Almost straight away after Simon and Kaggsy chose 1961 for the current club year, I started to come across references.

As in Stacey D’Erasmo’s memoir, The Long Run (2024) which draws a clear connection between one writer’s life and work and the values of the era: “We believed in it. I believed in it. I was born in 1961, so this is the 60s I’m talking about.”

And in Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives (2025), where she writes: “If you were serious about being a writer in Canada in 1961, you were told by those who knew that you’d have to go to London, New York, or Paris, as Margaret Laurence had done, and Mordecai Richler, and Mavis Gallant—not that we knew who Mavis Gallant was yet—because Canadians didn’t respect writing, and especially not Canadian writing.”

She carries on, explaining that the Canadian poet “Earle Birney had written that the only books likely to be found in an average Canadian home were the Bible and the Edward Fitzgerald translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” (I can vouch for having seen the Rubaiyat on at least one family bookshelf, even though you could not have imagined a less likely literary candidate to have shelved in that household.)

“Most Canadians,” Atwood writes, “felt there wasn’t any Canadian writing, and even if there was some, it was bound to be second-rate. Real writers came from elsewhere.”

Which is where the idea to re-publish some earlier Canadian works resided. So you have Malcolm Ross and Jack McClelland and the “New Canadian Library” imprint with so many volumes published in 1961, drawing attention to works by writers like Morley Callaghan, who was chumming around in Paris with everyone else earlier in the century, but wasn’t half so well known as Fitzgerald and Hemingway. (So many of these titles show as having been published in 1961 in library catalogues, only because the NCL reprint appeared that year.)  

Atwood herself had reason to call out 1961, as her first volume of poetry was self-published that year: Double Persephone—its cover made with linoblocks and all 220 copies handset on a flat-bed press. (Her first independently published collection would appear three years later, The Circle Game,)

In John Moss’ guide to the Canadian novel, he presents just two books for 1961:

Sheila Burnford’s Incredible Journey (you might know the Disney films, their heartwarming story of two dogs and a cat finding their way home through the Ontario wilderness), and

W.O. Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid (comic sketches about boyhood in a small Prairie community, similar in style to Stephen Leacock or Garrison Keillor or Stuart McLean).

Of course, this isn’t the whole story. It overlooks, for instance, one of Lyn Cook’s twenty-three novels (aka Evelyn Margaret Waddell) written for young readers.

You probably don’t recognise her name, but I grew up reading Lyn Cook’s books and regularly checked the shelves of the village library, in the heart of Ontario’s tobacco-growing country, to see which were available to borrow, because I loved rereading my favourites

The first Lyn Cook novel I read was Bells on Finland Street (1950), about a young Finnish girl living in Sudbury, Ontario who loves to ice-skate. My least favourite was Jady and the General (1955) because it was about a boy (and his horse, but I liked horses). One of my favourites was The Secret of Willow Castle (1966) because Secret and Castle—right? And The Road to Kip’s Cove was… somewhere in the middle. Honestly, I couldn’t remember it at all, and that made me curious.

It turns out that Kip also is a boy, nearly twelve years old and adjusting to life where his family has moved, near the small town of Bloomfield in eastern Ontario. (So I guess I know, now, why this one wasn’t a favourite: with a few exceptions, I really only wanted to read about girls. Isn’t it funny though, that the cover illustrations have Kip and Jady looking so similar!)

The biggest part of the appeal of Cook’s stories was that they took place in towns and cities where people I knew knew people. My landlord’s son had a family who lived in Cornwall, for instance, but not Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising Cornall in England, but Cornwall in Ontario. So Cornwall was a town I knew, without knowing it. And I didn’t know Bloomfield, Ontario—but I did know it was between me and Cornwall. This is how I pieced together the world around me, via stories.

The Road to Kip’s Cove (1961) is set in what one character calls the “cradle of Canadian history”. There’s talk of the Seven Years War (1754-1763, between the French and English and their First Nations and Indigenous allies) and the American Revolutionary War (1776) when many families moved north because they identified as United Empire Loyalists (i.e. English Empire loyalists, as opposed to Americans). And there’s a map, which only adds to the sense of it feeling real and true. 

It’s clear that being Canadian is something distinct, something that matters. But the other boy in the story who plays an important role is Dan, who’s identified as a Mohawk, and his family tells stories about their people which builds on the foundation of first peoples that Kip’s already accepted.

“Big battles right here in Prince Edward County between Huron and Iroquois,” Albert explains to Kip. “Wiped out the Huron missions. Funny thing. Indians fighting right here where we’re driving, eh?” And Kip quietly admits, to himself, that it is a funny thing. Trying to reconcile events from long ago that impact the present-day. (Contemporary writers and scholars have challenged the prevailing narrative that the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee were routinely characterised as the aggressors.)

When Kip asks a local man if he can work for him over the summer, learning about planting and growing by assisting in his greenhouse, the man agrees, even though he has had regular seasonal help (because he hasn’t seen the boy recently). It’s Dan who has worked there in the past, and when Kip learns that, he worries that he’s taken Dan’s job, a job that wouldn’t be a learning experience, but a necessary part of their family’s income. In other words, Kip wants to work but Dan—a Mohawk boy—needs to work.

He intuits this but later, when the boys go off paddling together for several days, Dan must explain why the two boys are treated unfairly by a man who assumes the boys are planning to steal from him—must explain the prejudice held against Dan and his people. The implication is that Kip can’t comprehend that kind of prejudice because it’s not evident in his own family and friends, and that both families—Dan’s and Kip’s—recognise a shared humanity, regardless of prejudice held by others in their communities. But of course prejudice can flourish beneath the veneer of polite conversation.

There is a good bit of exposition in the novel, recounting of a few tales (including a myth about treasure left behind by the French, who ultimately “lost territory” on the continent during those wars) and legends, and an acknowledgment that most white people don’t know any Indians, and haven’t been on a reserve, so they simply cannot understand the situation (and only need someone like Dan to explain things). It’s a coming-of-age story, both a boy’s story and a nation’s story.

The reservation system is presented as one that suits the natives because these regions were once part of their traditional territory. And the traditions that have been lost (like the harvesting of wild rice on Rice Lake, near present-day Peterborough) were lost because they no longer functioned—the rice had become diseased and the crops unreliable. (Contemporary playwright, Drew Hayden Taylor, writes in “Cottagers and Indians” about one Indigenous man who confronts the cottagers on the lake who do not appreciate his efforts to revitalise the traditional rice harvests.)

There’s respect and acknowledgement of historical relationships in a collaborative context, and it’s clear that the Indigenous families have been here as long as—longer, even—than settler families (the Americans that moved there during wartime are viewed as recent arrivals in comparison to the white Canadian settlers). It’s also clear that these Indigenous families continue to thrive in and populate the area generations later (they didn’t all die off from disease, as some would have it) and manage complicated historical relationships (who warred on whom, and how accounts differ).

But of course Kip’s ancestors were not there first, and even after he learns of a place’s original name, there’s no question of overwriting the colonial name. (And even that name is a colonial renaming, just as Dan identifies as a Mohawk and describes the Mohawk peoples’ relationships with other nations in other colonial terms, like Ojibways and Iroquois. So there is no mention of these nations’ terms for their own peoples: Kanien’kehá:ka, the Anishnaabeg and the Haudenosaunee, for instance.)

Further, you can see by the title that Kip, himself, feels entitled to rename the places that matter to him …Kip’s Cove. But there is a consensus that people have evolved. It’s said that people behaved badly in the past, and Dan even uses the term “savages” to describe the way that some of his ancestors behaved (specifically towards other first peoples, rather than settlers). Anyone is capable of behaving savagely, it seems, and, so, everyone is capable of choosing to behave otherwise, especially when the importance of doing so has been adequately explained.

Even though The Road to Kip’s Cove wasn’t a favourite of mine when I was a kid, I enjoyed rereading it and thinking about Cook’s decision to include an Indigenous boy as a key figure in the narrative when that was still an uncommon approach (and long before the publishing industry recognised the importance of Indigenous storytellers telling the stories of Indigenous peoples). Her novel perpetuates some stereotypes but challenges some too, and lands on the need to repair historical damage and recognise one another’s shared humanity.

It feels like the quintessential ‘60s novel in many ways, even though it won’t be well-known internationally; I also selected an acclaimed and readily recognisable title from 1961, so more about that in a couple of days.

Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!