Author Glen Dresser

The first draft of Glen Dresser’s debut novel, Correction Road, was produced when he was a contestant in the 72-hour binge-writing marathon, the 3-Day Novel Contest, back in 2003.

The 20,000-word submission didn’t win, but with a little more time (three years) for reworking, fine-tuning and lengthening, it caught the attention of Ottawa-based Oberon Press and was published this December.

“There’s a lot of perseverance needed when writing a first novel,” says Dresser, who managed to squeeze in writing between working, getting married and opening a graphic design and illustration gallery (Uppercase, in downtown Calgary’s Art Central building) with his wife.

“In the end, you’ve got to see the big picture, work towards completion, and try not to make it too complicated for yourself,” he says.

Correction Road is an ambitious book that centres on a likable, though somewhat forlorn trio of characters — Hugh, Joan and Walt — in a small Prairie town at the end of the 1970s. Hugh, an officer in the Alberta Rat Patrol (an organization that still exists today and has a mandate to keep the province “rat free”) spends his time patrolling the Alberta-Saskatchewan border tracking down a particularly cunning rat. Joan, his longtime girlfriend, works as the night clerk at the town liquor store. Their lives are irrevocably altered when Joan finds herself drawn to one of the store regulars, Walt, a mysterious loner and curator of the local museum who is trapped in the past, both professionally and personally.

The novel’s central motif is the correction road of its title, a line along which the vast grid of Prairie roads is re-set, to correct for the distortion caused by the Earth’s curvature. Issues of belonging, alienation and the borders — natural, physical and emotional — are explored against the backdrop of a province at a crucial point in federalism.

Dresser, who hails from the small town of Carbon near Drumheller, stresses that “sense of place is hugely important to this novel,” and he credits Prairie writers Robert Kroetsch and Howard O’Hagan as significant influences.

“Given the setting and themes, I was surprised that a Western Canadian publisher wasn’t interested in it first,” said Dresser. “But there are certainly complex elements embedded in the book, like the unusual narration that takes it beyond the Prairie genre. I think it’s the unique stylistic features and universal themes — such as the quest for identity and the roots of separation and alienation — that give the novel its broader appeal.”