He spent four years of his childhood on the Canadian prairies, but otherwise remained on the west coast until 1963, where he got his bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Geddes received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto. He taught English and Creative Writing at Concordia University for twenty years. Then he returned to the west coast, where he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University. He has also taught English at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and the University of Victoria, as well as serving as a writer-in-residence at Green College and the Vancouver Public Library. In 2007 he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Royal Roads University. Geddes has written and edited over thirty-five books, including seventeen books of poetry, as well as fiction, non-fiction, drama, translation, criticism and anthologies. His work has been translated into five languages. Before embarking on his literary career, he worked as a gillnet fisherman, loaded boxcars at BC Sugar Refinery, stocked shelves at Woodwards, worked as a fishing guide and drove a water-taxi. Geddes is known as one of Canada's best political poets, having been singled out for this honour by literary critic George Woodcock in the late 1960s, whose claim graced the back cover of many of Geddes' books. Geddes has explored human rights issues in places such as Chile during its dictatorship, in Nicaragua during its civil war, and in Palestine and Israel after the Oslo peace accord. He lives on Thetis Island, British Columbia.
Literature and the Environment
Gary Geddes is most known for being a political and humanist poet, but his writing is also deeply rooted in place. Although he cannot be defined as an environmental writer or nature writer, early books such as Snakeroot and more recent work such as Sailing Home: A Journey through Time, Place & Memory are based around a specific place and explore the human relationship with that environment. Geddes's relationship to the environment seems to be strongly nostalgic: Sailing Home is a memoir of his personal search for a place which may no longer exist, or may have changed beyond recognition, and Snakeroot also involves revisiting a landscape which is no longer home. Geddes approaches the environment with an attitude that ranges from confrontational to appreciative. In the poem "ladder grass" he reveals the appreciative side: "The ladder grass/ at my feet is unique, splendid," and in "snakeroot" he says, "The road to hell is paved." However, these lines co-exist in the book that contains the poem "blood and feathers," which is far more confrontational towards nature, especially in the opening lines "I refuse to be seasonal, stirred/ to a frenzy by a planet’s turning. Let the dead rocks and dying grasses/ speak for themselves, or be dumb." Whether confrontational or appreciative, though, Geddes' responses to the environment seem based in a strong attachment to the places he has lived, and in an undeniable connection between human beings and their surroundings.
, Royal Roads University, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws for his lifetime of human-rights work and for advancing literature in Canada, 2007
