Description:

Review

I did not write Klee Wyck, as the reviewers said, long ago when I went to the West Coast Villages painting. I was too busy then painting from dawn till dusk. I wrote Klee Wyck...in hospital. They said I would not be able to go about painting here and there any more, lugging and tramping. I was sore about it, so, as I lay there, I relived the villages of Klee Wyck. It was easy for my mind to go back to the lovely places. After fifty years they were as fresh in my mind as they were then, because while I painted I had lived them deep. I could sail out of hospital and forget about everything."

When asked to write about the "struggle story" of her work out West in collaboration with a biographer, Emily replied:

--- "Nobody could write my hodge-podge life but me. Biographers can only write up big, important people who have done great deeds to which the public can attach dates. I could not be bothered with collaborators, nor would they be bothered with the little drab nothings that have made up my life."

Her first book, Klee Wyck won a Governor General's award for general literature, the year that it was published.

Product Description

The title of artist, writer, and rebel Emily Carr's first book means "Laughing One," the nickname given her by the Native people of Canada's west coast. She returned the favor with Klee Wyck, a collection of 21 "word portraits" of their lives and ways. The memoir describes in witty, vivid detail Carr's visits and travels as she painted their totem poles and villages and got to know a people whose "quiet strength healed my heart." The book is reissued here with restored text and features the original introduction by Ira Dilworth and a new introduction by Carr scholar Kathryn Bridge.