[In the following review, Creelman praises A Likely Story, although he admits the book contains little new material.]

For decades post-structuralists and cultural historians have been reminding us that the subject/self is an unstable construct of an unstable language, and that the author—if alive at all—is a function of the culture and not an independent creative identity. Yet despite these admonitions, we are still tempted to explore the inner-workings and reflections of the besieged writer. A collection of essays by Robert Kroetsch and two volumes of interviews by Jean Royer and Eleanor Wachtel sharpen this sense of temptation as they promise to inform us about the writer’s life.

Although promotional materials refer to the collection as “confessional,” the acknowledgement page of Robert Kroetsch’s A Likely Story distances the text from the problems associated with autobiography, noting that “these fugitive pieces … are concerned with the writing life, not with the personal life, of the writer.” A well known star of Canadian literature, Kroetsch frequently addresses literary conferences, and this volume brings together some of the talks he has given since 1989. The pieces are designed for public presentation; they are witty, humorous, allusive to personal experience, and strongly oral in their style and tone. Kroetsch is a brilliant story-teller and these essays mix disarmingly casual narratives from childhood and early adulthood with incisive comments about literary texts. Arranged according to the dates when they were produced, the informal essays address some of Kroetsch’s key concerns as a writer.

Beyond all else, Kroetsch is fascinated with the process of writing. Steeped in contemporary theory, he employs his poetic sensibility and develop metaphors, symbols, and simple narratives to examine the writing game without suggesting that the process can be stabilized or contained. Though he does not develop new or innovative critical positions, Kroetsch insists that writing is a mixture of desire and promise, trace and absence. Multiple analogies are suggested. Writing stories, he claims, is like venturing into the north to discover the “silence that would let me tell stories of my own.” The writer then mutates into a wanderer like the mad trapper Albert Johnson who “wore the silence of the artist like a badge, an indication of his will toward self-destruction.” Texts eventually function like scrapbooks which allow “us to bring into play whole areas of memory. And desire. And laughter.” The collection reiterates the idea that literature is a form of play and is finally impossible to pin down.

At the same time as Kroetsch insists that writing constantly slips away from definitive interpretation, he also suggests that writers are deeply influenced by culture and geography: “the plains or the prairies enable us to recognize ourselves as writers.” He claims that prairie writers have been educated in the assumptions of the European tradition, but they simultaneously recognize their existence on a geographic margin and thus must always reinscribe and resist the centrist discourse. For a writer who claims to suspect essentialist practices, Kroetsch comes close to reading geography as a transcendental signified, capable of defining all those who write within its bounds: “we who are twice marginalized cannot forget, dare not forget, the unspeakably empty page. The page that is our weather, our river, our rocks.” But then Kroetsch has always loved to dance along the edge of deconstruction and essentialism and these essays provide entertaining examples of his skill on the tightrope.

Besides the talks which examine literary absence and regional presence, A Likely Story also includes some fine discussions of specific writers including Wallace Stegner, Rudy Wiebe, Rita Kleinhart, and Margaret Laurence and two lyrical poems which are anchored in family experiences. For Kroetsch scholars who have been mining The Lovely Treachery of Words for nearly a decade, patiently waiting for a collection to document Kroetsch’s latest critical shifts and innovations, A Likely Story: The Writing Life offers little fresh material. But for readers who are looking for witty, challenging, and entertaining reflections on a writer’s experiences, this is a fine, pleasurable text.