I first met Elisabeth Harvor, the Ottawa short story writer, poet, and novelist, at the annual gathering of the League of Canadian Poets in 1993. That year, she had won the League’s Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for her first book of poetry, Fortress of Chairs, published by Signal Editions, Véhicule Press. I had actually been aware of her earlier. Ottawa was a much smaller city in the 1970s and 1980s and its literary community as equally small. She lived in Ottawa South and me in the Glebe, so our paths frequently crossed though we had never spoken.
Over the years since our meeting, I learned from her what an interesting life she had, and of her incredible dedication and single-mindedness to her craft. Elizabeth was born in 1936, in New Brunswick. Her parents, Kjeld and Erica (Matthiesen), had immigrated from Denmark and were important potters in the Canadian artisanal scene. Elisabeth often said that her parents’ hand-built pottery creations were similar to her approach to writing: both begin with an image or idea of what could be fashioned, followed by the laborious work of bringing it to fruition. She knew early that she wanted to be a writer, announcing her decision to her parents at age 10.
In 1957, she married Stig Harvor, an architect, born to Norwegian parents in Finland. After a period in Europe, Elisabeth and Stig came to Ottawa and had two sons, Finn and Richard. Sadly, the marriage did not last. Her son Richard, himself a poet, died in 2013, aged 49.
Elisabeth was certainly prolific. Her first collection of short stories, Women and Children, was published by Oberon Press in 1973. Although her work brought quick recognition, she decided to pursue a creative writing degree at Concordia University, where she received her MA in 1986. But the publishing world had taken note of her work as her fiction, poetry and reviews fiction appeared in Canadian, American, Mexican and European journals.
Penguin Books Canada published her second collection of stories, If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever, in 1988. Then, HarperCollins reissued Women and Children under a new title, Our Lady of All The Distances, in 1991. And then her third short story selection, Let Me Be the One, was released in 1996 and was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction.
Following up on the success of her first poetry collection, Signal Editions, Véhicule Press, issued The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring, in 1997. It was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award, given by the League of Canadian Poets.
The new century brought two novels: Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, released by McClelland & Stewart in Canada, and by Harcourt in the US, in 2000. This was followed by All Times Have Been Modern, published by Viking Canada/Penguin in 2004, which was nominated for the Ottawa Book Award. And a collection of poetry, An Open Door in the Landscape, by Palimpsest Press in 2010.
Elisabeth was the recipient of many awards, including the Alden Nowlan Award for Literary Excellence in 2000, the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career in 2003, the Malahat Novella Prize in 2015 and, in the same year, second prize in Prairie Fire Magazine’s Fiction Contest.
Although she lived in many different cities in her life, Elisabeth spent a great deal of time in Ottawa and so can be considered an Ottawa writer. While in the city, she was part of a women’s fiction group that included Nadine McInnis and Sandra Nicholls among others.
Many years ago, Elisabeth moved to the Wellington West neighbourhood, to a condominium just a few blocks from me. I often saw her walking in the late afternoon or evening along Wellington or the Byron Linear Park next to my home. We would chat and she would keep me up-to-date on what she had been working on that day, an idea or a character she wanted to explore in her latest chapter or her frustrations with edits that had been proposed to her work by an editor. All these underlined her consistent dedication to and pursuit of a literary career that spanned decades.
Blaine Marchand's poetry and prose has appeared in magazines across Canada, the US, New Zealand, Pakistan, India, France and Ukraine. He has won several prizes and awards for his writing. He has seven books of poetry published, a chapbook, a children's novel and a work of non-fiction. He has completed a new collection, Promenade.
Active in the literary scene in Ottawa for over 50 years, he was a co-founder of the Canadian Review, Sparks magazine, the Ottawa Independent Writers and the Ottawa Valley Book Festival. He was the President of the League of Canadian Poets from 1991-1993.