Lisa Grekul.

profile by Joe Wiebe
posted June 23, 2005

Lisa Grekul was surprised when Kalyna’s Song (Coteau Books, $19.95) was nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel award. Published by a small prairie press, the novel received little publicity when it was released last fall.

“It’s nice to be on the shortlist,” she tells me at a café near her Kitsilano apartment in Vancouver. “The winning is very irrelevant to me with such a little book.” Humility seems to come naturally to Grekul, who started writing this novel in the late 1990s without ever expecting it to be published.

She may be humble, saying in one breath, “I wonder what [the contest judge W.P.] Kinsella was thinking,” but that doesn’t get in the way of her sense of humour: “I was going to offer him my first-born to thank him, but I think it’s inappropriate at this point to contact him.”

Grekul grew up in the predominantly Ukrainian-Canadian town of St.Paul, Alberta, almost two hundred kilometres northeast of Edmonton. Coincidentally, this is the same hometown of her novel’s central character, Colleen Lutzak. There are other similarities between Colleen and her creator as well. Colleen is a gifted pianist; so is Grekul, though she says her protagonist is more of a prodigy than she ever was. Colleen spends a year studying at an international college in Swaziland right around the time of the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa; Grekul spent two years there, and witnessed the celebrations of February, 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

When I point out these similarities, Grekul laughs and asks, “Is this a thinly veiled question about the autobiographical elements of the book?”

She acknowledges the “seriously hard-to-dispute” autobiographical aspects of Kalyna’s Song, and admits, “I actually think that I work best from real life. Sometimes I’m a bit ashamed of that because I think it means I have no imagination.” There’s that humility again, but then she allows, “It’s not just writing exactly what I’ve seen—it’s being able to twist it and embellish it and turn it into a comic or dark moment, do something with it because real life is not that interesting.”

First novels are often autobiographical to some degree. Many authors need to hold on to safe touchstones from their own experiences before they can venture into completely fictional territory. For Lisa Grekul, safety lay within the realm of family, though she also acknowledges that she worried about how her family would react to the book.

“I think I was able to write it mainly because I never thought it would get published. I thought no one is ever going to read this. The anxiety level increased the closer we got to publication.”

Colleen’s family in the book is similar to Grekul’s in real life. Both parents are teachers, and Colleen has an older sister and younger brother. “It’s a relatively kind portrayal of the immediate family,” Grekul says. “The extended family I was a little nervous about, but I thought they’re not going to read it.” Add naïveté to humility, perhaps, because of course, all of her extended family read the book, along with much of St.Paul.

“Yeah, they read it all right,” she laughs, and then relates a story about a reading from Kalyna’s Song she did shortly after the book came out. While she was reading from the Christmas dinner scene where Colleen and her sister criticize their aunt’s cabbage rolls, one of Grekul’s aunts in attendance stood up and interrupted her. “I never burnt my cabbage rolls,” she proclaimed. “Just for the record, I want everybody here to know I never burnt my cabbage rolls.”

Grekul admits she was nervous about one character that is loosely modelled after her rather well-endowed high school French teacher. But rather than being offended by the playful parody in the novel, the real-life teacher loves the book. “She carries it around with her—it’s dog-eared now,” Grekul says, laughing. “She has highlighted the portions that are her. She actually says, ‘Oh you have to read this book!’ to everybody she sees. And then she says, ‘Look on page 84—this is me!’ It’s a small town. She’s sold a lot of books for me.”

If these are typical of the characters that Grekul knew growing up Ukrainian in rural Alberta—all good fodder for novel writing—then it’s obvious why she stayed so close to home in Kalyna’s Song.

The initial impetus for writing the novel came out of what she perceived to be a lack of Ukrainian voices within Canadian literature. As she was completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, she took a Canadian literature course that focused on writers from different ethnic backgrounds, but found there were no Ukrainians on the syllabus. In what she calls an epiphany, she sat down one night to “write the great Ukrainian-Canadian novel,” and sketched out the characters and plotline for what would eventually become Kalyna’s Song.

Grekul wrote the first draft as her Master’s thesis. She discovered other Ukrainian writers along the way, including prominent names like George Ryga, Vera Lysenko, Janice Kulyk-Keefer, and Myrna Kostash. But finding out there were other Ukrainian-Canadian writers out there after all did not deter Grekul, who by this time had caught the writing bug. She placed the novel with Coteau, moved to Vancouver to attend UBC, and “as I was working on my PhD, I was also constantly revising the book for another four years.”

She is now working on her second novel during her summer off from teaching at UBC, where she received her PhD in English literature last year. She says the new book is darker. It is set in northeastern Alberta again, although “this time it’s a small, predominantly Irish-Canadian community, but ethnicity is really not in the mix here.” It is less autobiographical, though she is still writing from experience, with characters inspired by her ex-husband’s family. “He’s OK with it,” Grekul assures me. “This is a very amicable break-up.”

Grekul enjoys teaching, but finds it “very time-consuming.” She would love to write full-time. “What writer doesn’t want to write full time?” For now, she will have to make do with finding time for both teaching and writing in her life. Unless, of course, she manages to win this First Novel contest (which will be decided this fall), land an agent, and sign a big deal for her second novel.

“When you look at the other people on the list, they’re all much bigger hitters,” she says, and she’s right; Grekul is up against some stiff competition for the award, especially from Michel Basilières’ Black Bird and John Bemrose’s The Island Walkers. Still, “any little bit of recognition is good, especially for a little book.” There’s that humility again. I wonder if it’s a Ukrainian thing.

Joe Wiebe is a Vancouver freelance writer who loves holubtsi and pyrizhky.