Christi Verduyn, ed. Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries.

Rak, Julie

Christi Verduyn, ed. Must 1-write: Edna Staebler's Diaries. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier LIP, 2005. Viii + 265 pp. $24.95 paper.

Edna Staebler is best known in Canada for a series of cookbooks about Mennonite cooking and culture that began with the publication of Food Drat Really Schmecks in 1968. I remember the 1979 book, More Food That Really Schrnecks. I took the book out of the library because of that word in the title, the delicious-sounding "schmecks" But the book was more than a recipe collection: Staebler introduced me to a culture I had never seen. Her stories about Bevvy Martin and her other friends who lived and cooked simply made more of an impression on me than the recipes. I never forgot her descriptions of Mennonite women and the ways they went about their everyday lives in the kitchen.

Staebler's cookbooks created memorable portraits of people like these because they are a kind of life writing, a description and celebration of the lives of women who often lead lives which go unrecorded and unrecognized. Life writing is not found in a formal autobiography or biography but is found in unpublished, or unlikely, places--letters, diaries, and even cookbooks, genres that have historically been where women have written about their own experiences or where they have most often worked (in the kitchen, on the farm, or in the home). The study of this private writing that was not published as writing about the self is also called life writing, as scholars try to bring into view the hidden history of "ordinary" women who wrote in this way or who kept private writing separate from their public selves and public writing. In her professional life as a journalist, a travel author, and most famously as a cookbook author, Edna Staebler sought to make the lives of the people she wrote about as vivid and real as the lives of fictional characters. Throughout her career, she was a practitioner of life writing that most often was about and for women. And, like Staebler's efforts to get her friend Bevvy to slow down her cooking long enough to let Staebler write down what she was doing, much of this writing is a record of the difficulties of capturing seldom-recorded lives in words.

The same sense of writing as a potentially difficult process of recording life forms the core of the excerpts from Staebler's diaries that Christi Verduyn has selected and edited in Must Write: Edna Staeblers Diaries. Verduyn asks us to understand the diary entries of Must Write as another example of life writing, which she calls "a genre and a critical practice encompassing many kinds of texts" (3), including letters, diaries, and other personal documents. Verdun argues that the public writing of Edna Staebler must be considered in light of her unpublished diary writing and, even, that Staebler's diaries should be considered her life's work. In these excerpts from the thousands of pages of diary writing that Edna Staebler created and kept for more than five decades, Verduyn has selected passages about Staebler's life as a writer in order to show that Staebler's public writing life was supported, and even to some extent eclipsed, by her entries about her frustrations with writing and her doubts about her ability to be the kind of writer she dreamed of becoming.

Verduyn's introduction to Must Write sets the stage for reading the diary entries not as biography but as important personal writing which shows how an "ordinary" woman struggled with family problems and the idea of conducting a career that was unusual for a Canadian women during the first half of the twentieth century. Verduyn argues that recent scholarship on diary writing shows how diaries have as much literary quality and are as worth examining as published works, particularly for feminist critics who have brought the issues connected to women's private writing to the fore of feminist theory and literary criticism since the 1980s (4-6). Verduyn also says that Staebler's diaries add to the growing corpus of life writing and criticism about it that is available in a Canadian context. She concludes with a discussion of the literary value of the diary, although I am not sure how her discussion of the diary's open-ended and cyclical form must necessarily be that of ecriture au feminin. The tendency of diary entries to be more informal and less consistent than other forms of writing may point more directly to the devaluation of the diary form as unpublished (or unpublishable) work that so often has been the work of women, a point which Verduyn also makes.

At least in theory, Verduyn's decision to treat Staebler's diaries as life writing is a good way to select entries from the hundreds of diary volumes that Staebler wrote from 1922 until 2003, when she suffered a mild stroke and stopped keeping a formal diary. To this end, Verduyn selected diary entries from the 1950s to the year 2002 that are about the process of writing to find a way through the wealth of material. Although a few entries do deal with other issues, the idea of writing becomes the unifying metaphor of Must Write. To provide context for these entries, Verduyn includes carefully crafted biographical introductions to each decade of diary selections and includes annotations unobtrusively at the end of each section. To show that Staebler's public and private writing should be considered together, she also includes examples of Staebler's articles for Maclean's and the essay "The Great Cookie War" about a lawsuit connected to one of her recipes.

But the diary entries themselves--with very few exceptions--do not make for interesting reading. The focus on writing as a practice has the effect of making Staebler's concerns seem to be very narrow since Staebler used her diary as a way to castigate herself for not being a good writer and for not writing enough. Decade after decade, with very little change until the late 1990s when her entries become less anxious, Edna Staebler wrote obsessively about her yearning to write and her frustration with herself for not being a "real" writer who could work consistently. In 1953, for instance, she writes, "It's damn near time I stopped being a piddling, timid, exhibitionist ninny and got some work done. Some real work, honest, solid, constant and unafraid. Something about real people in conflict with life" (127). In 1964, she writes "I must work. I'd like to be able to discipline myself to work every day at my writing--hours and hours, every morning, some afternoons, some evenings" (144). In 1971, she tells herself "I am essentially hone lazy. I will do anything, anything to avoid working" (170) and more than ten years later, in 1984 she says "I must write. The passion is not spent. It is still there and I must make it vivid in my writing. I've written nothing this winter, only wasting time" (2277). In 1992, she is still berating herself for not writing: "And that's that, another wasted day. Watched two short days passing without any accomplishment" (250).

Although she could and did write about other things and probably wrote like this in order to inspire herself, it becomes frustrating to read entry after entry about Staebler's inability to become the writer she wished to be. The interesting things about much diary writing--sharp observations about people and places, personal revelations or even how the writer lives her daily life--are mostly absent from the text of Must Write because so many of the entries just record Staebler's admonishments to herself. Only a few entries near the end provide a sense of Staebler as an interesting, witty conversationalist whose crankiness about being a public figure is fun to read. One of the best examples of this is an amusing entry from 2002 where Staebler tells her cat that it was best to turn down an invitation to be on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno because "'We're quiet people. That show is not for us. All those Americans screaming at the sight of TV celebrities ... what could I possibly contribute to a show like that?' And so we went to bed" (282). Entries like this leave me wishing that I could see more than just a glimpse of Staebler the wry observer and fewer entries where Staebler wishes that she could write about anything at all.

Verduyn's work on Staebler's text will make Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries valuable for scholars who want to know more about Edna Staebler and who are interested in life writing by women. But the text of Must Write itself is not a so much a record of Staebler's writing life as evidence of Staebler's life-long yearning, as she writes page after page, for words that she cannot ever seem to find.

Julie Rak

University of Alberta