful Ontario Mennonite cookbooks) but also of the Kitchener and Waterloo areas of Southern Ontario from 1922 until the beginning of the 21st century (since Edna Staebler almost religiously wrote in her diary on a daily basis until she suffered a mild stroke in 2003 and post her recovery decided to stop writing altogether).
And indeed, I soon and with very much frustration and disappointment had to realise that not only is Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries very much a book of just selected diary and journal excerpts but that furthermore, Christl Verduyn has also specifically chosen those parts of the diaries that are dealing with in particular Edna Staebler’s development as a writer, something that is interesting, of course, but also something that I certainly was not expecting since the book title, because Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries certainly does not (in my opinion) suggest that it would ONLY contain diary passages that tend to deal with Edna Staebler the writer and not so much with Edna Staebler the all round person (and yes, Christl Verduyn focussing on mostly "writing" has definitely made the diary selections in Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries appear as rather one-sided at best and as such much of what I was actually wanting to read and discover about Edna Staebler, well, it just seems totally missing in action so to speak).
Combined with the fact that Christl Verduyn's introduction is also tediously and dryly academic in scope, that it reads more like a PhD dissertation and that there are also (in my opinion) far too many potential content spoilers contained in the introduction (so that by the time one finally does get to the main diary excerpt section of Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries, most of what is shown is neither all that novel in any way nor even unexpected), I really and truly have been massively disappointed with and by Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries (and yes, my one star rating absolutely does reflect this and how annoyed I have been with this book).
Displaying 1 of 1 review