Often zany and wildly humourous, The Artist & the Moose features a narrator who is commissioned by the federal government to come up with a multicultural aesthetics for the 21st century. The answer, he thinks, resides in the big mystery that surrounds artist Tom Thomson.

Was Thomson's sudden death in Algonquin Park, in that fateful summer of 1917, an accident or was he murdered? To solve this mystery, the narrator sets out from his hometown, Forget, Sasatchewan, to visit the national archives in Ottawa. As his quest unfolds, readers meet the usual suspects in the Tom Thomson saga, including Tom's love interest, but as well a cast of fabulous non–human characters, such as the little bird, Thomson's pipe, Plot, Text, and most prominent of all, the magical Moose, named Ol' Twig–Eater.

While recognizing Thomson's artistic legacy, Kiyooka's fable offers a compelling critique of Canadian cultural nationalism and its violent appropriation of native land and culture., a long process of colonization that exiled the Moose from the very homely spaces once his own.

Complementing this newly edited work is the serial poem, "letters purporting to be abt tom thomson," first published in Artscanada in 1972. These poems capture Kiyooka's initial thoughts on Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, and set the stage for his writing on Tom Thomson in the years ahead.

The Artist & the Moose: A Fable of Forget is edited with an afterword by Roy Miki, editor of Pacific Windows: The Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka

Roy Kiyooka (1926–1994) was a painter, poet, photographer, and arts teacher. A second generation Japanese Canadian, he was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1926, grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and died in Vancouver, B.C. in 1994. He was one of Canada’s first “multi-disciplinary” artists, and the subject of several important exhibitions during his lifetime. His visual artwork included paintings, sculpture, film, and photographs. During his career he taught at a number of universities, including the University of British Columbia. Kiyooka was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1978.

Roy Kiyooka's profile page

Roy Miki
Roy Miki is a writer, poet, and critic who has taught and written about the work of bpNichol for many years. He was the editor of Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His major bibliographic study, A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, won the Gabriel Roy award from the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature for 1991. Miki is also the editor of This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians (1985); Tracing the Paths: Reading‚ Writing The Martyrology (1988); co-editor with Cassandra Kobayashi of Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol.

Cassandra Kobayashi
Cassandra Kobayashi helped shape the grass-roots community movement in Vancouver to seek redress for the forced removal, internment, and abrogation of the rights of Canadians of Japanese ancestry. She served on the national Redress Committee that negotiated the historic 1988 settlement with the Government of Canada. The struggle for redress is documented in her book, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, co-authored with Roy Miki.

Roy Miki's profile page