Wendy McGrath

Who is Wendy McGrath?

Wendy McGrath is a poet and novelist from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

McGrath's most recent novel, Santa Rosa is the first of a trilogy set primarily in Edmonton, Alberta. Santa Rosa was nominated for the 2012 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. North East, the second novel in the series, is forthcoming from NeWest Press in Spring, 2015.

Recurring Fictions, McGrath's first novel, is an experimental work chronicling the history of a Canadian family. The plot structure of this novel is non-linear, with shifts in narrative viewpoint and time. The first line of the novel, "Johnny Cash played the harmonica imitating the sound of trains" hints at one of the novel's recurring motifs. The often poetic style of this novel is multi-layered with spaces in the text and on pages providing literal and figurative openings for the reader to enter the world of the narrator. Short fragments of the text are also repeated at the bottom of some of the pages.

Her first book of poetry, common place ecstasies, explores themes of home, and childhood. A long poem, "Preserving," which is included in this collection was also published in chapbook form by Rubicon Press in February, 2011. "Preserving" uses found portions of text extracted from a home canning pamphlet as a springboard for poetic narrative that tells the multi-generational story of prairie women. As noted on the Rubicon Press website: "McGrath’s grandmother gave her that brochure and it was a palimpsest of sorts, with notes on the recipes and unexpected doodles penciled in. Publications like that brochure, as well as cookbooks, seemed to be in the background of her grandmothers’ and her mother’s lives when she was growing up. But, when she encountered these texts as an adult, their meaning became quite different."