Home office in Biggar, Sask., close to family farm
Merle Massie fits in fine anywhere on the University of Saskatchewan’s leafy campus and its lengthy hallways.
The university is like a second home to her after obtaining a bachelor of arts, a master of arts and a Ph.D. from there, and academic libraries and archives hold none of the intimidation for her that some in the public might feel.
However, Massie’s real academic work has occurred at home, in the small town of Biggar, Sask., where she wrote Forest Prairie Edge, the deeply researched history of the forest edge farming community around Paddockwood, Sask., that has just been published.
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For most of the time she was working on her Ph.D. and then reworking it for publication as a book, she was ensconced in a home office closer to the fields of her family farm than to the shelves of any academic library. This, to her, was an edge she had over urban fellow students and academics.
“I think that living in rural Sask-atchewan was actually a huge advantage for me because I had to be focused,” Massie said May 15, the day Forest Prairie Edge was launched.
“I had no choice. I had to be strategic.”
Massie got her first two degrees at the U of S in quick succession in the 1990s, but then left university behind and went to Calgary for 10 years.
When she and her husband re-turned in 2006, she enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate, committed to producing a book-length dissertation of the subject that had transfixed her since the beginning of her MA: the unique but neglected and disrespected farming community north of Prince Albert, Sask.
She waded through mountains of archives in Saskatoon, Prince Albert and elsewhere, forded rivers of academic histories and studies of Western Canada and produced her dissertation in slightly more than four years.
She kept away from the university for most of the time, creating her own library and set of archives in the cloistered calm of her Biggar home.
“It was my job. I worked at it every day. I took my kids to school and I came home and worked at it until they came home,” said Massie.
If she had been working inside the university, she thinks she would have been more easily distracted and probably still be years from publishing the book.
However, she admits her family home is a little odd compared to most rural homes because of her academic career.
“I’ve had to collect my own library. I own a lot of bookcases, stacked double full of books,” said Massie with a laugh.
“My office is a bit crazy.”
