About Alice Major
Alice Major has published twelve collections of poetry, two novels for young adults, and an award-winning collection of essays about poetry and science.
Alice came to Edmonton the long way round. She grew up in Dumbarton, Scotland—a small town on the banks of the Clyde, not far from Glasgow. Her family came to Canada when she was eight, and she grew up in Toronto.
After graduating with a BA (English, history) from Trinity College, Toronto at the University of Toronto, Alice moved west to work as a reporter with The Williams Lake Tribune in British Columbia.
She is an active supporter of the arts and writing community and has lived in Edmonton, Alberta since 1981.
Alice's first book was a prize-winning YA fantasy novel, The Chinese Mirror.
Alice Major and her dog Moose at home in their garden.
She was the City of Edmonton's first poet laureate and served a two-year term from 2005 until 2007. During her tenure, she founded the Edmonton Poetry Festival in 2006.
Since then she has published 12 books of poetry and an essay collection on poetry and science.
Alice went on to receive the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award in 2017 and an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Alberta in 2019, pictured below.
Alice is past-president of the Writers' Guild of Alberta and the League of Canadian Poets, and former chair of the Edmonton Arts Council.
Anthologies, awards, and recognition
Selected anthologies
“Sometimes You Have to Dig” published in Reimagining Fire: the future of Energy Durville and UpRoute Books, 2023.
Anthologies (partial list) continued
“We Have Elegies to Write” published in Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography Wolsak & Wynn, 2020.
“Currents” published in Waiting: An Anthology of Essays. University of Alberta Press, 2018.
"Mary T. McDonald: From Nowhere, Alberta" The Dark Horse, Spring & Summer, 2018.
Ten Canadian Writers in Context. Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 2016.
"Falling in Love with Poetry" Waterloo,The New Quarterly, 2016.
"The wide and starry sky: Falling in love with the poem." Waterloo, The New Quarterly, July 2015.
"Barbers & Big Ideas: Paradox in Math and Poetry." Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 2014.
"Word Shapes and Rhymescapes: Translating Translation Symmetry into Music and Poetry." Math Horizons, Mathematical Association of America, February 2013.
"The Ultraviolet Catastrophe" published in The New Quarterly, QuArc issue, 2011.
Awards and recognition
Winner, Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Knife on Snow, 2024.
Honorary Doctorate of Letters, University of Alberta, 2017.
Winner, Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry (Book Publishers Association of Alberta), for Standard Candles, 2017.
Winner, National Magazine Award Gold Medal, for “The Ultraviolet Catastrophe” (included in Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science), 2012.
Winner, Wilfrid Eggleston Award, for Intersecting Sets: A Poet looks at science, 2012.
Winner, Stephan G. Stephansson Award (by the Writers Guild of Alberta), for Memory’s Daughter, 2011.
Winner, Pat Lowther Award, for The Office Tower Tales, 2009.
Winner, Alberta Book Publishers Association Trade Book of the Year (fiction) for The Office Tower Tales, 2009.
Winner, “Poetics of Space” competition, 2004 (Sponsored by CV2).
Winner, Malahat Review Long Poem Competition, 2001.
Winner, Poets Corner Award, for Tales for an Urban Sky, 1999.
Winner, Shaunt Basmajian Chapbook Competition, for Scenes from the Sugar Bowl Cafe, 1998.
Winner, Alberta Writing for Youth Competition, for The Chinese Mirror, 1988.
Finalist, Canadian Library Association Book of the Year, for The Chinese Mirror, 1988.
Influences
William Hendry Docherty Major
My father was a poet too, and a profound influence on my life and work. In fact, you could say my experience of poetry leaps back over a hundred years of innovation and change, straight to the late 1700s and Robert Burns. That was because Dad wrote his own poems in Burns’ popular Scottish idiom — long narrative poems, in rhyme, with humour, pathos, and a passionate concern for the ordinary man.
We were a working-class, immigrant family, not scholars. Dad was a house painter for many years and wrote his poems on walls during tea break, then painted over them. He recited to us around the dinner table and at parties. I can remember his poems better than I can remember my own. His poems were — and are — wonderful. But he always felt that somehow they weren’t “real” poems. We knew that somehow they were not fashionable, not modern.
He called himself a “makar,” the old Scots word for a poet. He meant it as a bit of a slight, an apology. To him, makar meant a simple versifier, unsophisticated. In fact, makar is an ancient word in the English language that got preserved up there in Scotland. And it means exactly the same as “poet” which derives from the Greek word for “to make.”
Here are two of the poems I grew up with:
My faither’s faither’s faither
Mary MacMillan Matheson
There is a time in your life when you realize that you are shaped more by your mother’s childhood than your own. I may have been, in theory, a child of the post-war boomers, a product of the 60s.
But really, I am shaped by the world she grew up in, which was really formed by the Victorian era of inventions like orphanages, blast furnaces, clocks and cameras, and the shipyards of the Clyde that were now making ships out of steel instead of wood.
I have written many poems for her over the years, like "Transformation Passages", and the elegy in my collection of poems, Memory’s Daughter.
Poetry community
The poetry group Alice belonged to in 1993.
I could not have become a poet without other poets.
Perhaps other people can manage such an act of self-creation. But I couldn’t have without a writing group I discovered four decades ago. Oh, I had written poems through my teens and twenties, small, squashed, sporadic compositions while I was growing up in Toronto, but had never shown them to anyone else.
Then I arrived in Edmonton – not known as a literary capital – intending to take a generously paid public relations job and then move on again. And by some kind providence was brought into contact with a poet, someone who took poetry seriously and openly.
Shirley Serviss was the editor of an employee magazine for a sister company to the one I worked for. She invited me to a meeting of her poetry group. I went to the first meeting clutching a poem – not realizing I was supposed to bring copies to share – and read it to a living room-full of people listening attentively. That first time felt like offering myself for ritual disembowelment, but it opened a door I didn’t know could be there.
“My poetry group” I call it, but not to imply any kind of ownership or control. Almost the way I’d refer to ‘my’ eyes or heart. There wasn’t a leader—no eminence to sit at the feet of. Just a group of (mostly) women sharing their work, listening, commenting, learning from each other at a time when most published poets were male.
Many people have cycled in and out of the group over the decades. Some went on to publish books of poetry. For many others, it wasn’t about publication. It was the joy of community, of putting words on paper and sharing them. I have a large file box of draft poems from group members over the years that create a picture of poetry in a particular city in the years before and after the end of the 20th century. It’s the environment in which I could become a poet, and for which I am unfailingly grateful.