Edmonton-raised author Conor Kerr has stacked up several accolades over a short time. His debut novel, Avenue of Champions, won the ReLit Award, was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada 2022 First Novel Award and longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize. His poetry collection Old Gods was a finalist for the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry. In 2022, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch.
His latest novel, Prairie Edge, which came out in April, was longlisted for the 2024 Giller (the winner will be announced in November).
In Prairie Edge, an activist and a slightly lost soul who learned to comply through foster homes and youth jails, steal bison from Elk Island Park and release them into Edmonton’s River Valley.
“There was a herd of bison that got loose in Camrose and were stampeding down main street at 5 in the morning and some guy just driving to get a coffee saw this herd of bison. I always thought what a cool image that was,” Kerr says. It was later, while joking with friends, that he wondered what it would look like if a herd of bison was loose in downtown Edmonton. “That was the initial imagery behind the book.”
While the sense of place becomes another character in the story, the two main characters are so strongly drawn that readers will feel a sense of familiarity with them. Grey is an educated activist female Métis character. Ezzy, a Métis youth who yearns for family connections, will pull the heartstrings of anyone who has worked with youth in schools, group homes, foster care, and street outreach.
“They’re both composite characters based around people I grew up with or knew or at some point when I was working with students at NorQuest [College],” says Kerr. “He’s kind of a composite character of all that. He comes from that system of always being told what to do and then when he doesn’t have that happening, he’s kind of waiting once again for somebody to tell him what to do.”
But social services and the justice system aren’t the systems that assign roles, Kerr observes. “It kind of goes back a long time ago to when the Métis were on bison hunts, you’d have your job and your role. That got taken away from Métis people.”
This is a theme of the novel as both Ezzy and Grey experience long periods of seemingly directionless time while waiting for their lives to unfold.
Kerr grew up experiencing his strong Métis heritage, especially through his grandmother.
“My family held a lot of the old stories and teachings close. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. She was a very fierce and proud Métis lady.”
In contrast to Ezzy, Grey has strong ties to her mother, father, and family but also searches for meaning.
“She’s kind of based around a lot of people I know who have set up and built these organizations that advocate for Indigenous rights. I was hoping with a character like Grey, you’d see the person acting behind the scenes who doesn’t want to be in the spotlight but does the work in the background,” says Kerr. “I also wanted to kind of showcase the sides to people, too. You have these characters that might appear to be incredible, but there are not so good people on either side of the protests; [they’re] not all altruistic because they have these kinds of motivations.”
Kerr says he’s not a planner when it comes to writing, so these characters develop as he progresses. One of the novel’s many strengths is letting the characters’ lives fall where they may in ways that might not satisfy all.
“I did want to show that for a lot of people there’s just one little thing that can put them into homelessness there. It’s pretty tough.”
So, how would Kerr feel if he opened up the paper one morning and saw that a copycat group had released bison in city parks across the country? “I’d be very, very, very excited. There’s actually a really cool organization called International Buffalo Relations Institute, and they’re out of southern Alberta but also Calgary and Edmonton. They’re working on restoring bison to the southern prairie. And for the first time in 150 years, they had a bison herd that crossed between the nations and crossed over the borders. That’s pretty cool work they’re doing.”
Conor Kerr appears at Wordfest’s Imaginarium October 17 and 18. For more information and tickets, visit wordfest.com.
