The Terrain of Matriarchs: From the Silence of Munro to the Centenary of Laurence.

The Margaret Laurence Centenary Project

Margaret Laurence, Vancouver Sun, 1960

It has been nearly two years since the country’s literary landscape underwent a quiet, tectonic shift. In July 2024, Andrea Skinner’s account of her childhood forced a reckoning that was as much about Alice Munro’s legacy as it was about our own complicity in its preservation. For one who spent years mapping the geography of Munro’s 'Literary Trail,' the terrain suddenly felt unnavigable. With the subsequent dissolution of the Munro Festival, a permanent stillness has settled over the fictional town of Jubilee, a silence that feels less like a pause and more like a final word.

And yet, Munro’s work remains a difficult, necessary presence. Her mastery of the short story is a monument that exists with a brilliance seemingly independent of her human failings, a landscape we cannot simply un-map. Recently, I’ve found myself leafing through Thank You for Visiting: Essays on Alice Munro’s Work, a gift from its editor, J.R. (Tim) Struthers. The book serves as a quiet insistence that these stories are a permanent fixture of our psychological geography, even if the air around them has grown thin.

Seeking a different sort of matriarchal light, I have drifted back toward Margaret Laurence. Last year, over lunch with Penn Kemp, a foundational figure recently honoured by the League of Canadian Poets, the conversation turned to the approaching 2026 centenary of Laurence’s birth. For more than half a century, Kemp has been less a witness to Canadian letters than its kinetic center; she is, as the Writers’ Union once put it, a ‘one-woman literary industry.’ Since her 1972 debut, Bearing Down, she has acted as a vital interlocutor, translating the aural impulses of the avant-garde for the high-table titans of the era.

As London’s inaugural Poet Laureate, Penn Kemp holds a stewardship of Margaret Laurence’s memory that is both deeply personal and profoundly civic. They were twin architects of a mid-century literary renaissance: while Laurence arrived at McClelland & Stewart just as a new Canadian consciousness was taking root, Kemp was finding her tribe at Coach House Press, where she published Bearing Down and edited IS 14 (1973), Canada’s first anthology of women’s writing. If Laurence gave the Canadian landscape a voice through her prose, Kemp gave it a pulse, literally bringing poetry to the streets by broadcasting it on transit buses to bridge the distance between the printed page and the public ear.

Today, that pulse remains as vibrant as ever; her latest collection, Colour Fielding, continues this project of sensory exploration, proving that as we look toward July 2026, the centenary is not a dusty retrospective, but a living dialogue we are both eager to carry forward.

Kemp’s memories of the Lakefield scene in the 1970s and 80s illuminate a period of quiet but profound literary revolution. She recalls a time when the village was a surprisingly interconnected hub: Margaret Laurence lived in her brick house on Regent Street, while Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson were nearby on their farm. Kemp moved through these circles with ease, acquainted with Laurence, Munro, and Atwood during a decade defined by both creative explosion and fierce feminist resolve. She remembers the collective resistance of these women when school boards in places like Peterborough and Huron County tried to purge Laurence’s The Diviners and Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, a shared battle against provincialism that forged a permanent bond among them.

Laurence’s prose first took hold of me in my early twenties, a time when one is particularly susceptible to those very contradictions of small-town life. I recognized her world because I had lived it. I attended grades eight through ten in Norwood, Ontario, a village that shared the same DNA as the towns Laurence and Munro immortalized. Norwood sits just a stone’s throw from Lakefield, where Laurence spent her final years and where the echo of her presence still lingers. Since 1987, I have been a frequent visitor to the villages of Huron County, finding in both regions a landscape of deeply rooted conventions and hidden lives.

It was Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel and Morag Gunn in The Diviners who radicalized my understanding of what a Canadian woman could be on the page. They were dangerous women, much like those created by Margaret Atwood, whose own works, such as The Handmaid’s Tale, have faced persistent bans. I recall seeing Atwood speak at Western University; she was funny, self-deprecating, and deeply engaged with the audience, a stark contrast to the gravity of the censorship her work has often provoked. These authors refused to blink at the raw panorama of human desire or the inequities of the spirit.

However, where Munro’s legacy is now clouded by a dark biographical shadow, Laurence’s end was a final act of agency. Facing terminal cancer in 1987, she chose to document her own exit, a Dance on the Earth that was both metaphorical and literal.

As I prepare for Laurence’s centenary, I also think of Mavis Gallant, the Montrealer who lived a life of fierce, solitary independence in a small Paris apartment. Between 1951 and 1995, Gallant published 116 stories in The New Yorker. I recall the Mavis Gallant centenary tributes by Bill Richardson on Substack, which first sparked my desire to do something similar for Laurence. I still remember attending one of Gallant’s readings at Western University in the mid-eighties; she possessed a masterful sense of humanity that mirrored Laurence’s own.

This project is still finding its destination. Pet projects have a way of taking on lives you hadn’t envisaged. But in this moment of literary reckoning, returning to Laurence feels like a necessary reclamation. She was divining these waters decades ago, looking at the vast, golden fields and finding the beauty in both the landscape and the struggle. BL