In 1961, Watson was hired as a professor of English at the University of Alberta. "In Edmonton the Watsons became part of an active circle of writers and established the literary magazine,"The White Pelican" in 1970 along with Douglas Barbour, Stephen Scobie, John Orrell, Dorothy Livesay, and artist Norman Yates." Watson remained the founding editor of the "White Pelican" for its brief existence (1971–1975). White Pelican Publications published "Lions at her Face," the first book by Miriam Mandel, which won the Governor General's Award in 1973. In 1984 Watson edited the "Collected Poems of Miriam Mandel." Watson retired in 1975. In 1976, she and her husband moved to Nanaimo, where they died in 1998. Watson is best known for her modernist novel The Double Hook (1959), which is considered "a seminal work in the development of contemporary Canadian literature." ""The Double Hook" presents in concise, symbolic terms a drama of social disintegration and redemption, set in an isolated BC community... These themes are presented in a style which itself balances on a "double hook": it is simultaneously local and universal, realistic and symbolic." Watson has said the "double hook" of her title refers to the idea “that when you fish for the glory you catch the darkness too. That if you hook twice the glory you hook twice the fear.” She explained that her novel is "about how people are driven, how if they have no art, how if they have no tradition, how if they have no ritual, they are driven in one of 2 ways, either towards violence or towards insensibility – if they have no mediating rituals which manifest themselves in what I suppose we call art forms." In 1992 Watson published a novel, Deep Hollow Creek, which she had written in the 1930s. It was shortlisted that year for the Governor General's Award. ""Deep Hollow Creek" treats many of the same themes" as "The Double Hook" "in a manner which is more direct and conventional, but no less elliptical and challenging. It is fascinating to imagine the ways in which Canadian fiction might have been transformed if this startling and brilliant novel had been published at the time of its first composition." In the 1950s Watson published three interlinked stories, and a fourth in 1970, dealing with the family of Sophocles' Oedipus in a contemporary, realistic setting. The most critically discussed of these is "Antigone", a setting of the story of Creon and Antigone in the wilds of British Columbia.