It’s no exaggeration to call Patrick Lane a legendary Canadian poet. With nearly two dozen poetry collections, a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and a Governor General’s Award under his belt, Lane is firmly established in the country’s literary canon. “It’s not superstardom,” he chuckles. “It’s modest, and quite sweet. Sometimes the checkout girls at the supermarket ask what I’m working on. The boys at the AA meetings come over and say, ‘I hear you’re nominated for a prize. Way to go. Any money in it?’”

On the verge of his 70th birthday, Lane has a new notch on his belt: his first novel, Red Dog, Red Dog, was published by McClelland & Stewart in September, and long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

“Eight years ago, I went into a treatment centre for alcohol and drug abuse,” says Lane. “I came out the other end cleaned up and a little bewildered as I began a new life, and I wanted to do the things I hadn’t done during those other years, when I had devoted my life to poetry and short fiction. Once the memoir was finished, I thought, what the hell. I’m in my late 60s. It’s time to write a novel.”

The novel writing experience was eye-opening for Lane. “Poets tease novelists, because they’re such drudges. They spend five years in dark rooms, tapping away at a typewriter,” he laughs. “I have such respect for novelists now. I had no idea of how laborious it is to write a large book of fiction. It’s a test of endurance, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. One of the great curses of a marriage, I think, is to have a wife or husband who’s a novelist. Lorna is very proud of me, and she loves me dearly, but as I consider the prospect of a second novel, she’s suddenly looking at two years of a strange daydreaming man hanging around, labouring in a corner, muttering to himself.”

Red Dog, Red Dog takes place over a week in 1958, following the remnants of the Stark family. A decade previous, the family’s three daughters died; the father, Elmer, has been murdered; the mother, Lillian, is deeply dysfunctional; the eldest brother, Eddie, is a heroin addict; and the younger sibling, Tom, attempts to hold his disintegrating family together. “Tom tries desperately to understand his family, and why they’re in this rather bleak and desperate state,” says Lane, “but all he has are the fragmentary stories left behind. They tell us of what happened, when it happened, but never why.”

The narrative flashes back and forth through time, exploring the family’s history and landing in some very familiar locales. “Lillian and Elmer meet in Saskatchewan, in the Dirty ’30s, and eventually end up in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley,” says Lane. “A lot of this novel takes place in Alberta — at the Calgary Stampede, in Turner Valley, Manyberries, Medicine Hat. The West is the heartland for me. When we think about the West, our brains always go to Hollywood movies about Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, the great myth of cowboys and Indians. We sometimes think that we don’t have our own mythology, and my God, we do.”

Lane’s family tree is a who’s who of Albertan history: his aunt was born in the territories before Alberta became a province, and she rode in the Stampede parade; his great-uncle, George Lane, was one of the Big Four founders of the Calgary Stampede; and his father was a bareback rider known as the MacLeod Kid. “One year, when he won big, he and his buddies rented the top floor of the Palliser Hotel for three days,” says Lane. “I love staying at the Palliser. I go up to the top floor and think of my father, up there with the ladies and the booze, having a real good party.”

Respect for history is paramount in Lane’s writing, and he is no less respectful of place. “A lot of Canadian novelists want their novels to include a little France, some Britain, maybe a touch of Italy in there, in order to have a broader appeal on the international stage,” he says. “When I look back at the really great novels of the English-speaking world, Faulkner and people like that, they create a human world out of a small place. That’s what I’d like to do. The readers see themselves in any novel, in the characters you create, wherever you happen to place them.

“In Canada, there are very few novels centred in the 1950s. It’s a decade that most of us look back to, if we look back at all, and say ‘It was a very conservative time.’ That’s all we say, because following the ’50s, there was an outrageous rebellious period, with rock ’n’ roll and the rest,” says Lane. “The late ’50s was another kettle of fish, and this is a small-town novel. In small towns, things happen inside families that are terrible. Nobody talked about them. It was a time of great silence.”