cover image: Must Write : Edna Staebler’s Diaries

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Must Write : Edna Staebler’s Diaries

1 Jan 2006

Long before she became the renowned author of the best-selling Schmecks cookbooks, an award-winning journalist for magazines such as Macleans, and a creative non-fiction mentor, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen and continued to write for over eighty years. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries draws from these diaries selections that map Staebler’s construction of herself as a writer and documents her frustrations and struggles, along with her desire to express herself, in writing. She felt she must write—that not to write was a “denial of life”—while at the same time she doubted the value of her scribblings.

Spanning much of the twentieth century—each decade is introduced by an overview of key events in the author’s life during that period—the diaries vividly illuminate both her intensely personal experiences and her broader social world. The volume also presents four key examples of Staebler’s public writing: her first published magazine article; her first award-winning publication; the opening chapter of her book Cape Breton Harbour; and her lively account of the Great Cookie War. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries portrays an ordinary woman’s struggle to write in the context of her lived experience. “All my life I have talked about writing and kept scribbling in my notebook, as if that makes me a writer,” wrote Staebler in 1986. This volume argues that the very act of writing the diaries, with all their contradictory accounts of writerly ambition, success, and conflict, made Staebler the writer she yearned to be.

canadian authors, canadian diaries biography & autobiography 20th century personal memoirs literary criticism 1906- staebler, edna,

Authors

Edna Staebler

Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Control Number Identifier
CaOOCEL
Dewey Decimal Classification Number
C818/.5403
General Note
Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
ISBN
9780889209145 0889204810
LCCN
PR9199.3.S73
LCCN Item number
M88 2005eb
Modifying agency
CaBNVSL
Original cataloging agency
CaOONL
Physical Description | Extent
1 electronic text (viii, 301 p.)
Published in
Canada
Publisher or Distributor Number
CaOOCEL
Rights
Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
System Control Number
(CaBNVSL)jme00324129 (OCoLC)180772954 (CaOOCEL)402710
System Details Note
Mode of access: World Wide Web
Transcribing agency
CaOONL

Table of Contents