By Richard Cumyn
2012. If the interpreters of Mayan forecasting are correct, this is the year it all goes tits-up. We’ve already felt the first rumblings of disaster: widespread malfunctioning of a financial system, some would say an entire economic system, predicated on greed and inequality; the devastation of another small nation sitting atop a volatile geology, this time with nuclear-power plants built close to a tsunami-prone coastline; democratic revolution in the Middle East, the Arab Spring devolved to soldiers shooting their fellow citizens as they gather in city squares. In North America, Europe and around the post-industrial world, the Occupy movement, begun as hopeful outrage meant to push social responsibility into Wall Street’s field of vision, petered out as winter temperatures fell and our patience for the motley campers in our midst waned. We want the world to change, we really do, but not quite yet.
The Canadian government, re-branded in the name of the ham-fisted leader of the ruling party, rolls relentlessly over its opposition, especially if it thinks dissent will harm our fragile economic recovery. Thus the private-sector union representing flight attendants employed by the country’s largest commercial airline lost the right to strike, not because its workers provide an essential service but because idle planes mean that goods and people aren’t moving, which means money isn’t being spent, which in turn means that tax revenue is lost. Meanwhile, HarperGov.com demonizes those protesting the proposed pipeline to carry bitumen from the tar sands of Northern Alberta south and west, calling this coalition of the environmentally conscious a fringe movement funded (I wish I were making this up) by “billionaire socialists from the U.S.”
The warning signs tumble on. The probable Republican candidate for President of the Untidy States of Americard believes that corporations are people. The European Union wavers on life support, throwing Revelationists Jack and Rexella Van Impe into a state of permanent end-days orgasm. Proposed cuts to health and education spending in Ontario, reductions more akin to amputation than to liposuction, threaten to set social spending in this province back a century. A debris field the size of Texas is headed this way from across the Pacific. We ingest estrogen and microscopic bits of waste plastic with every glass of water we drink. It’s now almost impossible worldwide to find wheat or corn that has not been genetically modified. The Mayans may not have known exactly how our way of life would come to a groaning halt, but for an ancient civilization they had the timing right. Or very close. The polar ice caps are melting at accelerating rates, the average global temperature is rising inexorably despite columnist Margaret Wente’s assurance to the contrary, and I have yet to even touch on my intended subject: Canadian writing and publishing in a time of globalization and digitization. It’s all connected, all one, when you think about it.
Random House, subsidiary of the German mega-publisher Bertlesmann AG, announced recently that the publisher McClelland and Stewart, iconic in this country and more than a century old, would no longer be run as an independent Canadian company. The announcement was not a shock, Random House having had a controlling interest in M&S for some years now. But the move is significant. The tectonic shift away from print and away from a multiplicity of diverse local publishing companies is complete. English Canadian literature, a phrase our parents could still say without wincing or giggling, is as far as I know still a category on Amazon.ca. I haven’t checked the Chapters site lately. I assume they still sell Canadian books alongside their lifestyle and décor items. We continue to fête the shortlisted Giller Prize nominees and occasionally pluck a small-press title from obscurity, though not without fuss and inconvenience. The print-run shortage that followed Johanna Skibsrud’s win for her first novel, The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau), underscored how tenuous is the footing and how eccentric the business practice of the small presses in this country. We’re still buying books, you might say, so what’s the fuss? It’s that we’re not buying Canadian titles, not in the numbers needed to sustain an indigenous publishing industry.
Europeans love Canadian books, we keep hearing. Mordecai Richler’s Barney Panofsky, for example, has become the epitome of literary machismo in Italy, replacing libidinous media moguls and snoozing cruise-ship captains. The love affair may be coming to a close, however. I suspect that Greeks and Spaniards are hawking the promotional copies of Oryx & Crake Canadian Heritage sends them and using the money to buy food. You might say it’s a little difficult to entice Dubliners to sit through Guy Vanderhaeghe’s latest epic of the great Northwest while their once vibrant economy gasps for breath.
In an attempt to create instant readers, the CBC urges us to follow such giddy programming as Canada Reads, maybe because the format reminds us of reality TV. Listen to Battle of the Books instead of reading about battles depicted in books. Which novel will remain standing after the smoke has cleared? Which celebrity readers will come to verbal fisticuffs defending their champions? And what of the losers, the non-Survivors? Should we not take the contest to its logical end and expunge those titles, every copy, every trace, not only from our minds and those few bookshelves still bearing print but from our Kobo readers? (Note to self: Silly idea. Any exposure = gold. Must find way to get my book on next year’s list! Call agent, launch trial balloon…)
The instant my latest fiction collection had an ISBN, it began to be listed on bookselling websites around the world. India, China, South Africa, Australia. Amazing, I remember thinking. Readers! Potentially millions of ‘em. Readers of English, aspiring speakers of English, minds hungry for uniquely Canadian stories. Well. Let me tell you. Not only are people not buying, the title is consistently listed as being unavailable. I suspect that even if the book were selling, no revenue would ever trickle back to me or the press, which so bravely puts out twelve to fifteen titles like mine a year. Knock-off print copies and e-book piracy threaten to throw us back to the days of rogue American printers ripping off the latest Dickens as soon as it was offloaded in Boston. And the sad, head-shaking truth is that such U.S. Congressional proposals as PIPA and SOPA, blunt instruments designed to stop copyright infringement (which bills were thankfully tossed aside in the wake of those demanding their right to get and share information), were entirely misguided, predicated on the protection of corporate interests.
My recently published novella, ostensibly Canadian by dint of my citizenship and my publisher’s location, is qualitatively a different entity than a song or a movie. Granted each is a work of intellectual property. Now that my book can be disseminated electronically it shares with music and video that same potential ubiquity. The difference, the reason why we need a separate copyright law to cover the written word, especially literary writing, is that the consumer must work to appreciate my creation. The reader contributes an essential element to the equation: a mind without which my book is mute. Sure, I deserve to be paid a little when someone buys access to my work, from wherever that reader might be in the world. Likewise, because the transaction does not end at the cash register or at PayPal’s checkout counter, but requires active participation by the reader, my collaborator has the right to do what she wants with it, including giving it away, lending it, making it available to her students or selling it, just as she would with a paper book.
In the global flea market that is the business of bookselling today, the distinction “Canadian” doesn’t really mean much except to bureaucrats and arts advocates. The qualification, “writing in English,” on the other hand, does. A Canadian living in California writes a darkly entertaining dust-up set in the American West of 160 years ago and he becomes one of this country’s publishing darlings. Esi Edugyan, born in Calgary to Ghanaian immigrants, set her novel, Half Blood Blues, in Jazz Age Paris. The reaction by the reading public has been instant love. Both her book and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers are sensational reads, bestsellers, but are the titles Canadian? Sure, of course, why not. Ultimately what does it matter? All we want is a good book.
The most identifiably Canadian writing in English of the past twenty years, the strongest group of literary voices, comes from the province that in 1949 came within a hair’s breadth of choosing independence over admission to Confederation. The tough rural realism of Ernest Buckler and Sinclair Ross, once CanLit mainstays, is now considered hokey. It’s a truism that literary tastes shift over time. In those newspapers where books are still reviewed, former stand-alone book sections are now folded into “arts” coverage, another term for the kind of gossipy trill a thirteen-year-old might exude at the sight of a cardboard Justin Bieber cutout in the drugstore. Can we even call ourselves readers anymore?
We are consumers of information, fickle, easily distracted nibblers at text. People, usually men about whom I hold an otherwise high opinion, will admit without a shred of irony and knowing what kind of writing I do, that they read exclusively nonfiction. If the literary novel is seen to be on life support, the identifiably Canadian book of literary fiction in English has been so long laid out on the mortuary slab it’s beginning to smell. A minuscule number of English Canadian authors sell enough copies of their books that they don’t have to moonlight as teachers, editors or hospital orderlies. Canada is 145 years old this year, relatively young to have a publishing industry in such a perilous state. All right, so what was the situation in America the same number of years after Independence? Were the Yanks of 1921 similarly wringing their hands over whether or not they had a distinct literature?
In one sense, yes, they were. Such intellectuals as John Dewey were casting back to Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, holding them up as preeminent examples of uniquely American voices. Mark Twain, eleven years dead but never out of print or the public’s consciousness, had shown that a great novel could be written in the vernacular of a poor illiterate child. With the help of interest by D.H. Lawrence and others, Moby Dick was gaining a second and from then on an enduring life after being rediscovered in the 1920s, seventy years after initial publication and dismal sales. The poetry of Emily Dickinson was similarly brought to a larger audience in that decade after the end of World War I. The work of Henry James, recently deceased (1916), and of Edith Wharton, though arguably influenced by and reproducing a British sensibility, were yet investigating what it meant to be American and newly moneyed, at home and abroad. Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, chroniclers of the prairie and the small town, the first in all its harsh natural beauty and the second, its suffocating grotesquerie, helped define the literature of Middle America. In an explosion of creativity, energy, optimism and rebellion, the early 1920s saw first books by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Edna St. Vincent Millay took established poetic forms and gave them a lyrically American, feminist flavour. Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot all came to prominence in those years.
Differentiating American literature from that of the UK was relatively easy. For one thing distance, an entire ocean and the time it took to traverse it, gave America space necessary to the development of a body of writing wholly its own. This exuberant, nouveau riche, industrial power nipping at Britain’s heels, those of an empire in decline, had much to celebrate. American involvement in the recent world war had been minimal but pivotal, giving them perceived license to take credit for victory in Europe. The USA of 1921 was not spread thin, as was Great Britain, trying to manage far-flung and increasingly fractious colonies. The American West was opened, Hollywood was growing, and millionaires were building their dream homes in the Thousand Islands and Beverly Hills. And people read. Newspapers, usually more than one a day. Were there more readers then than now, relative to population size? Maybe not, but I have an inkling that for Jazz Age Americans the writer as an authoritative figure and the book as object of social influence held more sway and were more important to the average citizen, avid reader or not, than they are to present-day Canadians.
The difference may lie in America’s belief in their citizens’ extraterritoriality abroad. Whether depicting life in Paris or Kenya, American writers have always left the stamp of their national ego on foreign soil. Canada has tended to play an opposite role, until now defining itself as a geography of inclusion. Like an extra-thick paper towel we absorb, whether it be immigrants and their stories or movies and music from south of the border. We take it all in, we consume, we synthesize, and the books we write tend to reflect that national trait. We may be still too young for our regional histories to have generated a Yoknapatawpha County, but its equivalent could well be coming, the heir to Faulkner and to David Adams Richards beavering away at a remote laptop somewhere. We like to boast about the brilliance and accomplishment of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, although most readers of The New Yorker and Harper’s believe them to be American writers. That’s all right. Isn’t it so very Canadian to take pride in international recognition, and even the outright adoption by a country greater than our own, of an artist born on our soil. You can live your entire life abroad and be published only by foreign presses, but as long as you were born here and your work is deemed worthy, the Canada Council will fund you.
A single entity called Canadian literature may no longer exist. If 2012 is the equivalent of America’s 1921, no coherent wave of distinctly English-Canadian writing appears to be building on the horizon, not the way the U.S. saw renewed interest in its great Nineteenth Century writers or an emergence of youthful genius fired by innovation and the expression of modernity. Theirs was a generation of children of immigrants eager to exchange old-world identities for new. Today, more and more, the most successful authors who call themselves Canadian writers come from elsewhere in the world and tend to set their stories there. The urge to tie their work to a Canadian landscape, real or imagined, and to express a unified, uber-Canadian character, doesn’t seem as important to us as it was for Americans of the Roaring Twenties. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that our best books need not be set here. The world has become too small for arbitrary divisions: nation states, territorial boundaries, divisive international laws and literature burdened by national labels.
Knowing woefully little about Canadian writing, I grew up dreaming of one day writing a latter-day Oliver Twist. My early reading was in books from England and America. I still identify with and find my greatest inspiration from the work of writers from there. My job as I see it is to write good stories and be different enough from everybody else that my stuff will stand out and be read. I work in English, that ever-changing, mongrel language. I draw upon what is around me and what I remember. I come from a cultural milieu that used to dominate but which is quickly losing ground, perhaps even becoming an irrelevant perspective in the arts. I envision my descendants living like vestiges of the Roman Empire, eking out a diminished existence in a world dominated by Asian interests. They will be like the Sicilian mafia in America today, speaking not a derivation of Latin but something vaguely resembling English, their ancestors’ (i.e., my) sense of entitlement no longer supportable. They will follow an alien code of honour based on the belief in liberty and responsibility and, like devotees of an underground sect, perpetuate an archaic text-based form of communication. The book. Codex. Remnant in the debris field of history.
In a way, English Canadian writers like me resemble those tourists who stood on the beaches of Indonesia and Thailand on Boxing Day of 2004 and watched transfixed as an ominous black line filled the sea’s horizon. Though in danger of being swept away, we’re intrigued to the last by the coming changes in our vocation and livelihood. We’re dumbstruck. We no longer know who we’re supposed to be. Still, it may not be the disaster we think it is. Readers generally don’t care where a book’s author hails from. Tomorrow we will still get up, drink a cup of coffee, throw some words at the screen and see if they stick.
Standing in the Debris Field
Articles
By Richard Cumyn
2012. If the interpreters of Mayan forecasting are correct, this is the year it all goes tits-up. We’ve already felt the first rumblings of disaster: widespread malfunctioning of a financial system, some would say an entire economic system, predicated on greed and inequality; the devastation of another small nation sitting atop a volatile geology, this time with nuclear-power plants built close to a tsunami-prone coastline; democratic revolution in the Middle East, the Arab Spring devolved to soldiers shooting their fellow citizens as they gather in city squares. In North America, Europe and around the post-industrial world, the Occupy movement, begun as hopeful outrage meant to push social responsibility into Wall Street’s field of vision, petered out as winter temperatures fell and our patience for the motley campers in our midst waned. We want the world to change, we really do, but not quite yet.
The Canadian government, re-branded in the name of the ham-fisted leader of the ruling party, rolls relentlessly over its opposition, especially if it thinks dissent will harm our fragile economic recovery. Thus the private-sector union representing flight attendants employed by the country’s largest commercial airline lost the right to strike, not because its workers provide an essential service but because idle planes mean that goods and people aren’t moving, which means money isn’t being spent, which in turn means that tax revenue is lost. Meanwhile, HarperGov.com demonizes those protesting the proposed pipeline to carry bitumen from the tar sands of Northern Alberta south and west, calling this coalition of the environmentally conscious a fringe movement funded (I wish I were making this up) by “billionaire socialists from the U.S.”
The warning signs tumble on. The probable Republican candidate for President of the Untidy States of Americard believes that corporations are people. The European Union wavers on life support, throwing Revelationists Jack and Rexella Van Impe into a state of permanent end-days orgasm. Proposed cuts to health and education spending in Ontario, reductions more akin to amputation than to liposuction, threaten to set social spending in this province back a century. A debris field the size of Texas is headed this way from across the Pacific. We ingest estrogen and microscopic bits of waste plastic with every glass of water we drink. It’s now almost impossible worldwide to find wheat or corn that has not been genetically modified. The Mayans may not have known exactly how our way of life would come to a groaning halt, but for an ancient civilization they had the timing right. Or very close. The polar ice caps are melting at accelerating rates, the average global temperature is rising inexorably despite columnist Margaret Wente’s assurance to the contrary, and I have yet to even touch on my intended subject: Canadian writing and publishing in a time of globalization and digitization. It’s all connected, all one, when you think about it.
Random House, subsidiary of the German mega-publisher Bertlesmann AG, announced recently that the publisher McClelland and Stewart, iconic in this country and more than a century old, would no longer be run as an independent Canadian company. The announcement was not a shock, Random House having had a controlling interest in M&S for some years now. But the move is significant. The tectonic shift away from print and away from a multiplicity of diverse local publishing companies is complete. English Canadian literature, a phrase our parents could still say without wincing or giggling, is as far as I know still a category on Amazon.ca. I haven’t checked the Chapters site lately. I assume they still sell Canadian books alongside their lifestyle and décor items. We continue to fête the shortlisted Giller Prize nominees and occasionally pluck a small-press title from obscurity, though not without fuss and inconvenience. The print-run shortage that followed Johanna Skibsrud’s win for her first novel, The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau), underscored how tenuous is the footing and how eccentric the business practice of the small presses in this country. We’re still buying books, you might say, so what’s the fuss? It’s that we’re not buying Canadian titles, not in the numbers needed to sustain an indigenous publishing industry.
Europeans love Canadian books, we keep hearing. Mordecai Richler’s Barney Panofsky, for example, has become the epitome of literary machismo in Italy, replacing libidinous media moguls and snoozing cruise-ship captains. The love affair may be coming to a close, however. I suspect that Greeks and Spaniards are hawking the promotional copies of Oryx & Crake Canadian Heritage sends them and using the money to buy food. You might say it’s a little difficult to entice Dubliners to sit through Guy Vanderhaeghe’s latest epic of the great Northwest while their once vibrant economy gasps for breath.
In an attempt to create instant readers, the CBC urges us to follow such giddy programming as Canada Reads, maybe because the format reminds us of reality TV. Listen to Battle of the Books instead of reading about battles depicted in books. Which novel will remain standing after the smoke has cleared? Which celebrity readers will come to verbal fisticuffs defending their champions? And what of the losers, the non-Survivors? Should we not take the contest to its logical end and expunge those titles, every copy, every trace, not only from our minds and those few bookshelves still bearing print but from our Kobo readers? (Note to self: Silly idea. Any exposure = gold. Must find way to get my book on next year’s list! Call agent, launch trial balloon…)
The instant my latest fiction collection had an ISBN, it began to be listed on bookselling websites around the world. India, China, South Africa, Australia. Amazing, I remember thinking. Readers! Potentially millions of ‘em. Readers of English, aspiring speakers of English, minds hungry for uniquely Canadian stories. Well. Let me tell you. Not only are people not buying, the title is consistently listed as being unavailable. I suspect that even if the book were selling, no revenue would ever trickle back to me or the press, which so bravely puts out twelve to fifteen titles like mine a year. Knock-off print copies and e-book piracy threaten to throw us back to the days of rogue American printers ripping off the latest Dickens as soon as it was offloaded in Boston. And the sad, head-shaking truth is that such U.S. Congressional proposals as PIPA and SOPA, blunt instruments designed to stop copyright infringement (which bills were thankfully tossed aside in the wake of those demanding their right to get and share information), were entirely misguided, predicated on the protection of corporate interests.
My recently published novella, ostensibly Canadian by dint of my citizenship and my publisher’s location, is qualitatively a different entity than a song or a movie. Granted each is a work of intellectual property. Now that my book can be disseminated electronically it shares with music and video that same potential ubiquity. The difference, the reason why we need a separate copyright law to cover the written word, especially literary writing, is that the consumer must work to appreciate my creation. The reader contributes an essential element to the equation: a mind without which my book is mute. Sure, I deserve to be paid a little when someone buys access to my work, from wherever that reader might be in the world. Likewise, because the transaction does not end at the cash register or at PayPal’s checkout counter, but requires active participation by the reader, my collaborator has the right to do what she wants with it, including giving it away, lending it, making it available to her students or selling it, just as she would with a paper book.
In the global flea market that is the business of bookselling today, the distinction “Canadian” doesn’t really mean much except to bureaucrats and arts advocates. The qualification, “writing in English,” on the other hand, does. A Canadian living in California writes a darkly entertaining dust-up set in the American West of 160 years ago and he becomes one of this country’s publishing darlings. Esi Edugyan, born in Calgary to Ghanaian immigrants, set her novel, Half Blood Blues, in Jazz Age Paris. The reaction by the reading public has been instant love. Both her book and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers are sensational reads, bestsellers, but are the titles Canadian? Sure, of course, why not. Ultimately what does it matter? All we want is a good book.
The most identifiably Canadian writing in English of the past twenty years, the strongest group of literary voices, comes from the province that in 1949 came within a hair’s breadth of choosing independence over admission to Confederation. The tough rural realism of Ernest Buckler and Sinclair Ross, once CanLit mainstays, is now considered hokey. It’s a truism that literary tastes shift over time. In those newspapers where books are still reviewed, former stand-alone book sections are now folded into “arts” coverage, another term for the kind of gossipy trill a thirteen-year-old might exude at the sight of a cardboard Justin Bieber cutout in the drugstore. Can we even call ourselves readers anymore?
We are consumers of information, fickle, easily distracted nibblers at text. People, usually men about whom I hold an otherwise high opinion, will admit without a shred of irony and knowing what kind of writing I do, that they read exclusively nonfiction. If the literary novel is seen to be on life support, the identifiably Canadian book of literary fiction in English has been so long laid out on the mortuary slab it’s beginning to smell. A minuscule number of English Canadian authors sell enough copies of their books that they don’t have to moonlight as teachers, editors or hospital orderlies. Canada is 145 years old this year, relatively young to have a publishing industry in such a perilous state. All right, so what was the situation in America the same number of years after Independence? Were the Yanks of 1921 similarly wringing their hands over whether or not they had a distinct literature?
In one sense, yes, they were. Such intellectuals as John Dewey were casting back to Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, holding them up as preeminent examples of uniquely American voices. Mark Twain, eleven years dead but never out of print or the public’s consciousness, had shown that a great novel could be written in the vernacular of a poor illiterate child. With the help of interest by D.H. Lawrence and others, Moby Dick was gaining a second and from then on an enduring life after being rediscovered in the 1920s, seventy years after initial publication and dismal sales. The poetry of Emily Dickinson was similarly brought to a larger audience in that decade after the end of World War I. The work of Henry James, recently deceased (1916), and of Edith Wharton, though arguably influenced by and reproducing a British sensibility, were yet investigating what it meant to be American and newly moneyed, at home and abroad. Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, chroniclers of the prairie and the small town, the first in all its harsh natural beauty and the second, its suffocating grotesquerie, helped define the literature of Middle America. In an explosion of creativity, energy, optimism and rebellion, the early 1920s saw first books by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Edna St. Vincent Millay took established poetic forms and gave them a lyrically American, feminist flavour. Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot all came to prominence in those years.
Differentiating American literature from that of the UK was relatively easy. For one thing distance, an entire ocean and the time it took to traverse it, gave America space necessary to the development of a body of writing wholly its own. This exuberant, nouveau riche, industrial power nipping at Britain’s heels, those of an empire in decline, had much to celebrate. American involvement in the recent world war had been minimal but pivotal, giving them perceived license to take credit for victory in Europe. The USA of 1921 was not spread thin, as was Great Britain, trying to manage far-flung and increasingly fractious colonies. The American West was opened, Hollywood was growing, and millionaires were building their dream homes in the Thousand Islands and Beverly Hills. And people read. Newspapers, usually more than one a day. Were there more readers then than now, relative to population size? Maybe not, but I have an inkling that for Jazz Age Americans the writer as an authoritative figure and the book as object of social influence held more sway and were more important to the average citizen, avid reader or not, than they are to present-day Canadians.
The difference may lie in America’s belief in their citizens’ extraterritoriality abroad. Whether depicting life in Paris or Kenya, American writers have always left the stamp of their national ego on foreign soil. Canada has tended to play an opposite role, until now defining itself as a geography of inclusion. Like an extra-thick paper towel we absorb, whether it be immigrants and their stories or movies and music from south of the border. We take it all in, we consume, we synthesize, and the books we write tend to reflect that national trait. We may be still too young for our regional histories to have generated a Yoknapatawpha County, but its equivalent could well be coming, the heir to Faulkner and to David Adams Richards beavering away at a remote laptop somewhere. We like to boast about the brilliance and accomplishment of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, although most readers of The New Yorker and Harper’s believe them to be American writers. That’s all right. Isn’t it so very Canadian to take pride in international recognition, and even the outright adoption by a country greater than our own, of an artist born on our soil. You can live your entire life abroad and be published only by foreign presses, but as long as you were born here and your work is deemed worthy, the Canada Council will fund you.
A single entity called Canadian literature may no longer exist. If 2012 is the equivalent of America’s 1921, no coherent wave of distinctly English-Canadian writing appears to be building on the horizon, not the way the U.S. saw renewed interest in its great Nineteenth Century writers or an emergence of youthful genius fired by innovation and the expression of modernity. Theirs was a generation of children of immigrants eager to exchange old-world identities for new. Today, more and more, the most successful authors who call themselves Canadian writers come from elsewhere in the world and tend to set their stories there. The urge to tie their work to a Canadian landscape, real or imagined, and to express a unified, uber-Canadian character, doesn’t seem as important to us as it was for Americans of the Roaring Twenties. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that our best books need not be set here. The world has become too small for arbitrary divisions: nation states, territorial boundaries, divisive international laws and literature burdened by national labels.
Knowing woefully little about Canadian writing, I grew up dreaming of one day writing a latter-day Oliver Twist. My early reading was in books from England and America. I still identify with and find my greatest inspiration from the work of writers from there. My job as I see it is to write good stories and be different enough from everybody else that my stuff will stand out and be read. I work in English, that ever-changing, mongrel language. I draw upon what is around me and what I remember. I come from a cultural milieu that used to dominate but which is quickly losing ground, perhaps even becoming an irrelevant perspective in the arts. I envision my descendants living like vestiges of the Roman Empire, eking out a diminished existence in a world dominated by Asian interests. They will be like the Sicilian mafia in America today, speaking not a derivation of Latin but something vaguely resembling English, their ancestors’ (i.e., my) sense of entitlement no longer supportable. They will follow an alien code of honour based on the belief in liberty and responsibility and, like devotees of an underground sect, perpetuate an archaic text-based form of communication. The book. Codex. Remnant in the debris field of history.
In a way, English Canadian writers like me resemble those tourists who stood on the beaches of Indonesia and Thailand on Boxing Day of 2004 and watched transfixed as an ominous black line filled the sea’s horizon. Though in danger of being swept away, we’re intrigued to the last by the coming changes in our vocation and livelihood. We’re dumbstruck. We no longer know who we’re supposed to be. Still, it may not be the disaster we think it is. Readers generally don’t care where a book’s author hails from. Tomorrow we will still get up, drink a cup of coffee, throw some words at the screen and see if they stick.