Clark, Joan 1934-

Personal

Born October 12, 1934, in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada; daughter of W.I. and Sally MacDonald; married Jack Clark (a geotechnical engineer), 1958; children: Tim, Tony, Sara. Education: Acadia University, B.A. (English), 1957; attended University of Alberta, 1960.

Addresses

Home—6 Dover Place, St. John's, Newfoundland A1B 2P5, Canada. Office—c/o Writers' Union of Canada, 24 Ryerson Ave., Toronto M5T 2P3, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Writer. Teacher in Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada, 1957-58, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 1960-61, Calgary, Alberta, 1962-63, and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canaa, 1969-70. Co-founder and co-editor of Dandelion (magazine), 1974-81.

Member

Writers' Union of Canada, PEN International, Writers' Guild of Alberta (president, 1983-84), Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Awards, Honors

Alberta Book Award, 1983; Alberta Culture Award, 1985; Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children runner-up, 1986, for Wild Man of the Woods; Canada Council "B" Award, 1988; Governor General's Fiction Award shortlist, 1989; W.H. Smith/Books Canada Award shortlist, 1989; Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction, 1989, for The Victory ofGeraldine Gull; Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, Canadian Children's Book Centre, 1995, and Mr. Christie's Book Award, Christie Brown & Co., 1996, both for The Dream Carvers; honorary doctor of letters, Sir Wilfred Grenfell University, 1998; Vicky Metcalf Award, 1999; Geoffrey Bilson Award, 2003, for The Word for Home; IMPAC Award longlist, 2006, for An Audience of Chairs.

Writings

FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Girl of the Rockies, illustrated by Douglas Philips, Ryerson Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1968.

Thomasina and the Trout Tree, illustrated by Ingeborg Hiscox, Tundra Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1971.

The Hand of Robin Squires, illustrated by William Taylor and Mary Cserepy, Clarke, Irwin (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1977.

The Leopard and the Lily (fable), illustrated by Velma Foster, Oolichan Books (Lantzville, British Columbia, Canada), 1984.

Wild Man of the Woods, Penguin Books Canada (Markham, Ontario, Canada), 1985.

The Moons of Madeleine, Viking Kestrel (Markham, Ontario, Canada), 1987.

The Dream Carvers, Viking (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

Leaving Home, illustrated by Cherrisa Bonine, Your Book, 1996.

The Word for Home, Viking (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

Snow, illustrated by Kady McDonald Delton, Vintage Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2006.

Author's books have been translated into Braille, as well as into several languages, including French, Italian, and German.

OTHER

From a High Thin Wire (short stories), NeWest Press (Edmonton, Ontario, Canada), 1982.

The Victory of Geraldine Gull (adult novel), Macmillan of Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1988.

Swimming toward the Light (short stories), Macmillan of Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

Eiriksdottir: A Tale of Dreams and Luck (adult novel), Macmillan of Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1994.

Latitudes of Melt (adult novel), Knopf (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000, Soho (New York, NY), 2002.

An Audience of Chairs (adult novel), Knopf (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2005.

Work included in anthologies, including CBC Anthology, Alberta Anthology, Doublebound, Glass Canyons, Calgary Stories, and Prairie Fire. Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Canadian Fiction, Waves, Dalhousie Review, Saturday Night, Journal of Canadian Fiction, and Wascana Review.

Adaptations

Several books by Clark have been adapted for audiobook.

Sidelights

Award-winning Canadian writer Joan Clark populates her historical fiction with young heroes and heroines who are confronted with realistic personal challenges as well as adventures of the kind often encountered in myth and folklore. While researching her novels, picture books, and short stories, Clark draws factual elements from the historical record and structures her story around them, integrating these facts so that they do not disrupt the momentum of the tale. As Clark explained in an essay for Canadian Children's Literature, she is "guided by the words that the Icelandic novelist, Halldor Laxness, wrote in Christianity in Glacier, ‘… the closer you try to approach history through facts, the deeper you sink into fiction.’"

Clark did not begin her work as a writer until after she married and moved from eastern Canada to Winisk, in northern Ontario. She began by writing poetry, and continued to do so after another move, this time to Calgary, in the prairies of Alberta. "I like the energy in the West," Clark explained in an interview with Nancy Robb for Quill & Quire. "It was very much the frontier, while the Maritimes were very traditional—and enclosed. Just walking down the street in Halifax, or any of the small towns I lived in, you can see the leaves leaning overhead, and you're kind of in a tunnel. It was almost like I was breaking out when I went west. Anything was possible."

After her move west, Clark moved into fiction. Her first book for young readers, Girl of the Rockies, is the story of a girl and a bear cub in the mountains. "I just naturally slid into the young girl's point of view," the author recalled to Robb. After scribbling out a rough draft, she bought a typewriter and finished the manuscript, sending it off to Ryerson Press, where it was quickly accepted. "I was so surprised when Girl of the Rockies was published, but I could see the glaring flaws," she added in her Quill & Quire interview. "That's when I knew I was serious about writing."

At the beginning of her career, Clark also raised her three children, and "there were long periods when I couldn't write at all," as she recalled to Robb. Like many working women, she sometimes found herself dealing with the tension created by the conflicts she felt between being a mother and being a writer. "I was always a bit too tired, and I thought that to be a good writer, I should do it full-time," she explained to Robb. "But I knew I had my priorities straight."

As her children grew older and more independent, Clark became more active in the publishing world. In 1974 she became a co-founding editor of Dandelion, a literary magazine to which she contributed for seven years. At the same time, her writing career flourished with such novels as The Hand of Robin Squires, Wild Man of the Woods, and The Moons of Madeleine. Based on historical accounts of searches for treasure on Oak Island off the coast of Nova Scotia between 1795 and 1971, The Hand of Robin Squires follows the adventures of nineteen-year-old Robin Squires as he travels from England to Oak Island with his uncle Edward after his father's death. Robin's father had invented a pump to use in mine shafts during flooding, and Edward wants his nephew to construct one of these, to be used in conjunction with a huge vault on Oak Island where the man plans to hide the Spanish treasure he seized during the battle of Vigo Bay. Robin's "first-person narration invites immediate reader-identification and his blend of visual detail, conversations, and action creates a sense of time present," maintained John Smallbridge in Canadian Children's Literature. Smallbridge added that "each chapter advances the plot significantly and contains sufficient foreshadowing and suspense to impel the reader to finish the book ‘at one sitting.’"

Wild Man of the Woods and The Moons of Madeleine were originally conceived as one story. However, in recognizing how differently boys and girls handle conflict, Clark opted to break the tale into two separate books which focus on cousins who travel to each other's homes for the summer. In Wild Man of the Woods Stephen leaves Calgary to visit his aunt, uncle, and cousin Louie in the Rocky Mountain town of Inverary. Madeleine, Louie's sister, visits Stephen's family in Calgary, and her experiences are detailed in The Moons of Madeleine. For both children, the summer is filled with experiences that cause them to gain in maturity. Stephen deals with being bullied through the use of a mythical mask which brings about a violent result. Madeleine, on the other hand, copes with her beloved grandmother's illness, as well as with her own confused adolescent feelings, during an escape to the cave of the First Woman and an introduction to the continuity of the circle of life. In a Canadian Children's Literature Annual review of both Wild Man of the Woods and The Moons of Madeleine, Barbara Michasiw pointed out that Clark's coming-of-age novels "are self-contained, and the truths the protagonists discover are profoundly different; but each complements the other." "For both cousins," the critic added, "the month will bring experience, testing, a symbolic death, and a rebirth into a new stage of maturity."

Taking readers further back in time, The Dream Carvers centers around the kidnapping of fourteen-year-old Thrand as the teen accompanies his father from their Greenland home to Leif Ericsson's colony on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Captured by the Osweet people to replace a young man of the tribe who was killed by the Greenlanders, Thrand first tries to escape, but eventually adapts to his new culture and comes to respect the traditions and lifestyle of the Osweet. "On the whole, Clark uses and invents from her source material with skill and tact," observed Frances Frazer in the Canadian Children's Literature Annual. Describing The Dream Carvers as "an exciting adventure story," Quill & Quire contributor Barbara Greenwood cited Clark's use of "language that is poetic and reflective."

In Clark's middle-grade novel The Word for Home, fourteen-year-old Sadie Morin attempts to provide her younger sister Flora with a sense of family after the girls' mother dies and their widowed geologist father leaves them in Mrs. Hatch's boarding house in 1920s Newfoundland. As it becomes clear that Mr. Morin will not be returning from his prospecting adventure, Mrs. Hatch becomes increasingly severe in her treatment of the sisters. Fortunately, Sadie develops several close and empowering friendships at school and also gains academic recognition. When the decision is made to transfer the sisters to a local orphanage, Sadie is able to deal with the circumstances with emotional clarity and confidence. In addition to noting the novel's value as a window into life as it was lived in post-World War I Newfoundland, Resource Links reviewer Victoria Pennell added that The Word for Home can be "read and enjoyed for the wonderful story it tells."

Geared for younger readers, Clark's picture book Snow transports readers to a winter in the north, where a boy named Sammy watches the snow pile up around his family's house every day for almost a month. Surveying the scene from the roof of his house each day as the deep snows melt, Sammy allows his imagination to conjure up a magical world under the fields of rising snow, his daydreams brought to life in illustrations by Kady MacDonald Denton. In Resource Links, Isobel Lang described Snow as "lyrical, imaginative and repetitive, full of fun and dreams," and Maryann H. Owen noted that Denton's highly textured, mixed-media illustrations "deftly reveal the various possibilities that Sammy ponders."

While Girl of the Rockies marked the start of Clark's career as a respected writer for young readers, the author has also penned novels and short stories for adults, and many of her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies. Sharing its setting with Clark's young-adult novel The Dream Carvers, the historical novel Eiriksdottir: A Tale of Dreams and Luck focuses on Freydis Eiriksdottir, the illegitimate daughter of Eirik the Red. In 1015 Freydis organizes an expedition to Leifsbudir, the Viking outpost in Newfoundland that has been established by her brother, Leif Eiriksson. Determined that luck and good fortune will be hers, Freydis endures many hardships during her journey, and these hardships continue even after she settles in her new home. "With the characters and conditions of the voyage very firmly established, Clark diversifies both plot and narrative, bringing the adventure to life," maintained Kathleen Hickey in Quill & Quire. Eva Tihanyi, in a review of the novel for Books in Canada, concluded that Eiriksdottir "is a meditation on the nature of the human spirit, its courage and treachery, its quest for material wealth and sensory adventure, but above all, its quest for meaning of its own self."

Another adult novel, Latitudes of Melt, also takes Newfoundland as its setting, but moves the action forward to the first decades of the twentieth century. As the story starts, a fisherman discovers an abandoned infant nestled in a basket left on the ice. Named Aurora, the child is taken in and raised by the fisherman's family. She grows up to marry Tom, a lighthouse keeper, and raise two children. The marriage of Aurora and Tom is the focus of the first part of the story, while the personal travails of their grown son and daughter figure prominently in successive chapters of Clark's multigenerational novel.The action of Latitudes of Melt, which also moves from present to past and from Canada to Ireland as Aurora's granddaughter Sheila searches for her grandmother's roots. Describing Clark's story as "as subtle as the working of water on ice," Booklist contributor Neal Wyatt added that Latitudes of Melt "exposes the daily struggle to build a life and cope with its inevitable dissolution." In Publishers Weekly, a critic concluded that "Aurora's story will please those with an interest in northerly lands and Titanic mythmaking."

Clark's penchant for historical fiction is something the author herself cannot fully explain. "While I am conceiving a story, be it historical or not, I seldom understand why I am attracted to it," she commented in Canadian Children's Literature. "Part of the process of writing the story is figuring out the attraction. I like to think this adds to the mysteriousness, the indefinable quality of a story, that which helps lift it from the page. The reason for writing any story, amorphous as the initial impulse might be, is simply that it is there. The fact that the impulse (or, if you like, inspiration) comes from the past makes it no less real."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 1, 2002, Neal Wyatt, review of Latitudes of Melt, p. 806.

Books in Canada, December, 1985; September, 1994, Eva Tihanyi, "Heroic Quests," pp. 48-49.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, November, 2006, Deborah Stevenson, review of Snow, p. 118.

Canadian Children's Literature Annual, number 14, 1979, John Smallbridge, "Two Mysteries: Pirate Treasure and Wisdom," pp. 73-75; number 50, 1988, Barbara Michasiw, review of Wild Man of the Woods and The Moons of Madeleine, pp. 86-87; winter, 1991, pp. 238-240; number 83, 1996, Joan Clark, "What Is History?," pp. 78-81; winter, 1995, Frances Frazer, review of The Dream Carvers, p. 80.

Growing Point, January, 1980, pp. 3619-3623.

Junior Bookshelf, April, 1980, p. 79.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2001, review of Latitudes of Melt, p. 1624; August 15, 2006, review of Snow, p. 837.

Library Journal, January, 2002, Joshua Cohen, review of Latitudes of Melt, p. 149.

Maclean's, June 27, 1988, pp. 52-53.

Publishers Weekly, January 28, 2002, review of Latitudes of Melt, p. 272.

Quill & Quire, December, 1985, p. 30; December, 1986, Nancy Robb, interview with Clark, pp. 12-13; May, 1988, p. 26; June, 1990, p. 30. May, 1994, Kathleen Hickey, review of Eiriksdottir: A Tale of Dreams and Luck, pp. 22-23; March, 1995, Barbara Greenwood, review of The Dream Carvers, p. 75.

School Library Journal, September, 1986, p. 132; September, 2006, Maryann H. Owen, review of Snow, p. 164.

Resource Links, February, 2002, Victoria Pennell, review of The Word for Home, p. 9; October, 2005, review of The Hand of Robin Squires, p. 31; November, 2006, Deborah Stevenson, review of Snow, p.118; February, 2007, Isobel Lang, review of Snow, p. 2.