Rudy Wiebe Room announcement by Tom Wharton

Salter Tea, May 17 2017

From the early 1970s, room 4-59 in the Humanities Building has been a special place for students of creative writing. It’s not a big room – it was originally designed for much smaller classes than those we have today – but 4-59 looms large in other ways. For writing students like myself and many others, enormously important things happened there. And many of these important things only happened because of Professor Emeritus Rudy Wiebe. 

During the building of the Humanities Centre in the early 1970s, Rudy was consulted and had room 4-59 designed according to his vision for a writing workshop space. But his vision wasn’t just about the layout of a room, as innovative as it was. It was more about the kind of intense, focused encounters with writing that would happen there. Rudy challenged his students to give everything they had to their writing. He made us look unflinchingly at our own work. This was not easy, and room 4-59 could become a dreaded but necessary site of deep humbling. Rudy’s classes were always memorable, to say the least. Former students remember Rudy’s fist pounding the table to punctuate a point about good writing. He could cut our weak stories to ribbons, it’s true, but he talked seriously to us AS writers, so that we fledglings felt we were or at least could be part of a great lineage of Canadian writing. Many of us remember Rudy gesturing out the window to the river valley, and asking us: Do you know where you are? Do you know the history of this place, its stories? As writers, you NEED to know. 

Rudy held writing classes in room 4-59 for many years, and taught many future Canadian writers of distinction, including Frances Itani, Suzette Mayr, Minister Faust, and Aritha van Herk. Videogame creator Jason Kapalka, who recently gifted our Writer-in-Residence Program with a million dollar endowment, was a student in Rudy’s classes and credits his time in our writing program as the creative springboard for his later achievements. 

And so, given all that, in order to honour Rudy’s legacy as a teacher and mentor, room 4-59 has been officially designated The Rudy Wiebe Room. From now on, when we instructors ask our writing students, Do you know where you are? we can start answering the question by saying, You’re in the Rudy Wiebe Room, and go from there.