It’s the same for the arts and literature, even among those of us involved in the enterprise. Do we pay attention to the threats to the artistic environment? Are we aware that vital habitats, the environments which make literature and reading possible, are eroding at an alarming rate? Are we willing to do anything about it?

For writers and publishers, there is only one thing that matters: an audience. And the truth is the audience for literary writing in Canada is so small it cannot enable CanLit to survive in its current state, let alone thrive. It never has. Those who write, edit and publish books know this. The reading public, insofar as it cares, has been insulated from this truth for decades, for generations, by the appearance of a viable literature: an appearance, a facade, largely bought and paid for by the various layers of arts funding in our federal and provincial governments. Without this funding, the vast majority of Canadian literary publishers would not exist, nor the books they publish. Government funds support our libraries, our universities, our magazines, our literary festivals, even our writers. These features of our literary environment do not exist because significant numbers of Canadians demand it. They exist because our governments believe arts funding is a good investment, financially and politically. And because if the government doesn’t pay for them, no one else will. And because not to have them would make us seem a rather puny and underdeveloped country.

So, casting aside the government-funded illusion, we are left with authors in need of readers and publishers in need of customers. And while the writers keep typing up manuscripts, and the publishers keep printing them, and the libraries dutifully put them on the shelves, we pay scant attention to the decline of what little habitat for readers still exists. The unexamined assumption underlying all this government-funded activity is the fanciful notion that so long as we keep churning out books, the audience, by sheer force of our efforts, will, like the surprising rebound of the sandhill crane, eventually emerge. But it has not. And it will not.

The simple fact is, after innumerable launches, readings, publicity campaigns, hundreds of author interviews with Peter Gzowski and Shelagh Rogers, the publication of thousands of books, and millions upon millions of dollars in government subsidy, the environment in this country for Canadian literature has not changed perceptibly since the onset of official CanLit and the proliferation of small, state-funded literary presses some forty years ago. The best which might be said is that CanLit, in the midst of the technological onslaught from the Internet and the digital revolution, is holding its own. Sort of like swift foxes in Alberta, or the five-lined skink in Ontario – the populations are not robust, but a steep decline has yet to be observed. Though this statement, I have no doubt, could be easily challenged; in certain respects, things are inarguably worse. Perused your newspaper’s book review section lately?

There are two basic forms of environmental degradation: pollution, putting garbage and toxins into the air, land and water, and habitat loss, razing forests or draining wetlands to “develop” the land or extract resources. Similarly, there are two basic “habitats” of crucial interest to Canadian writers and publishers: schools and bookstores. After all, where do readers come from? And where might they go to buy Canadian books?

Let’s consider education first. Our schools, it is safe to say, are not keenly interested in literature, let alone Canadian literature, which is troubling enough. What is worse, our schools no longer place an urgent emphasis on the written word. There no longer exists an unquestioned dictum that the early acquisition of the solitary skills of reading and writing are crucial for unlocking a child’s potential and ability to learn. Instead, the focus in our primary and junior classrooms is on group activities and shared experiences, what is called in teacher-speak “cooperative learning.” Precision of written expression is not valued. The necessary attention span and ability to concentrate for meaningful reading are not encouraged. Basic grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence structure are not taught with any urgency or conviction. Composing sound, logical, error-free prose is no longer regarded as a crucial skill.

I know these things to be true because I happened to teach English in Ontario schools for several years. In my advanced level high school classes I had many perfectly capable, intelligent students who simply did not understand what a sentence was, did not recognize the logic underlying sentence construction, and thus did not understand how to utilize basic punctuation. They possessed no clear understanding of the function of a paragraph and thus possessed little skill in terms of the simplest methods of organizing ideas. Worse, most had yet to obtain an innate sense of the rhythms of written English (something only acquired through regular reading, which one might assume they had done to reach this level of their education), and therefore had difficulty reading grade level prose at merely a phonetic and denotative level. Having breezed through primary and junior grades, suddenly in high school students find themselves expected to apprehend the nuances of composition and the basic strategies of rhetoric, when in fact many have yet to master the building blocks of simple written English. And spare a thought for the harried teacher, struggling to inspire thematic interest and stylistic appreciation for serious fiction and poetry, while in truth, the majority of his or her students find it arduous to simply read the texts on the level of linguistic comprehension. And this is prior to attempting to teach these same students Shakespeare, because my discussion here refers only to the “advanced” or “academic” stream students. I lack the space or stomach to detail the shameful reality of how we “educate” those in the “general,” “applied,” or “essential” streams.

Simply put, our schools are not producing avid readers. We all know this. Young people keenly interested in reading, writing, books and literature, now emerge in spite of our educational system, not because of its efforts to inculcate literary appreciation, rigorous standards, or academic values. We know the vast majority of recent high-school graduates have not received anything close to a worthy introduction to fiction and poetry. We know even those lucky few who have – graduates from special arts schools or enriched programs for gifted students – likely have not been exposed to more than a few Canadian authors. Where I taught, Canadian writers did not exist. The novels assigned to my classes were To Kill a Mockingbird, Call of the Wild, Animal Farm, The Outsiders, Night, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Flies. The lone Canadian book I had an opportunity to teach was Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, this for an “essential” level class where every page of the book had to be read out loud, most of it by me, since several of the students, in fact, could not read. If I had not illegally photocopied short stories by Alice Munro and Guy Vanderhaeghe for my advanced classes, many of my students may never have encountered Canadian writing in the course of their secondary education. I am aware there are schools which teach Canadian books, but I also doubt my experience to be anything other than typical. The norm, after all these years, is still Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird; Sinclair Ross and Mordecai Richler, sadly, remain exotic.

All this should be cause for alarm. The fact it is not says something disheartening about the larger culture. But more to the point, despite the indifference of the larger culture, those of us invested in the field of CanLit should have been, for our own good, angrily sounding the alarm a long, long time ago.

“But wait,” you say. “What about all these bright young people enrolled in English programs at our universities? What about all those arts schools, and writing workshops, all these degrees and diplomas in creative writing? Are these not the writers and readers of the future?”

I am a graduate of such programs and I’ve attended more than my share of literary workshops; their existence shouldn’t convince anyone of a vibrant literary culture thriving in our halls of higher learning. Our academic standards are not so stringent that any university English faculty or MFA program is going to voluntarily cut enrolment due to a lack of qualified candidates. Whatever the secondary schools pump out is what the universities take in. And in turn, churn out, failure being a foreign concept within the halls of liberal arts academe. Students enrolled in the last graduate program I attended received grades for their course work within a strict range of B- to A+. When pressed, instructors admitted, privately, that it was almost impossible to fail one’s thesis defence.

But in regard to low levels of literary ability and understanding at the university level, don’t take my word for it. I’ve only taught public school and the odd undergrad composition or ESL class. A few years ago, in CNQ 74, Adrian Michael Kelly had this to say about the preparedness of his undergraduate English-Lit students:

Take a random sampling of Canadian students from a senior seminar in Romantic or Modern poetry: they may be able to parrot what they’ve been told about the male gaze in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” or about Pragmatism in the poems of Wallace Stevens, but few if any could explain the difference between an iamb and a trochee, never mind scan a phrase such as “rammed with life in every line.” Asked to read a poem aloud, many would pause at the end of an enjambed line, and pronounce each word like a disconnected unit. . . . I am not saying that teachers should loom over students as they sweat their way through memorized Virgil. I am saying, however, that few students can hold a poem – or the best prose – in their hearts. They cannot do so because they are deaf to its cadences and rhythms and euphonies.

Kelly does not assert that something is innately deficient with the younger generation; neither do I. Instead, his observations echo my argument, that our schools are failing – not only our children – but literature. His students, who, bear in mind, have chosen to study English literature, are oblivious to the “cadences and rhythms and euphonies” of the best poetry and prose, to the aesthetic power of charged language, because they were educated in schools which failed to instil an understanding of basic prosody or communicate veneration for the written word. Why then do these same schools not feel the sting of our collective scorn? Why instead, through their silence, have Canadian writers and publishers expressed only indifference?

No doubt there are studies and statistics to refute all of these observations and assertions and their disturbing implications. I would be surprised if there were not. Ministries of Education, school boards, teachers’ unions and universities all have interests to protect and the money to produce evidence to support their claims. (This, for example, is what standardized testing is all about.) But the point I’m trying to highlight is that literary writers and publishers also have interests to protect, also have reasons to speak out on what is happening in our classrooms, and also have ample evidence at hand to support their concerns. As the saying goes, the silence is deafening. Not to mention, lethal.

If the educational environment is compromised such that it no longer encourages serious reading, the bookstore habitat is equally threatened. In fact, it may be beyond saving. But the damage has not happened overnight. The bulldozers and cement mixers of Chapters/ Indigo have been paving over northern spotted owl habitat in broad daylight for fifteen years or more. The warning signs from south of the border go back further, to at least 1991 when the Borders chain was bought out by Kmart, or even to the 1980s when Barnes & Noble became the first bookseller to aggressively discount new books.

In terms of recruiting readers and making available Canadian books, independent booksellers were second only to libraries in their importance because they actually cared about books. The people who opened now-vanished establishments such as The Double Hook or Duthie Books got into the business not because it was so profitable, but because they had a passion for the printed page. They chose titles for their shelves not just on the basis of fast turnaround, but because they valued certain authors and had regard for certain publishers. Their employees were readers and knew something about books, could actually recommend titles or converse about a given writer’s strengths and weaknesses. Small, independent bookstores which promote Canadian books still exist of course, much like Bengal tigers or right whales still exist, but for the most part they have been replaced by the corporate outlets whose employees remind one of order-takers at McDonald’s, outlets which in recent years stock fewer books and more toys, candles and jars of Lovefresh Pomegranate Body Scrub.

This is old news and no one can be surprised. And yet, many of us were. In 1996, just after the huge, oversized Chapters outlets began opening their doors across the country, author and critic Philip Marchand speculated in an interview on the upside of their emergence:

A couple of days ago I went to the new Chapters superstore on Bloor Street here in Toronto and I went up to the mystery section and there was my novel Deadly Spirits, displayed quite prominently . . . I had assumed it was out of print and of no interest to any bookseller but there it was, prominently displayed. And naturally this very kindly disposed me to that store and this is not an isolated thing. A lot of writers [will] be very pleased that their books are going to be on the shelves longer and get more exposure . . . these superstores are a tremendous marketing force for books and they’ve been by no means harmful . . . to the interests of writers.

Marchand was not alone in feeling “kindly disposed” towards Chapters in the late 90s. During the first years, few of us were not. There was something exhilarating about the sight of those vast floors devoted to nothing but new books – all those long, uninterrupted aisles; the silent escalators transporting one to even more aisles; the sheer quantity of volumes; the sense that virtually any book in print was there, within reach. Everyone loved the fat, comfy chairs and their silent invitation to relax and read as long as one liked (an invitation homeless people soon found irresistible), not to mention the tolerant attitude towards snacks and refreshments. Chapters appeared to be doing all it could to make everyone, including that small percentage of people serious about literature, feel welcome and accommodated. They were even stocking small press backlist titles as if it were the normal thing to do, and hosting readings and book launches with nary a votive candle, cheeseboard, or bar of beauty soap in sight.

If it took a few years, a few bankrupt publishers, and the disappearance of scores of independent bookstores for us to acknowledge the awful truth, maybe it shouldn’t have. As early as 1997 the true motives of the corporate enterprise, not to mention its total disregard for anything resembling literary interests, were spelled out for everyone at a high-profile symposium on the publishing industry in New York City. At one point in the evening, Cynthia Ozick spoke of the need for bookstores to actually care about books as something other than units of sale, to maintain their traditional role of helping to uphold such virtues as sophistication, taste, intellect, excellence. As John Seabrook later reported in his book Nobrow, her “eloquent argument for the value of good books . . . drew applause from the sympathetic audience.” What followed revealed in no uncertain terms the true interests of the corporate bookseller:

After Ozick had finished talking, another panelist, Leonard Riggio, head of the Barnes & Noble chain of megastores, said, “Well, Cynthia, I happen to have your sales figures right here,” and, reading from a computer printout, proceeded to inform the audience that the recently published Cynthia Ozick Reader, a collection of the author’s favourite writings, had sold only a few hundred copies. He then asked, “So why should the publishing industry support a midlist book that readers clearly don’t want?”

Ten years later, after the worst of the destruction levelled by the Chapters/Indigo monolith (the market not being large enough in Canada to support two mega-bookstore chains) and long after the chain stopped stocking small press backlist titles or hosting literary readings, its mercenary book display and shelving policies were exposed by author and editor John Metcalf in his sui generis volume, Shut Up He Explained:

To have a book displayed face-out at the end of an aisle in Chapters [or Indigo] costs $5000 a month. To have a book displayed on a “power table” . . . costs a publisher $10,000 a month. It is even rumoured that “Heather’s Picks” are not favours freely bestowed. . . . books displayed spine-out are granted an existence of 90 days and are then automatically returned. Chapters does not stock “backlist,” a writer’s earlier titles; Chapters places “product.”

The above passage was published in 2007. Not a word in response, let alone a public cry of protest, escaped the lips of any author, critic or publisher I know of.

Less temperate and level-headed people than myself might attach certain words to this type of business practice, though “payola” and “extortion” are not the ones you will hear uttered by any Indigo sales rep or see printed in Quill & Quire. “Co-op advertising” is the preferred term, as cheerful a euphemism as you could find to describe a monopoly’s tactics to squeeze even more profit out of publishers who, with few exceptions, can barely survive.

But the terms Metcalf outlined are now defunct. It seems the number-crunchers at Indigo have come up with a better scheme. Why level specific costs for specific titles which actually have to be put on display, when you can simply charge a base percentage on every book that finds its way past an Indigo loading dock? Starting this past January, Chapters/Indigo mandated an extra 4 per cent fee for all books they stock, regardless of where they are displayed. The change makes sense if in fact less shelf space is going to be given in future to books, and more to things like lamps, gourmet coffee, and baby toys. Besides, states Stuart Woods, editor of Quill & Quire in the July/August 2011 issue, “there’s a strong argument that the new terms are a reasonable cost of doing business.” He concludes: “My guess is having a national bookstore chain to gripe about is preferable to the alternatives.”

Really? Well, one alternative could be hundreds more independent book stores promoting books not just because they happen to sell in large numbers, but because they happen to be good books, and thus making it potentially possible for more literary presses and Canadian authors to reach an audience. But Woods, like pretty much everyone directly involved in the publishing industry, has his hands tied when it comes to publicly telling it like it is. In many respects, Indigo is the only game in town and casts a long and dark shadow over the entire publishing industry. But don’t worry; it isn’t a huge corporate monopoly causing untold damage and making the business of writing and publishing in this country more difficult than it already was. As Woods says, Chapters/Indigo is our very own Canadian bookstore chain, a national treasure. With 30% off the latest by Stephanie Meyer and Danielle Steele.

When one takes a good hard look at the reality of our current book-selling business, one understands better why the government had to step in to encourage the enterprise of Canadian literature. How else were Canadian publishers and writers ever going to get a piece of the action? Under the protective wing of state funding via the Canada Council and sundry government programs, Canadian literature has been able to function safe from the consequences of that most basic of economic laws: supply and demand. There is a correspondingly high price to be paid for this protection of course, namely the “facade” I referred to earlier, the government-created illusion and all its necessary critical distortions. (Distortions, because when you attempt to manufacture a literature, you have to manufacture the myths and reputations that go with it.)

Not to mention all the time and effort devoted to the tasks of completing grant application forms, as well as working to stay in the good graces of those looming, powerful figures – people, mind you, of exquisite literary taste and judgement – the arts council bureaucrats. During my brief tenure as a managing editor at a small literary press, no assignment was more pressure-laden or time consuming than the completion of our applications to the federal and provincial arts councils for grant moneys. Naturally the procedure is slightly less arduous for the individual writer and I know of authors who, far from finding the application process hazardous to their integrity, actually appear to enjoy it. If successful, there is satisfaction to be taken from being approved of by a jury of one’s peers. And it is comforting to embrace the idea that the state will always play a role in encouraging and making viable the enterprise of Canadian literature. But in truth, the government has little sympathy for what we do, and in many ways is our active enemy.

By way of illustration, consider the plight of the National Library of Canada. The one institution charged with the task of archiving the substance of our intellectual heritage – the letters, documents, rare books and collections which provide the literary links to our history – has also been the one government building left to contend, for decades, with ongoing water problems, problems so pervasive that by the government’s own admission, entire collections of Canadiana have been severely damaged. A 2001 report admitted that just since 1993 (the building was opened in 1967) over 25,000 items in National Library collections had been damaged by water. This is of course prior to the flood in 2008 when a burst pipe resulted in water leaking onto three separate floors of the library. While the construction in 1997 of the LAC Preservation Centre went a long way to improve this absurd situation, the original, leak-ridden building remains in service.

But in the last few years, something more insidious than rusted-out pipes, crumbling plaster or even subterranean mould growths has recently invaded the safe house of our collective history, this being the mandate of Library and Archives Canada to “modernize” the institution. As a result of this new directive, starting in 2009, the National Library no longer acquires books and rare documents from Canadian dealers, a practise fundamental to the library’s relevance and the maintenance of its holdings. According to Liam McGahern, president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, the library has, for more than two years, “effectively stopped acquiring and preserving Canada’s historic print materials.” In a statement released last fall, McGahern went on to say that “important artifacts of Canada’s history and heritage . . . have likely been lost, many leaving Canada never to return.”

As part of its ongoing “modernization initiative,” Library and Archives Canada and the National Library are questioning the very nature of what they do. According to LAC’s own website, the “face of information has substantially changed” due to the onset of “overwhelming digital production.” Further, “considerations of sufficiency can introduce pragmatism to collecting efforts.” In government terms, LAC is “working to draft proposed orientation instruments and practices that will encompass a manageable and results-driven approach.” In real terms, this likely means the National Library will suffer diminished influence and an ever decreasing budget. By way of comparison, can anyone imagine the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian being undermined and abused in similar fashion?

Ultimately, our governments, while useful in the short term for grants of much-needed cash, are not the reliable allies of writers and publishers. The arts council funding which keeps things going is always uncertain from year to year, and increasingly under threat as Canadians elect right-wing governments which have about as much commitment to literary values as they do for preserving the habitat of the endangered northern cricket frog. Probably less. Witness the unfolding debacle in Toronto, Canada’s Mecca of literary publishing, where Mayor Rob Ford and his retinue of deep thinkers have taken over. No doubt Ford’s promised “gravy train” assault will hit funding for public libraries, the Toronto Arts Council, and the International Festival of Authors. If it hasn’t already.

According to a diverse panel of scientists who gathered at Oxford University this past April, humanity has roughly twenty years to take decisive action in order to avoid a wholesale collapse of the world’s oceans. A diverse range of threats, including rampant overfishing, rising sea temperatures, increasing ocean acidification due to air pollution (most carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans), and reduced oxygen content in the seas, are combining to make it increasingly likely the oceans will soon be incapable of supporting the diverse range of life which has thrived there and formed the basis of the food chain for millions of years.

The comparison is absurd of course, but we might also take a guess as to how long CanLit has to reverse the anti-literary trend in our schools and bookstores and protect other elements of our literary habitat before it finally loses all relevance to Canadian life. My bet would be something less than twenty years. In both situations, swift and bold action is required. And yet when talking to other writers, teachers, and editors, I rarely encounter a sense of urgency about the current situation. I find it difficult to think of another industry where the people involved display such indifference towards its sustainability. If the schools are not going to foster reading, and the bookstores are not going to encourage literary taste, and the state is not going to protect vital cultural institutions, just how do literary publishers and writers expect their enterprise to survive?

I have used the metaphor of environmental degradation and endangered species less to mirror the decline in the numbers of literary readers in Canada, and more to highlight the steep price to be paid for inaction, for doing nothing to address what, despite appearances and the general indifference of most, is a crisis of monumental proportions unfolding before us. Serious readers may soon be an endangered species, but unlike the black rhino or the blue whale, those of us with a passion for literature in this country, can, if we choose, take action to protect ourselves and our enterprise. At the very least, there is nothing preventing literary publishers from organizing campaigns to lobby governments, raise awareness, pressure our schools and universities, and, dare I say it, organize boycotts of our corporate enemies. There is nothing preventing us from finally getting angry and choosing to fight for our future.

Insofar as we don’t, insofar as our complacency allows us to tolerate anti-literary education, the takeover of the book trade by corporate hucksters, and the continuing erosion of the fundamental pillars of literary culture, how can anyone say we do not – unlike the disappearing aurora trout or the poor Vancouver Island marmot – deserve our fate?

As is the case with most science-fiction, the world Snowman describes is in many essential and uncomfortable respects our own. But other SF writers who have imagined the post-literate dark age ahead have come up with more likely scenarios for how this cultural watershed will be brought about. For Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury the future is bookless due to aliteracy. Huxley sensibly turned Orwell on his head, envisioning a brave new world where “feelies” and other trivial entertainments would be more popular than reading, making the thought police redundant. In much the same way, state censorship isn’t the real villain in Fahrenheit 451. The firemen who burn books are dystopian props. The public, we are told, “itself stopped reading of its own accord,” preferring immersive and interactive social networking and “three-dimensional sex magazines” to books and newspapers (the latter “dying like huge moths . . . no one wanted them back”). This is not a police state. There is no surveillance apparatus spying on closet readers. Indeed there doesn’t seem to be any police presence at all aside from the Mechanical Hound. Subversive book people are turned in by concerned members of the community who freely volunteer to inform on them. Contrasting Orwell to Huxley, Neil Postman remarks how the latter describes a world where people “adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” This is what coming to love Big Brother (the face of dictatorship and the TV show) really means.

In much the same fashion, aliteracy today is a consumer choice driven by new technologies. Blaming the tube and the screen may seem like an old story, but it’s not. It’s worth remembering that many of Canada’s senior literary figures grew up in a world without television. Meanwhile, the digital revolution is only a generation old, and e-books still in their infancy (can we say incunabula?). These e-books are, in turn, read on tablets or other devices also designed to play games on, send or receive e-mail, or used to browse the web. The book is now a multimedia platform, a shift in functionality that comes at the expense of the word. “I’m not against e-books in principle,” writes Johann Hari in the Independent, “I’m tempted by the Kindle – but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words – offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s internal life – can sing.”

Well, you can bet the “object,” in a highly competitive marketplace of electronic devices, is not going to “remain dull.” Kate Pullinger, winner of the 2009 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction, puts it bluntly: “If you are going to put a work of fiction on a computer, why would you not use the multimedia components a computer has to offer you – image and sound and interactive games?” Indeed. And make no mistake: this will lead to an unfair fight for the reader’s attention. The videogame industry is a big business, and these guys aren’t messing around. Game testing involves “galvanic skin response” measurements that detect increases in heart rate and the amount of sweat on one’s palms. Arousal levels are also measured, positive and negative emotions, and the level of cognitive engagement. Researchers watch and record players from behind one-way mirrors, making transcripts of everything they say, how frequently they save their games, how many times they blink and wet their lips, all so that game designers can then adjust their narratives to optimum responses, making the experience more compelling. Compare this to publishing, where it’s getting harder and harder just to find good editors and layout people. In George Borrow’s classic Lavengro (1851) the narrator is told by a London publisher that the business is “a losing trade . . . literature is a drug.” That’s still true, and today there are many more powerful, more addictive, and cheaper fixes on the market.

It is useless to say that literature is just different – more intellectual, appealing to different tastes – and so doesn’t have to directly compete with these newer forms of entertainment and distraction. Nonsense. All of the arts have to evolve in order to survive. Poets don’t compose narrative epics and sculptors don’t carve heroic nude forms out of marble any more. Publishing is a business like any other and an audience with a finite amount of time and money will naturally look to where it can get the most bang for its buck. Simon Meek, for example, is a game designer who wants to see classics like Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment take the next step in their “digital evolution” toward a medium that blends text, film and videogames. This is thinking beyond e-books even. Meek “doesn’t like that electronic books still have people reading printed words on white pages that need to be turned. . . These electronic books are still too rooted in the form that gave them birth, the physical side of the media.” “We are not turning the books into games,” Meek further explains, “but rather we are turning the stories in these books into experiences on gaming platforms.” Such books will not be read so much as (the preferred word) “consumed” by way of an interactive, immersive, visual experience. The words of “the stories in these books” will, in turn, become ghostly, disembodied, fragmented ur-texts. “Words pulled directly from the book float into view at the appropriate times,” for consumers of Meek’s version of Wuthering Heights.

None of this, however, constitutes the major challenge literature faces from the digital revolution. Nor does that prize go to the devastation of the retail environment by online booksellers, or the possibility that Google is making us stupid (an argument popularized by Nicholas Carr in an essay that first appeared in The Atlantic and was then expanded in his book The Shallows). While I agree that Amazon is, in the long run, bad for publishing, and that digital forms of entertainment train our brains to respond to ever faster forms of stimulation, reducing our attention spans and making it harder and harder for us to re-enter, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, the exacting silence of a book, I have other concerns.

The digital revolution poses two existential threats. The first of these is economic: how, in this new environment, is publishing going to pay its bills? This is a fundamental point. As Ewan Morrison recently put it, “The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.”

Are things falling apart? Rocker John Mellencamp was only stating the obvious when he called the Internet “the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb.” We have already seen the digital fallout in other industries, notably music and film. But books were thought to be different, a perfect technology that could not be improved upon. There is, however, no immunity from what Nicholas Carr lays down as the iron law of the Internet Age: “As the Net expands, other media contract.” Looking about the current landscape, I don’t see any reason to be hopeful.

The bet being made – it is in fact the only bet on the table – is that e-books will somehow “grow the game.” It will have to grow significantly. In the early days (that is, a couple of years ago) the announcement that Amazon would be setting a benchmark price of $9.99 on e-books was met by many with horror. This response was not, however, universal, as Finn Harvor of the website Conversations in the Book Trade found out when interviewing ECW publisher Jack David in 2009:

CBT: How much potential do you think e-ink and e-book technologies have? Do you see e-books catching on with the public? And do they provide a reasonable business model?
JD: Of course they do. We are publishers of intellectual content, and it doesn’t matter to us how that content gets read by the public as long as our margins exist. Take away the cost of printing, and shipping, but not selling, and you have cut out a big chunk of your costs. We typically get about 30-35% of the list price back in our hands, after bookstore discount, distribution and selling costs. For a $20 book, that’s $6 or $7. And from that we pay all our other costs, including royalties. If we get $10 from an ebook purchase, we’re laughing.

Unfortunately, $10 for an e-book is a price point that has, predictably, already passed. Names like Amanda Hocking and John Locke (not that John Locke, but a writer of thrillers) are the great success stories of the e-book revolution. You may not have heard of them, but they are self-published genre writers who sell their books for 99 cents a pop, and do a good business, with royalties reported to be in the six figures. (When Locke became the first self-published author to join Amazon’s “million Kindle club” he remarked of his success: “When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I’m as good as them . . . Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me.”) At one point in 2011 a full 20 per cent of the top 100 Kindle sellers were 99-cent e-books. In general, $2.99 seems to be the new sweet spot though I wouldn’t bet on our having reached bottom. Digital prophet Chris Anderson even subtitled his book on the Internet economy “Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.” Things may not get to that point, but I suspect what is coming is a “bundling” of content offering 100, or even 10,000 books for $9.99. Or perhaps something more along the lines of NetFlix, where a monthly fee will provide you with unlimited downloads. For a publisher this means there is no more margin – they will effectively be paying to give their books away. Jack David will not be laughing.

I said this slide in price was predictable. In fact, it was inevitable. How could publishers hope to hold the line after they’d already ceded control over price to deep-discounting online booksellers? How are new books to compete in a market where all titles in the public domain are free? How is intellectual property going to be protected when it takes the form of what is basically just a text file (that is, something far less sophisticated than, say, movies, which are already easily copied and shared online)? How much are people going to be willing to pay for what is in effect only a license to view a file for a limited time on a specific reader? Media companies from newspapers to record labels, and brand-names from Stephen King to Radiohead, have been trying for years now to figure out some way of turning the Internet’s “culture of free” into a sustainable business model for the primary producers of that culture. They haven’t been successful. The only winners in the new digital economy have been the platform builders, those anonymous types who quietly file away all of your personal information and sell it to advertisers. The people who actually make things are the zeroes in this binary. Anthony De Rosa pulls no punches in describing how the system works: “We are being played for suckers to feed the beast, to create content that ends up creating value for others. . . . . We live in a world of Digital Feudalism. The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.” This is Web 2.0: the game that plays you.

The chief result of the digital revolution, then, has been to downgrade all art and personal expression to the level of ephemeral, quickly-consumed and discarded content. In terms of writing this means genre filler: romance (or its seedier cousin porn), suspense thrillers, and supernatural twaddle. What we’re talking about here is the kind of stuff people purchase by the bale, but that nobody wants to have on their bookshelf at home. Not, I might add, out of shame but simply because they don’t think such books are worth keeping. In Britain, for the last three years in a row the novels of Dan Brown have been the “most donated” to the charity Oxfam. Meanwhile, though sales of printed books are in decline across the board it is the sales of genre fiction that are in freefall.

Content, on the Internet, is crap. Everybody freely produces it; nobody thinks it’s worth very much. And so in his manifesto of the new age, You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier sees the open culture of the Internet as ultimately relegating creativity to slums outside the economic mainstream where it then becomes a cannibal subculture feeding off itself (or, in a metaphor provided by David Carr, “the equivalent of a refrigerator that manufactures and consumes its own food”). The culture itself is dead, of interest only to the odd collector and antiquarian. In this neo-feudal media landscape advertising is the only real content, with everything else just a way of snagging eyeballs for a few seconds: “At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements,” writes Lanier. “Advertising is elevated by open culture from its previous role as an accelerant and placed at the center of the human universe.”

The usual response to such complaints is to champion the Internet’s promotion of individual self-expression, the way it allows for a new literary culture free of middle-men and mainstream corporate elites. Unfortunately, what has happened is that by giving more power to the people we have only empowered a disposable culture. It’s a good system for discovering and promoting James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer wannabes, but that’s about it. E-books reduce literature to the status of Tetris, and, what’s more to my point here, they’re not sustainable as a business (unless your business is making dedicated reading devices, and even then I have my doubts). Chad Post, a small press publisher of books in translation had a piece that recently appeared online, “Why Selling E-books at 99 Cents Destroys Minds,” that talks about his own experience with pricing e-books and the lessons he learned:

. . . more than three million books were published last year [2010]: 300,000 from “traditional” publishers, and 2.9 million from nontraditional publishing outlets, such as self-publishing.
So, you have an e-reader, you’re bored with TV and all your video games, ain’t feeling the Facebook, and want a book. Why pay $12.99 for “entertainment” when you could buy a John Locke thriller for $0.99? I have no answer to that question. Seriously. And this has always been my problem with e-books: they emphasize immediate entertainment – and gratification – over real “reading,” which takes more commitment, patience, attention and time.
Now, you pay what you would pay for an app and dump it after you’re done. And why not? Those “expensive” books are a lot of work.
As someone devoted to literary culture, this scares the crap out of me. Sure, John O’Brien and a few others will claim that this has “always been the case,” that there has always been only 10,000 “serious readers” in the U.S., and that’s the same today as it was 50 years ago, but I don’t know if these people are actually in touch with the world around us. It’s all $0.99 e-books and instant movies and Angry Birds.

You can call this snobbishness (and a flood of angry commenters on Post’s article quickly did just that), but the economic point Post makes is valid. It was also addressed by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent:

This feels like a tough case to defend. We all want cheaper entertainment and enlightenment. But look at tasteless supermarket fare. Ruthlessly enforced economies can kill diversity. Rather, they favour uniformity and predictability. Contra the pub wisdom you often hear, e-books do have significant production costs even if they don’t need trucks and sheds. Those costs include keeping professional authors alive.
Dirt-cheap e-books benefit the very rich – and the very dead. They might also help new authors to find a foothold and win an audience – although, on that logic, newcomers should think about showcasing their work for nothing. Many do. But the almost-free digital novel hammers another nail into the coffin of a long-term literary career. Who cares? Readers should, if they cherish full-time authors who craft not safe genre pieces but distinctive book after distinctive book that build into a unique body of work.

I, too, dislike it, but getting rid of the publishing industry – especially in a country like Canada where its role in fostering homegrown talent is so essential – leaves us with nothing but the Internet, producing a form of writing that isn’t supposed to last: eye candy meant to be consumed quickly and then discarded, literature as app. What will be the consequences, not just for us but for our cultural inheritance? What will happen when people come to see Pride and Prejudice no longer as a novel, or even a book, but only as a worthless file to be diced, sliced, mashed-up, manipulated, and (mostly) ignored? Where, Mark Bauerlein asks, if “students grow up thinking that texts are for interactivity – to add, to delete, to cut and paste – do they acquire the patience to assimilate complex texts on their own terms, to read The Iliad without assuming that the epic exists to serve their purposes?” How will such texts be “read” when they appear on a digital page framed by a toolbar and links, with embedded videos, pop-ups and banner ads?

That is a rhetorical question. The studies have been done: we don’t read from a screen, but only scan in an F-pattern for information.

There is something more to this transformation than the shedding of a Benjaminian “aura.” Not just the integrity of the text, but our sense that text can have any value or meaning at all is being lost. But why? Why are we in such a rush to throw so much away? Why are so many of us volunteering to be exploited as digital serfs in the new economy, while at the same time brazenly boasting of our aliteracy?

In the concerned conclusion to his book Reading the 21st Century Stan Persky flags an important point: “we find ourselves in a paradoxical dilemma in which writing flourishes, which is just cause for celebration, but book reading is in decline, especially among younger people. That situtation ought to set off alarms.” How to interpret this paradox? Colin Robinson, writing in the London Review of Books, suggests one answer by introducing the second threat I see being posed by the digital revolution:

Electronic communication has generally made life easier for writers and harder for readers. Text is simpler to produce on computers, easier to amend and spell-check, and a breeze to distribute. No one can be more conscious of this than editors, who are now deluged with manuscripts, attached with consummate ease to letters explaining that if this particular book is not of interest, several others, perhaps more appealing, await on the author’s hard drive. But how does this technology serve the reader? For all the claims of their optical friendliness and handiness, e-books still strain the eyes and are challenging to carry around. Worse, the dizzying range of easily accessible material on the Internet conspires with a lack of editorial guidance to make web reading a disjointed experience that works against the sustained concentration required for serious reading.
This privileging of the writer at the expense of the reader is borne out by statistics showing the annual output of new titles in the US soaring towards half a million. At the same time a recent survey revealed that one in four Americans didn’t read a single book last year. Books have become detached from meaningful readerships. Writing itself is the victim in this shift. If anyone can publish, and the number of critical readers is diminishing, is it any wonder that non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists?
Perhaps the problem has to do with more than just the way in which words are transmitted. People bowl alone, shop online, abandon cinemas for DVDs, and chat to each other electronically rather than go to a bar. In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading.

Take that last sentence and inscribe it on the grave of the book: In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading. The Internet is a mirror not of our society but of our private selves. Or rather “isolated,” since privacy no longer exists. The first thing to keep in mind about social networking is that there is in fact nothing social about it. The Internet has become a seamless web of self, a standing pool of Narcissus that we are now drowning in.

Specifically, we are drowning in an ocean of our own words. Near the end of Douglas Glover’s Elle, the heroine recalls her lover F. (code for Rabelais) saying “that as soon as everyone can read whatever they want, they’ll all decide to be writers as well.” With regard to the present discussion, Denis G. Pelli describes how this works:

By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators.

Barthes has been neatly inverted: in order for the author to live, the reader must die.

This is by now a common complaint. We are familiar with the observation that there are far more people today writing poetry than reading it, and that the only growth sector in university literature departments is their creative writing programs. Even the field of literary criticism and reviewing has suffered from this atomic blast, with book reviews and journals falling before the flood of Amazon reviewers (in fact, a small team of professional Amazon reviewers were the first to be made redundant, hoist with their own petard).

Nor is there anything new about invoking the spectre of narcissism in this context. Christopher Lasch saw it as defining the culture of the 1970s, and in the 1980s Allan Bloom blamed its inherent moral relativism for the closing of the American mind. The Internet, however, has both enabled and amplified the condition, as numerous studies now attest (in The Narcissism Epidemic the authors see in the web “a giant narcissism multiplier”). Online, we can all become as gods. Or at least, as Glover’s F. predicted, as authors. “If there were authors, how could I bear to be no author? Consequently there are no authors.” Thus spake Zarathustra.

Perhaps this is our revenge on art, tearing it down from its pedestal and making it finally as disposable and ephemeral, as mortal, as the rest of mere humanity. If so, I fear it will be a root-and-branch job, as the lasting nature of art has long been a myth necessary for its creation. Writers have to believe in some kind of posterity for their work: that their “Kilroy was here” will remain on the wall, that what they lovest well will remain, that they may enter the pantheon and be counted among the English poets, that so long as this (my immortal sonnet) lives, it will give life to me.

The Internet, however, has put an end to all that. No writer today can seriously believe that their words will long outlive them, even if they do manage to attract contemporary notice. But, as Snowman understands, to come to the conclusion that any reader one can possibly have is in the past is self-defeating. Why even bother, then? I have long thought that such feelings lie behind the appeal of historical novels, and in particular our literary fetish for the nineteenth century. For the Victorian Era was, manifestly, a time when (in the words of Jean-Christophe Valtat, defending the setting of his “steampunk” novel Aurorama in an alternative nineteenth century) literature was “regarded as able to educate, elevate, delight and even change life”: “Perhaps that is what we are missing, too. . . . Perhaps it’s a certain idea of literature as a power that we are nostalgic about.” If so, that nostalgia is something both producers and consumers of the written word can identify with.

It is a narcotizing cliché to speak of every crisis containing opportunity. This may be true, but crisis can just as easily lead to total collapse. And while some kind of contraction in the scope and extent of print culture is now inevitable, my concern is that the collapse will in fact be sudden and catastrophic, hastened by the forces I’ve been talking about. As Bauerlein puts it, “Knowledge is never more than one generation from oblivion.” That’s a maxim we are going to put to the test. “How long have we got?” Ewan Morrison asks. “A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short-term world that will not pay them for their labour.”

In Double Fold Nicholson Baker made a passionate plea for saving our cultural heritage of old newspapers from having their archives purged and replaced by microfilm copies (and don’t ask where all that microfilm is now). The Internet has improved on this. Today the talk is all about “the cloud,” a.k.a. “the end of tactile media.” Somewhere out there, in the electronic ether, after all the books are gone, our culture will continue to enjoy an immaterial afterlife. I take it this is part of the ambiguous meaning of the apocalyptic conclusion to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, where the world is transformed by the nuclear desolation of cyberspace, to be made new or somehow preserved in a binary form that will no longer be a part of the world but a container for it: either the holy grail, or final reductio, of information theory.

We can’t say we were never warned.

As for the (mushroom) cloud itself, the image says it all. A piece that recently appeared in the Guardian (May 2011) caught my eye with the headline “Google can’t be trusted to look after our books.” Before I could mutter “No shit” I was into the lede:

Google announced last month that it would be deleting the content of the Google Videos archive. After a public outcry, it said it would work on saving all the video content and making it available elsewhere. But the situation raised concerns about data under Google’s control, including the archive of Google Books.

That concern is justified. Google is in the business of making money, and it can, any time the content of the cloud becomes unprofitable, just get rid of it. Much as Amazon can delete, at its own pleasure, the contents of your Kindle with the click of a button. Clouds are not forever. If this is the future of literature then we truly are writing on water. What will survive the coming Great Erasure? How much will dissolve, and, like an insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind?

The existence of literature, not the words on the page but the whole system of production and consumption, writing and reading, rests on a paradox. Literature is a leisure activity, a private, pleasurable pursuit of instruction and delight, but it also involves effort, intellectual labour, money, time, and public commitment. We cannot take its continued role in our culture for granted. I’ve said before that the arts need to evolve in order to survive, but we should remember that evolution does not mean progress, or even adaptation of ever more complex and sophisticated forms and functions. Evolution just as easily follows the path of least resistance and leads to degeneration and decline. And what we lose will not easily be regained. You can call this a slippery slope argument, but it’s really just facing hard facts. Sentences aren’t going to start getting longer any time soon, nor vocabularies expand. Every year enrollment in university English programs goes down, and students in those programs read less and less. In tough economic times and the changing media environment we face does anyone think this is a course that is going to be reversed? Given hard times, does anyone believe for a minute that public funding for the arts is going to become a priority at any level of government? Who wants to bet that bookstores are going to start making a comeback, or that e-books will turn out to be a short-lived fad? Who can imagine a twenty-first century like the nineteenth, when literature, with its power to “to educate, elevate, delight and even change life” actually mattered?

On a couple of occasions in this essay I’ve mentioned the analogy that has been drawn by others between the Internet and an atomic bomb. What I find interesting about this is the historical fact that the Internet was first developed to be a communication system that would, due to its dispersion of nodes, still be operational in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Of course humanity might not survive such a disaster, but by that point we would be expendable. The sole necessary survivor would be the Internet itself, a force we should be able to recognize now as the true destroyer of worlds.

This is rather like declaring that the major musical milestone of the 1960s was “Yummy Yummy Yummy, I’ve Got Love in my Tummy.”

How did it come to this?

It begins with an online poll. Online polls run by their own strange rules. Consider the disparity between editors’ and readers’ selections for the Modern Library’s top 100 novels of the twentieth century. Editors selected James Joyce; “readers,” Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, two writers who more resemble cult leaders than novelists. Their cult members, of course, had stuffed the ballot boxes.

And, as might have been expected, partisans of various stripes stuffed the ballot boxes of Canada Reads. Three of the novels on the resulting list were typical Canada Reads fare: Amy McKay’s The Birth House, Carol Shields’s Unless, and Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage. But the others were unexpected. The Best Laid Plans was the self-publisher’s Cinderella champion. And an organized campaign to get out the graphic-novel vote gave us The Complete Essex County to round out the list.

Two of these things, to borrow shamelessly from Sesame Street, are not like the others. Setting aside any tendency towards evaluation, three of these novels can claim to be “literary” in intent. One – The Best Laid Plans – makes no pretense of joining that company. And another, The Complete Essex County, should have been excluded on the grounds that it is not even a novel – which criterion, I hasten to add, came from the show’s producers.

The loudest fuss kicked up by the latest iteration of Canada Reads was not provoked by the move to an online vote, nor even by its unaccountable outcome, but by that single, innocuous word: “novel.” In calling for readers to vote on the essential Canadian novels of the past decade, the CBC had excluded short stories and poetry – and Canada’s poets and short story writers, struggling under the weight of the chips on their shoulders, were quick to object.

The wording was no accident. As Ann Jansen, senior producer of Canada Reads (and a “self-identified poetry lover who adores short stories”) explained, it was all about a level playing field:

Canada Reads is about five people debating their favourite books and somehow agreeing on one to recommend to a country. It’s kind of like comparing apples and oranges and pomegranates and gooseberries, or some such fruity comparison. And that’s just the novels. When you think of adding poetry and short stories, it’s probably the equivalent of comparing a variety of fresh fruit with a set of bottles of icewine (that’d be the poetry) and maybe my favourite apricot-raisin buns from Cobb’s Bakery (short stories, anyone?). More distilled language in poetry, different intentions, more characters to get to know in short stories, different numbers of journeys, a variety of locations, etc., etc.

The producers repeatedly stressed their affection for poetry and short stories – so Canadian, so determined not to give offence – but they made it clear that short stories and poetry just didn’t belong. It would be too difficult to compare such diverse forms.

But when graphic novel fans asked if a graphic novel was a “novel,” and therefore eligible, the producers found themselves equally unwilling to give offence. Of course a graphic novel is a novel! And the graphic novel was in.

Narration carries the novel. Turn that novel into a movie, and lens and lighting become our narrator. Have an artist draw the scenes as storyboard, and you have a graphic novel. Instead of a narrator, we have drawings. Sara Quin, who defended The Complete Essex County on Canada Reads, pointed out this distinction and said, in fact, that reading a graphic novel requires a different set of skills – a different form of literacy.

A Globe and Mail review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise by the cartoonist Seth – no stranger to readers of CNQ – puts that different form of literacy on full display:

The powerful diagonal graphic thrust of this panel leads you in.
Your eye starts in the top left at the word balloon (“Come in,” he says). Now, follow that dramatic tail from the balloon to the figure and then follow the figure’s widespread hands, which lead you right into the store.
Observe how the lighting leads you in as well. Note the bleached solar lighting of the street compared with the inviting dimness of the store’s interior. Even the passerby’s shadow points into the store.

Seth is not speaking the critical language of prose narrative. No one will ever discuss the bleached, solar lighting of The Best Laid Plans, the dramatic tails of Angie Abdou’s word balloons, the inviting dimness of The Birth House, or Carol Shields’s powerful diagonal graphic thrust. Yet the producers of Canada Reads felt that The Complete Essex County – which, to split a hair, is not even a graphic novel, but a collection of graphic novellas – was not icewine, nor baked goods, but fruit. A pineapple, perhaps.

Yet if the graphic novel is a pineapple, how is the short story a muffin? It works through the same narrative machinery as the novel. Indeed, people usually find themselves unable to explain the difference between the short story and the novel, and lapse into generalities. The difference may be as small as Jim Harrison has explained: “Short things are short all over, and long things are long all over.”

Yet graphic novels were permitted, when the same rationale the producers used to exclude poetry and short stories argues strongly for their exclusion. The explanation is obvious: audience.

Whatever interpretation is placed on Ann Jansen’s grocery-related explanations, there is no denying another significant difference between the forms Canada Reads included and those it chose to exclude: sales. No one will ever get rich writing poems in Canada, and your risk of pulling off the same feat by writing short stories declines if your name does not happen to be Alice Munro. Novels – preferably those aimed squarely at book clubs – have the sales.

But the plain old novel is so, like, yesterday; it’s the kind of thing your mom reads with her lame book club friends and they’re all drinking, like, Chardonnay and munching on, you know, hors d’oeuvres and stuff like that, and listening to Canada Reads. Because who listens to Canada Reads? Certainly not the members of (in Sara Quin’s somewhat less than unequivocal words) “a generation that has sort of given up a little bit on reading.”

When Jeff Lemire’s book was the program’s first casualty, howls of dismay were heard from supporters of the graphic novel: there, they proclaimed, goes all your audience under forty. Including a graphic novel allowed Canada Reads to hook in a new audience and, in keeping with CanLit orthodoxy, the graphic novel was held to be important because of its useful social function, specifically as a gateway drug to the heady pleasures of reading. And apparently it worked, however briefly: one commenter on the CBC Books website, singing the praises of The Complete Essex County, noted that she had read only fourteen books in her adult life (the word “adult” enclosed, quaintly, in quotation marks).

What nobody has yet explained is why Canada Reads should appeal to an audience that doesn’t.

It is difficult to decide which was the greater travesty: that one of the Canada Reads panelists, Debbie Travis, could not muster the mental resources to finish one of the books, or that the winning book, The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis, was so outrageously bad that her failure to finish it vindicates her.

The story is a cliché, the writing turgid, the chapters padded with filler, the dialogue clumsy. I cannot comprehend Fallis’s notion of the paragraph, which seems entirely arbitrary. But worst of all, this comic novel is not funny. Fallis does not grasp that the art of humour is the art of surprise; he overreaches, bludgeoning us with joke after joke, and when in doubt, has Angus McClintock fart. This book has all the subtlety of a drunk armed with a ball-peen hammer.

It is popular these days to excuse a book like The Best Laid Plans by arguing that writers come in two forms. There are the writers, those people who form wonderful sentences and write books of high seriousness with which educated people are gosh-awfully impressed. And then there are the storytellers, who are successful because they tell good stories that people actually want to read.

There may be some truth to this, but that superficial truth conceals a terrible fallacy.

All storytelling derives from an oral tradition. The oral storyteller, who relies on memory, builds his story from recycled bricks, a set of oft-repeated phrases and ideas rather like the floating couplets of traditional folk music. And as in traditional folk music, the art of oral storytelling lies entirely in performance. A vast gulf separates the earnest and respectful rehash made by a thousand college folkies, circa 1962, from the early recordings of Bob Dylan.

Writing freed the storyteller from the recycled bricks of the oral tradition, creating a new emphasis on originality. But writing did not put paid to the storyteller’s obligation to perform. It simply moved the performance from the present to the page. A new medium demands a new way of surprising and delighting the audience. Those who excuse poor writers as “good storytellers” forget that “story” is a mere noun, and “tell,” the verb. And if the art of storytelling is in the telling, then The Best Laid Plans is an abject failure.

Except that it won Canada Reads and, thanks to the CBC’s rather silly claims for Canada Reads’ mandate, is now considered the essential Canadian novel of the past decade.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Canada Reads, in its search for “essential” Canadian books, arbitrarily excluded some of Canada’s best writing, using a dishonest explanation involving fruit and baked goods to gloss over the fact that the producers wanted popular books. The producers included graphic novels in an attempt to appeal to an audience that doesn’t care about books. And through the dubious mechanism of an online poll, they labeled as “essential” a novel completely lacking in literary ambition or merit. Clearly, Canada Reads had sort of given up a little bit on reading.

It is time to face facts. The CBC does not care about books: not one iota, not one whit, not to the extent, even, of a rat’s patoot. The CBC is not in the book business. The CBC is in the business of audience. And in the business of audience, all that matters is the number of earlobes turned to the radio.

You can’t be a snob in the business of audience. If your aim is to engage a group of people, you must inevitably seek the lowest common denominator, and the larger the group, the lower that common denominator becomes. And so the online CBC Books portal became the “CBC Book Club,” where the emphasis is decidedly populist, and Canada Reads began with an online poll.

But in its rush to build a new audience around an online community, the CBC is also destroying any credibility its book coverage had. Set aside the complaint that CBC books coverage is relentlessly “middlebrow”; The Best Laid Plans does not rise to that level. And The Best Laid Plans appeared on Canada Reads only because the CBC threw out a perfectly good model – find interesting panelists, and ask them to champion interesting books – in favor of asking the audience to stuff the ballot boxes.

At one time, you could hear short stories read aloud on the CBC. You could wipe the sweat of a day’s honest toil from your brow, sit down in your easy chair, smile indulgently at the happy children playing quietly on the carpet, and hear a story called “The Peace of Utrecht,” by an unknown writer named Alice Munro. In all likelihood, you owned a pipe and a spaniel, or your husband did. It was, presumably, a stodgier time, even for spaniels. But then progress happened, and we became a nation of pygmies rapt in the glow of Dancing With The Stars.

If CBC radio still aired readings of short stories, Alice Munro might now be followed by something pulled from True Confessions, all in the name of audience. It is not the CBC’s fault that times have changed. If the CBC were to return to broadcasting readings of short stories, surely our nation would just tune out. We have Twitter to keep us occupied. No, we can’t blame the CBC for the decline of the national attention span – but we can fault the CBC, as a public broadcaster, for its happy embrace of that decline.

The modern viewer was the new boss: no more uncomfortable seats, unwanted audience participation, travelling inconvenience and expense, and (short of leaving the premises) lack of options during the film. Investment, in the deeper sense of the word, was tenuous. Parallels can be drawn with opera, sporting events, and cooking lessons.

Another association parallel can be made with literary readings at book launches, festivals, regional promotions, and ongoing venue series. The crystallizing idea of a literary event as truncated amusement – whether capriccio, metalinguistics, or willed hypergolic category mistake – has become a self-fulfilling intellectual accelerant. Like the info-beset VHS purchaser (now a key-clicker on Netflix, or downloader of nebulous legality), the audience may sign up to be haunted by supraliminal wonder, but, if event orchestration is any indicator, may also attend out of half-baked desire or (reversing Fellini’s contrasts here) social communion.

The poet, short story writer, or novelist now intervenes. “Some of this may be true, but I can’t compete with the fireworks of hockey playoffs, rock concerts, movies, TV, and the Internet.” Quite right, though you can compete with other poets, short story writers, and novelists. But the fatalistic shrug, this time from the audience, persists. “Artists who read from their own work are boring.” At times, yes. But does the fault lie with the work or with the reader?

Let’s investigate the reader’s complaint first. Most are aware of the familiar opposition: plugged-in, overloaded basement-brow Goliath versus page-turning, crafty Luddite David. Most also know who gets voted off the island these days. The outcome doesn’t resemble the Biblical dust-up. It’s the Fellini lament multiplied. We want the pre-digested, but now we want it cheap (or free), without delay, and in micro bites (or bite). But literary readers/authors aren’t competing with optically challenged philistines mistaking the Art Bar for the Dart Bar. Once the clean-cuticle bank dividend checkers conclude that the place is devoid of darts and loud rock, therefrom and therefore promptly departing, the reader is still confronted by the only audience that has ever mattered – those who have at least a passing interest in the highlighted genre.

Those convened on both sides of the microphone frequently bemoan the large number of vacant seats at literary events, the readers (obviously) the most disheartened. Michael Carbert, in an otherwise perceptive September 2008 Maisonneuve essay in September of 2008 for Maisonneuve, offered prescriptions to boost the roll call audience from thirteen to thirty. But everyone knows that most readings, outside of the yearly mega-events with a hundred participating readers or the few readings featuring name brand stars in (usually) well-established festivals, garner few attendees and even fewer neophytes. The focus should always be on quality over quantity, yet the latter is increasingly targeted. Hence the proliferation of gimcrack industries like the (now) international Literary Death Match, the organizational fribblers encouraging similarly produced spinoffs in (to list only two of many) the Vancouver Writers’ Series and the Guelph Spoken Word.

The caffeinated inanity of Literary Death Match enforces a seven minute time limit per actor (sorry, author). If the unfortunate reader actually dares a transformational eight minutes, he or she is body-puckered by a nerf dart. (Perhaps our hypothetic, optically challenged philistine would sign on for that.) The Vancouver Writers’ Series readers were are manacled by a six minute count, and the authors in the Guelph Spoken Word (admittedly more influenced by the Slam line) have to make do with three minutes. Next up: voting on a lone yelp.

The more common time constraints seem to hover around the fifteen minutes mark. That this is standard only emphasizes the conforming timidity of organizers in capitulating to a supposedly fidgety audience. I’ve never been able to understand this attitude. We’re repeatedly told by current practitioners that to go beyond a quarter-hour is to somehow invoke a Dantean sentence of purgatory, if not hell. Lynn Coady sets the familiar tone well: no imposing podium, softish lighting, comfortable seating, and most importantly, easily accessible alcohol and fifteen minutes of fortune if not fame. The sad part about Coady’s ideal literary reading? She’s right. But only if the reader is inept. And in that case, why show up at all? No, it falls on authors to demand (with exceptions stemming from various practical scenarios) lengthier reading periods. The aim of every reading (at least from where I balance on my wobbly plastic seat) should be wonder, if not transcendence, otherwise what the hell’s the poet or novelist really doing up there? Solidifying a career? If the reader cares to take the time to enunciate, project, pace (vocally), change dynamics, create effects with pitch and tone, use pauses wisely, engage with genuine gestures, and, most important, slow down, (along with reading from a worthy piece in the first place, of course), then the audience members who aren’t there just to socialize between and after sets have a chance at a transformative experience in a single, extended reading.

Now it’s time to flip the mirror. What about that (often true) whine, “the readers are boring”? Poets, novelists, and short story writers don’t get enough credit for their vocal capabilities. The failures outlined in the last paragraph are obvious to any audience member who’s attended more than a few readings, but many do a decent, if not exquisite, job in letting the glory of their creations do the work for them. After all, the author more than most, knows what sonic effect she wants to strike when stressing delayed consonantal twins, for example. Similarly, the tone a listener may have thought ironic upon first acquaintance with the page may turn out to be genuine when hearing the poet read the now dramatically altered passage. But the most important quality the audience member needs to bring to a reading is attention.

Awareness and attention. Everyone agrees on their importance, but how many pull a Todd Zuniga (founder of that Literary Death Match) and text a buddy after a desert of jokes at minute three, then awake to the proceedings at minute five when catching a multiple dessert of scatalogical clichés? And less obviously, how many intellectualize the small epiphanies, snapshot the deep images, and turn up the internal chatter, thereby drowning many subtle aural surprises line to line?

There’s no need to assign romance, nobility, or charm to the rhetorical effusions of mid-eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards competitors, nor to their stoically receptive parishioners under stark joists trying to ward off chilblains on ass-punishing pews. There’s also no need to follow the pendulum to the opposite and extreme arc, though that’s where the arrow is currently frozen. We live in distaste, if not terror, of being bored, and want our epiphanies paradoxically pre-ordered and familiar. We also want to like and admire the author, as if the reading is on a horizontal plane of easy reciprocity. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of performing, largely, for a coterie of sympathetic fellow pracitioners, made even more clubby by regional repetition. There are ways of avoiding the churchly mutuality, though: organizing events at non-traditional milieus (halls over libraries; parks over pubs) and in alien quarters (while on holidays, overseas). This is still market tweaking, however.

A poem on the page is not the same as a musical score. The squiggly type of the former can be voiced by a lone reader effectively; the latter usually needs a professional with ready instrument, if not a coordinated assembly and skilled direction. But to voice a poem, short story, or novel extract with a view to “entertain,” or to “enlarge” the words, perverts the original, just as altering the stage directions of a play or the staff markings of a sonata effectively contravenes the composer’s wishes, and usually makes a farce and travesty of the performance. Samuel Beckett and Dmitri Shostakovich weren’t shy regarding their crass interpreters. The playwright took some of them to court; the composer received LPs of his own work, then turned them into coasters. Wanting the author to perform her or his work in the spirit in which it was written, then, is likely going to mean a lot of unsensational voicing. This is a problem if one is only happy with tone-knockoffs of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf or “Howl.”

It’s not only OK-okay, but inevitable and historically par for the course that the receiver of art must often work to plumb a few depths – hidden metaphor, traded phrase-making, image hierarchy, voice tone, allusion, meta-punning, lyrical subtlety, narrative reverie – and that he or she must have the patience, good will, and love for literature to maintain energy and focus during the inevitable dull patches, wrong turns, and misunderstandings. Why? How else know when the tide has turned, and out of nowhere enters the startling phrase, the contextual epigram, the emotional shift? In sublime art, the author sometimes has such confidence in his own procedure that he purposely injects tedious prose into the fabric just to tease out a tear in order to make the contrast more amazing and worthy. Yes, authors at times botch their own works by ineffective presence and voice projection. Yes, at other times the acoustics and ambiance of the specific site are unredeemable. More often, though, patrons are guilty of receiving the words out of benign sociability or a “greatest hits” wishthe problem is really the audience’s, and their expectation to be both entertained and enlightened, when these are not always the same thing. It’s often easy to blame organizers, but it seems the argument here, again, hinges on comfort levels, both physical and literary.

It’s interesting that the six-to-fifteen minute monitors don’t have much of a problem with extended post-reading Q-and-A sessions, interminable pre-reading poetic statements, or lengthy set-ups to each individual poem. This reinforces another dynamic: the fact that we’re here to learn about the poet’s processes. The poems? Not so much. Unless and until the CanLit readership – other authors, those authors’ friends, lifestyle commentators, biographers, students pressed by profs who are friends of the author, and the occasional book lover mildly curious about the event – approaches readings with intense focus on the poems, stories, and novel passages being read, we’d at times be better off to attend these events by scrapping the usual event itinerary. Hang out, talk shop, buy or swap books, and drink.

That view – the total vocal white-out (pardon the anachronistic typewriter term) – certainly has antecedent traction in other artistic worlds. Robert Schumann, donning his critic’s hat in 1838, opined that an unspectacular contemporary’s latest quartet was “for the entertainment of good dilettantes who are kept fully occupied by things that an expert artist can grasp with one glance at the page, a quartet to be heard by bright candlelight and in the company of beautiful women; whereas true Beethovenians lock the doors, savoring and reveling in every single measure [of the late quartets].” Like many provocative statements, this is true, but it also has its limitations. His comments were prescient and against the grain. But poetry and prose, no less than the Great Fugue, needs an audience, a live interpretation, to introduce or revivify a silent page read or cloistered CD play.

Fellini thought technology knocked him out. He was wise to be concerned, but he was wrong. So was Marshall McLuhan. People still line up at movie houses, and others still attend hour-long poetry readings performed by a single author. The medium only changes the message in that it amplifies defects already entrenched in reader and listener. That kind of awareness is invaluable. Sometimes progress is a boon.

He seemed like a nice enough guy, but so did Ted Bundy from all accounts. And it wasn’t like Bread Loaf was short on desperadoes. It was a writers’ conference, after all. Charlie Manson could have hidden in plain sight. Still, here I was, following this guy across campus in the middle of the night to see something he just had to show me.

It started after dinner, up at the gathering place they call the Barn. Wine flowed for a buck a cup and jangled enthusiasm a whole lot cheaper. Even people who didn’t know each other seemed to know each other, their shared exuberance as contagious as it was creepy.

I retreated to the sidelines, fell in with the wallflowers. We swapped credentials, chronicled the despair, rejection, hope and colourful brochures that had brought each of us to Bread Loaf. Before you knew it, our exuberance was as contagious and creepy as the best of them.

I was quick to mention how I’d studied with Mordecai Richler and Clark Blaise, but the name-dropping got me nowhere. Screw that. I switched to Plan B: Paraded my short story sales to magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories and Realms of Fantasy, capping the rundown with consecutive appearances in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Hardcover, yet! My newfound writing pals appeared not unimpressed, especially Lyle, an IT manager from Georgia. No, I may not have been the stuff of Kirkus or Kenyon, but at least I’d been paid for my fiction. Not just in contributors’ copies either, but real bucks. Cheques! Cash you could buy things with. Toaster ovens, iPods, organic bananas. Yup, these eleven days at Bread Loaf were shaping up to be mighty swell. The self-doubt. The loathing. The chronic schadenfreude . . . All would be left behind. Unlike most of these wannabes, I was a published author and way ahead of the game, even if I’d yet to sell a novel. That’s when Lyle patted me on the knee, invited me to step outside. “I gotta show you something,” he said, his words a tad too moist upon my ear. “It’s in my car. Over at the lot.”

“Huh?” The last time a man had patted my knee and invited me into his car had been in the 70s, during my hitchhiking days in Vancouver. It had not gone well.

It was dark, the moon nowhere near as bright as I expected on a summer night among the Green Hills of Vermont. Robert Frost had exaggerated, if not outright lied.

Regrets surfaced. If only I’d listened to my mother, memorized the Reader’s Digest article she had clipped for me: How to Escape from the Trunk of a Car.

Lyle popped the rear of his Civic. A pair of Joe Boxers flopped onto the gravel. Jeez! If this didn’t bear the earmarks of a nut job, what did? Sweatpants, shirts, underwear, socks and assorted flip-flops mushroomed from the trunk, side to side and top to bottom. It was enough to give an FBI profiler a case of the giggles.

“I left in a hurry,” Lyle explained.

He kneeled on the bumper, dove into his wardrobe. Whatever he needed to show me was well buried.

I braced, waffling as to how I might handle the assault, deflect the blade of his combat Bowie, neutralize his TEC-9. Damn! Why hadn’t I listened to David Morrell, not only a professor of English at the University of Iowa, but author of First Blood and creator of Rambo, too. His Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing had stressed the importance of learning stuff outside your comfort zone, the need to make summer vacations meaningful. He’d gone to the G. Gordon Liddy Academy, for God’s sake: “The instructors were ex-CIA, ex-FBI, ex-DEA, and numerous other ex-operatives of various high-level alphabet-soup government agencies.” Had I followed his lead, I wouldn’t be in this fix to begin with, wasting vacation time at some panty-ass writers’ conference, that was for damn sure.

“Yes!” Lyle cried. “Got it!”

His feet hit the gravel.

Could I buy him off? Would my life be worth the ninety bucks in my wallet? Sure, forty of it was Canadian, but . . .

Distant laughter from the Barn. I became nostalgic for my life of ten minutes before.

Lyle surveyed the parking lot. There could be no witnesses.

I shifted position, frantic to identify the object he kept concealed behind him. Suddenly, his fists flew toward my face, rocked me onto my heels. And there, held aloft before me, mere inches from unbelieving eyes, illuminated by the penlight on his keychain, was the September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Mouth dry, hoarse, he whispered, “I subscribe.”

That was it? “Yeah. Well. Great.”

“You don’t get it, man. Once they know you’re into genre, you’re toast.”

2 The first genre writer I ever met

He turned up one day in the middle of term, asked if he could sit in. As creative writing classes go, I guess we weren’t all that creative. We dubbed him the obvious, Old Guy. Seventy, easy. Maybe seventy-five. Blue suit. Legion pin on lapel. Striped tie, silver clip. Boxcar moustache. Hair slicked straight back like shoestring licorice. It was a seminar class. No shortage of seats. Richler shrugged, circumspect behind his Schimmelpenninck smokescreen. “I guess.”

Old Guy hoisted his briefcase onto the conference table. “You know,” he said, drawing our attention to Richler’s cigarillo, “in The Big One, we called them coffin nails.” Some of us laughed; it was the respectful thing to do. Richler inhaled, exhaled, proceeded to the week’s readings.

Old Guy did not speak again. He listened and observed. Until the end of class.

He raised the lid of his briefcase. “I wonder, Mr. Richler, if you might be so kind as to read mine now?”

We froze, attention riveted to our renowned mentor.

You knew for sure Richler had seen it coming. The moment the old man tapped the door, he’d seen it coming. Hell, he sensed it before the geezer showed his face. So, you figure he might’ve been better prepared. “Um – uh – ”

There’d be no denying him. Not this day. Old Guy served up a slab of manuscripts as thick as a butcher block, Duo-Tang plies of red and yellow, pink and green, brown and blue, black and orange.

Richler shifted his tin of Schimmelpennincks from his right hand to his left. “Not all of them.”

“How many then?”

“I dunno. A couple.”

“But – ”

“Two.”

“But – ”

“Two.”

“Two.” Old Guy shook his head in a manner to suggest the loss would be Richler’s and fanned out the options. “Mystery? Science fiction? Western? South seas adventure? Romance? Erotica? Comedy? War? Horror? Crime – ”

Richler plucked a yellow and a green.

A week went by.

Old Guy showed up early. He didn’t wait for Richler to take his seat, put it right to him: “So, what did you think?” He was pretty much foaming at the mouth, spazzing with joy. This was the moment the Mordecai Richler would forever change his life.

Richler pulled the manuscripts from his satchel, handed them over. “Well, they’re not very good.”

“Wha – ?” It was like Dementia had dropped in for a quickie. He stood uncomprehending, let the critiqued Duo-Tangs fall into his briefcase. “Oh.”

We couldn’t look at him. We couldn’t look at Richler.

Head down, Old Guy gathered up his belongings and crossed to the door, stopped, hesitated, turned. “Well,” he said to Richler, “what do you know, anyways?”

3 Some genre writers are not born

This is the ill-advised part. This is where I blow any chance of winning a Hugo, Nebula or Stoker, never mind a Booker or Giller.

I was the first of my father’s family to graduate university. His pride was short-lived. I let slip I wanted to write. I might as well have told him I’d booked a ticket to Bangkok for sex reassignment surgery. “Gottenyu! A writer? A writer? Who’s going to hire you as a writer? Tell me who, goddammit! Who?”

He worried I’d end up like him. Frustrated. Disappointed. Penniless. Not tired of living so much, just tired of being the subplot of a Jolson movie.

My mother, meanwhile, urged me to give optometry a try. “Look how well your cousin Jerry does.”

Neither knew to ask whether I’d be pursuing literary or genre. Not that I would have had the answer. Despite the formidable influences of Richler and Blaise, I believed writing was writing. Literary or genre did not matter; I’d skip between the two as inspiration dictated. I could be Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon one week, Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg and Ray Bradbury the next.

And so I begin to write. Short stories. Novels. An apocalyptic SF novel. A porn novel. A coming-of-age novel. Pieces for Mad and Harpoon. All are rejected.

I roll carpets at Eaton’s warehouse. Cut broadloom. Drive a lift truck.

I write gag lines for cartoonists and make my first pro sale to an illustrator in Puerto Rico. He sends me a cheque for $1.50. The bank charges me $10 when it bounces.

I write university term papers for seven bucks a page. Engineering. Law. English. Philosophy. I sell short features to the Montreal Star and Vancouver Sun.

I get married. Have kids. Take a fulltime job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. But it’s temporary, you understand. Only temporary.

Career highlights are many, especially the personalized rejections. A personalized rejection is almost as good as an acceptance.

The editor of Harpoon returns Know Your Asshole Better with an encouraging note: “We’re doing a farting issue next if you’d care to contribute.”

My porn novel, The Mammary Recordings, earns a handwritten reply: “While we found your novel amusing, our readers will not. Please limit the plot of any future submissions to the main character hopping from bedroom to bedroom, sex scene to sex scene. Please, no humour.” Wow! They found it AMUSING – enough to keep me going for months.

Rejection, of course, is not limited to publishers and editors. Life in Henk is my coming-of-age epic. It is about growing up in a Jewish family in Trenton, Ontario in the late 50s, early 60s. I give the manuscript to my older sister to read. She had wanted to be a writer, but eloped at 18 and had babies instead. She is both concise and incisive: “What am I supposed to write about now?” I decide to write a serial killer novel next.

Wait! It gets worse. I’m at my urologist. Yeah, urologist. Cripes! Even he has published a book – Private Parts by Yosh Taguchi, MD. And mid-point of my digital rectal examination I hit rock bottom: I ask if he might put a good word in for me with his agent.

My urologist’s agent does not reply. No Canadian agent does. And I accept, at last, my father was correct. Who would want to hire me as a writer?

Until one Christmas Eve. The phone rings. The caller is Virginia Kidd, an American literary agent, and she loves Life in Henk and she wants to represent me and I’m thinking maybe there’s more to this Baby Jesus thing than I’ve been led to believe. She wants every damn piece of fiction I’ve ever written. And within a month, she sells one story to a UK fantasy anthology, Destination Unknown, and another to Fantasy & Science Fiction. And soon word comes down that Houghton-Mifflin is about to put an offer in on Life in Henk and my wife and I stay up the entire night, excited by the prospect of dream becoming reality . . . Alas, the offer never happens. The editor is apologetic. Virginia is angry. And I proceed to write a short story about a boy who finds a tiny human skeleton in a bug jar. A few months later, it makes the cut for the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.

The science fiction, fantasy and horror writers I know were passionate readers of the genres before they began to write in the genres. They were fans. Huge fans. And still are. I read a lot of SF growing up, but I never lived and breathed the stuff. I still don’t. That’s not to say I don’t like to write it; I simply didn’t set out to write it.

So, why did I become a writer of genre? Isn’t it clear?

Because nobody else would have me.

4 A painful truth

Ihave a wife and three daughters. All are avid readers. Literary, big name stuff. Ishiguro. Munro. MacLeod. Franzen. Roth. Atwood. Mistry. Shields.

They often discuss the books they read. And love.

The only genre fiction they read is mine.

I have never heard them discuss anything I have written. Never.

I have requested they stop talking about books and authors when I am around. They laugh. They think I am kidding.

5 Stranger in a strange land

Have I gone about this the right way? What does CNQ expect of me? I do not write essays. I am a not a literary deep-thinker. I do not belong in CNQ. This is a prank, right? CanLit Punk’d.

I’ve gone through the short story issue. The erudition intimidates me. Worse, I now find myself using erudition in a sentence. Jeez, two sentences.

I have never read Alexander MacLeod, Guy Vanderhaeghe or Michael Ondaatje. I have never heard of Mark Anthony Jarman, Audrey Thomas or Douglas Glover. Not that I expect they’ve heard of me. Do they read Fantasy & Science Fiction? Occasionally? Ever? Stephen King called the magazine “the gold standard for short fiction in America,” though it’s unlikely he garners much respect in these pages. Kirkus claimed it “eloquent, scintillating, often sublime.” I know Margaret Atwood isn’t a fan, otherwise she’d abandon her crusade to sever speculative fiction from science fiction. Is anyone buying that? She’s a savvy marketer, sure. Still, I resent how her defensiveness puts me on the defensive. Kurt Vonnegut never made me feel this way.

CNQ is wordy. Does literary critique demand no less than fifteen sentences per paragraph? Where is the pacing? The white space? The exclamation marks!!?? Would a larger font kill them?

Nasty, too. Like some high school clique. Mutual admiration society one sec, mutual denigration the next. They rip into their peers like it’s Boxing Day at Walmart. There’s so much nitpicking going down, it’s a wonder the pages don’t scab over. What am I doing here? I fear for myself.

I know it sounds whiny, but if you’ve never gotten a bad review before, you have no idea what a unique kind of heartbreak it is. And I’m not talking about getting constructive criticism from your seventh grade English teacher . . . . I’m talking about a complete stranger telling other complete strangers that something you’ve been carrying inside you for months is stillborn.
—The Escapists (2007)

The Escapists? It’s a graphic novel. Okay, a comic book. Oh, that’s going to go over well around here. The point is, you’d never catch a critic of genre fiction behaving the way your CNQ piranhas do. Is genre, as a group, not more humane, empathetic and respectful of one another’s craft?

Of the three slightly longer, independent short stories, Michael Libling’s ‘Pheromitey Glad’ I found to be a sophomoric, unfocused and ambling attempt at arch cuteness, which failed miserably. It just didn’t make any sense on any real level, and was difficult to read with all of the cUTe spellings . . . Sometimes literary experiments work, sometimes they don’t. This one totally failed for me.
—Dave Truesdale, SF Site
(1998)

Oh, man. Is that what I’ve done? Delivered another “sophomoric, unfocused and ambling attempt at arch cuteness”? Perhaps if I say something nice . . .

With a name like Canadian Notes & Queries, I expect it to be about as action-packed and provocative as Stephen Harper’s sex life. But the irreverence surprises me. The frequent shots at the Giller Prize are fun. So, I’m not the only one who finds CanLit stultifying. “Murder, stillbirth, war, suicide, scalding, genocide, another stillbirth” (as Ryan Bigge sums it up) have a place in genre, too. A big place. But we do not as a matter of course take the angst-ridden poems we wrote as teenagers and expand them into novels. We do not ramble on all mopey-dreary about our pain for 400 frigging pages without throwing a little action into the mix, an appealing character or two and a plot. (Come to think of it, there’s not much difference between literary fiction and porn; plot is secondary to both.) Most of all, we do not measure the quality of our writing by the extent of its inaccessibility.

Still, if I stick around for an issue or two, I might even learn something here. Maybe I have more in common with these CNQ guys than I think. Perhaps I do belong in these pages. Well, once every 42 years, anyhow.

I wonder. Has CNQ done a genre issue before? What’s that about? Are they slumming it? A My Man Godfrey sort of deal? Should I expect to be rolling my eyes?

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have brought up that Margaret Atwood thing. Is it too late to take that part out? I mean, who am I to –

Apart from a year in Summerside where my father was taking Coastal Command training as a pilot in the RCAF, I spent most of my first five years in my mother’s family home in the lovely village of Mabou on the west coast of Cape Breton. My grandfather, who owned a general store in what is today The Red Shoe Pub, died shortly before I was born. Nana ran the house, and in an attached apartment lived my grandfather’s dapper brother Uncle Jack, who had retired in the early thirties from his engineering work in Chicago to a bachelor life in Mabou. My mother told me a few years ago that Nana and Uncle Jack spoiled me; they certainly doted on me, and from the many photos of me, I suspect Mum did as well.

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence . . .”

I have numerous memories of childhood, some going back to when I was still in a crib. I have never been back to Summerside, but a few years ago I described to Mum in some detail the house we lived in and the beach. She agreed that my memory was entirely accurate. I was two when we lived there.

Winters of snow for my sleigh, sunny summers on the great curving sand beaches with the warmest ocean water north of the Carolinas – a golden childhood. While the rest of Canada made do with rationing, we often enjoyed mackerel, haddock, and lobster. We didn’t suffer a meat shortage either, because Earl Hawley would arrive in the back yard with great slabs of beef in the trunk of his car, a smile on his round face, and a butcher knife in his hand. Happy, pampered, trusting, and naive, I took my life as normal. I knew that some of my friends didn’t have central heating, running water, and flush toilets and that was also normal, the way things were.

At times I must have been insufferable. Once when Mum took me to Halifax, probably to wave Dad off as he sailed away to war, we stayed with Mum’s cousin Ethel, a slim, elegant woman who could surely have been a fashion model. Ethel was rather high strung and, I realized later, at times a mite acerbic. On that visit, in response no doubt to some outrage of mine, she remarked to my mother, “He’s going to have a hard time in school.” Ethel and her husband had two boys older than me, and her experience gave her remark authority. Of school later.

There were many books in the house. I don’t recall being read to, though I obviously was, but I do remember reading myself after I learned. In particular, I remember the animal books of Thornton W. Burgess. When the crisis became impossible, the animals would go to Grandfather Frog for the solution. One day I walked up the hill behind the barn to a pond in which frogs could be found, though I never saw one sitting on a lily pad. I observed the frogs for some time, but soon enough concluded they did not talk. Perhaps frogs in such exotic and distant places as Boston or Montreal could talk, but I doubted it. That meant that all those stories were made up. Yet I continued to be entranced by them, and worried each time as the plot thickened. This intrigued me – the stories were fiction, but they still moved me. Making books which could do that seemed an appealing activity and I rather thought I’d like to do it when I grew up. I read all the Buddy books. I was given the multi-volume Book of Knowledge, a sort of encyclopaedia for children, and pored over its pages for hours. Mum’s geography text in which most of the world was red. A history textbook in which I read about Frederick the Great and Napoleon.

One Friday in early September when I was five, I asked my mother for a scribbler. “You have three scribblers.” “I need a new one for school.” “Since when have you been going to school?” “Since the other day.” “I wondered where you were.” Several of my friends were attending the one-room schoolhouse in Earl Hawley’s back yard. Earl’s wife Anna was the teacher, and a third of the students were Hawleys; their son Winston was a friend and about my age. (This was the Protestant school; the more numerous Catholics went to the larger convent school.) Anna taught all grades up to seven. I don’t recall that I was given any particular tasks – arithmetic, perhaps – but I seem to recall the older kids learning about Laura Secord and her cow the first day.

When Dad returned from overseas, he went back to his job in the bank, and we moved to Sydney. Argyll Street School would not enroll me in grade one because I was still only five, but after being told that I had been attending school for a few weeks, agreed to let me in after I became six in December, and thus I got a year’s jump on my age group.

Of course, Cousin Ethel was right – I did have a bit of a hard time in school. But I wasn’t often bullied, I did make friends, and I enjoyed learning. After school, I sometimes explored Sydney which, after Mabou, seemed to me worldly and elegant. Wentworth Park with a meandering stream and a bridge, The Esplanade, the Royal George Hotel (I think that’s the name, but it has changed, though the hotel is still there), the entirely unlikely castle on King’s Road . . . While we were living in Sydney my brother Gerry was born. When school ended, Mum took us to Mabou where we stayed until Labour Day. Dad joined us on weekends and for his vacation. This happened every summer until I was fifteen. When I could swim well enough, Dad gave me a rowboat and with Winston Hawley and Kirk Hart I spent many days exploring Mabou Harbour. I never left the yard without my baseball glove and bathing suit hanging from the handlebars of my bike.

When I was in grade three we moved to New Glasgow. On Fridays I would board the bus and travel to the farm on which my father grew up, just outside nearby Pictou. Years later, my mother asked how I managed to bear winter nights in a house without central heating, running water, or an indoor toilet. Not to mention Pictou Nana’s rather eccentric cooking. I don’t recall being upset or uncomfortable about any of it. Dad’s younger brother Rollie sometimes took me on his rounds delivering ice which had been cut from the mill pond and stored in a big barn with sawdust between the blocks. Uncle Rollie had red hair; I think I can remember him not laughing but I could be wrong. His wife Kay was a superb cook. One weekend, perhaps in March, I watched the sow deliver a litter of a dozen piglets, and tried without success to save the runt. Once Nana told me to kill a chicken for supper. I’d seen it done, so took the axe to the hen house and returned a while later with the headless body. I helped feed the cows and horses, wandered the pasture, the orchard, and the woods. I was allowed to take the .22 and shoot at things. Two boys encountered along the river taught me to gather, cook, and eat mussels which no one I knew of then ate. They were delicious. Again, I accepted it all as normal.

Early in my grade five year, we moved to Halifax, and I remained there until I finished university. Canada in the 1950s was still a serious second-tier military power. RCAF fighter pilots usually won the Guynemer Trophy for NATO air gunnery, Halifax was home to a substantial fleet including the aircraft carriers HMCS Magnificent and later Bonaventure, and their Sea Furys, Banshees, and Avengers roared about overhead. One often saw sailors and soldiers about town. Friends had fathers in the navy or the army; others planned to join up when they finished school.

I expect I should talk a bit about my family. My father was a handsome man, seemingly proficient in all physical tasks. Overseas he piloted B-24 Liberators, departing from Ceylon across the Bay of Bengal and dropping supplies to commandos in Malaya. His shortest flight was over eighteen hours; his longest was twenty hours and thirty-five minutes (I have his neatly-kept log book). These were nonstop at low level all the way. In his youth he had been a fine athlete, but as I was growing up he was usually too busy for games, though he took us skating and he played golf. In later life he took up skiing – downhill, cross-country, and water. He got his papers for ocean navigation (“If the QEII loses her navigator in Halifax, I can take her to Southampton!”), scuba diving, and firefighting with the Mabou VFD. He had a motorcycle, a skidoo, and a speedboat. He got his commercial pilot’s licence and after he bought a plane flew on a large number of jobs. He was a fine and loving gardener, vegetables only, and kept two beehives. Even a year before he died (of leukemia at 77) he was immensely strong, strong enough that my athletic brothers felt stunned by their comparative weakness at shared tasks. Given his own youth, his wartime accomplishments, and the potential he sensed in himself, I suspect he may have been disappointed when he returned from overseas and found his son was quite unlike him, a dreamy, awkward boy. He was somewhat austere in those early years – he later told me that what had most appalled him about war was the waste of people and things. My brothers and I all had the sense that we were never able to do anything satisfactorily – after we’d washed the car, mowed the lawn, or painted a window, he could always point out a spot we’d missed. We were cowed by him, but when we told him this in later years he admitted he was entirely unaware of his effect on us.

Mum was a housewife. I doubt I can catch the nuances of our relationship, so I’ll not try. She was a loving mother, and used to say later that the big mistake she made was trying to shield us from Dad – we’d have been better off having it out with him when he said we’d missed a spot. Perhaps she was right. She was chatty and sociable, with lots of friends in the neighbourhood, around town, and in Mabou. They belonged to several bridge groups. They were both good at it, Dad an aggressive bidder and player, Mum even in her nineties a killer, especially on defence.

My brother Gerry is five years younger than me, and was always a fine athlete – when I was fourteen and he nine, he played baseball as well as I did. Mum observed that he excelled at all sports involving balls – I don’t think he played much hockey and he never won any swimming races. In later years his passion has been curling and especially golf, and a few years ago he was on the Nova Scotia team at the Canadian Senior Amateur. Gerry became a phys ed teacher in Halifax, and retired some years ago. We weren’t friends in youth – the age difference was too great – but we have been in the years since.

My younger brother Dave I hardly knew in Halifax, as he is twelve years younger, though we became close as adults. He is also a fine athlete, taught phys ed, and is now a principal in Toronto.

You ask about the influence of my parents on my writing – there wasn’t any that I am aware of. By the time I was about fourteen, I considered myself capable of independent thought, capable of making my own decisions. I was not precocious – I think all children arrive at this position at about the same age. My parents implied, though rarely if ever said, that one should be honest, decent, law-abiding, and hard-working – all the middle-class Protestant virtues. They never talked to me about the arts, and never commented on my choice of life. Dad rarely read fiction and may not have read mine; I know only that he read about a quarter of the Bottomly book in manuscript and thought it an hilarious and deadly accurate picture of the air force. He added that it would not be popular in Canada because Canadians don’t appreciate military humour. Mum read fiction all the time and I assume she read mine, though she rarely commented. We were not a noisy, demonstrative family, and the news of a new book received a simple “Congratulations” or “That’s nice” or “How many is it now?”

As this is not autobiography, I’ll not give a detailed account of the school years. I remained on the whole as I had been, cheerful, trusting, and most importantly, naive. Perhaps, in that Yorkshire word you like, gormless. With two younger brothers and away from Nana and Uncle Jack, I was no longer pampered. This caused a bit of friction, but not much. I continued to enjoy school – I didn’t suffer the endless boredom my two sons speak of when describing their schooling in Montreal. Except in arithmetic, French, and Latin, I usually scored high on tests and exams, bright but not exceptional. My neighbourhood had far more boys than girls, so we got together to play all the team sports, though almost entirely on our own. School sports, such as basketball and volleyball, were largely intramural, and extramural games never included audiences of parents. More commonly, we’d arrange with other kids to meet after school for a ball game. If the ice was good, we’d play hockey on Chocolate Lake or chip in to rent the Halifax Forum, the Arena, or the Dalhousie Arena at six in the morning. I wasn’t a great athlete, but was good at volleyball and won a few swimming races. Generally I managed to keep up.

I continued to read, and at some point became a regular at the Halifax Public Library. I don’t remember many titles – all of Sherlock Holmes, certainly. Later the Saint books by Leslie Charteris. Science fiction when I was about fourteen. The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat because of friends with naval fathers. But I don’t recall any chats with friends about books; they read, certainly, but our talk was dominated by the Yankees and the Dodgers, outrage at the suspension of Rocket Richard, and stunned shock when Jackie Parker ran for the touchdown.

High school was grades ten to twelve, though one could enter university after grade eleven. (We were smugly amused that Ontario students needed thirteen years to learn the same stuff.) About this time, I largely gave up sports – pitchers were able to throw hard enough to kill the batter, tackle football and body contact hockey could break bones, and despite my height I’d never been any good at basketball. Dances and the pursuit of girls were in any case much more interesting.

The most important artistic inspiration in high school was my friendship with Ken Tolmie and Roger Savage. We sat alphabetically – Savage, Smith, Tolmie. Ken and Roger wanted to be painters, and had taken some weekend training at the Nova Scotia College of Art. I have some facility for drawing, so we formed a group to produce posters for student council and mock parliament elections. With pastels or conté crayon, we went on excursions to the Public Gardens or the harbour. I have always been grateful to Ken and Roger for demonstrating that while they might make it as professional artists, I would not. They never bragged of their superior skills or belittled mine – quite the reverse – but I quickly came to the obvious conclusion that if I wanted to be an artist, it would not be as a painter. And we talked about painting. Ken was a fan of Breughel, Piero della Francesca, and Vermeer, all names new to me. He lent me biographies of Maurice Utrillo and Modigliani. We discussed chiaroscuro, El Greco, Impressionism, and more, and listened to Wanda Landowska’s recordings of Bach. Ken was and still is a brilliant talker. He can spin the most remarkable ideas, some history here, painting there, politics, fashion, landscape, science, music – then three hours later spin another hypothesis drawing the opposite conclusion.

The odds against three boys sitting together in a classroom in a minor provincial city all succeeding as artists were obviously astronomical. But the odds against are irrelevant to the one who gets hit by lightning or wins the lottery – Ken and Roger have both made successful careers as professional artists, and while Roger now and then picks up some cash from workshops, neither has ever taught so much as a single term in an art college. If you’re curious, they both have websites:

http://www.kentolmie.com/index.html

http://www.savagegallery.ca/

After grade eleven, Ken went on to Mount Allison where he studied under Alex Colville, and a year later Roger joined him. I remained in Halifax and entered Dalhousie, though I visited them at Mt A several times.

From Ken and Roger I got an education in art and art history. I had also concluded that all the arts must have certain core unities. Language is of the essence in literature, so only fluent speakers can write or read it; painting and music need deft hands for production and eyes and ears for appreciation. Beethoven and Goya both went deaf; Beethoven could still write music but not hear his Ninth Symphony or the late quartets; Goya’s work was presumably unaffected. Books can be multiplied and sent round the world, while paintings are unique and can only be in one place at a time. Books and paintings are usually produced by a single person; music needs a composer and usually a different performer. Drama, dance, and sculpture add other variables. But what are the features common to all? The question continues to intrigue me. Artists other than writers often appear in my fiction, and to some extent I have often thought of other arts when developing a work.

Before I move on to university, I should make clear what I hoped might happen. History, beginning in grade three, was always a favourite subject. The Nova Scotia curriculum moved back and forth over Nova Scotian, Canadian, European, and world history. These days it would be condemned as criminally Eurocentric, but I’ll let historians thrash that out. I gradually concluded that apart from the entry into Confederation, Nova Scotian history was largely a series of minor events in British and French imperial struggles. Canadian history, apart from the wars, was dreary tales of coureurs du bois, river explorations, the CPR, sod busting, and dead beavers. Americans had history, but they seemed obsessed with perfecting their nearly perfect constitution, a lot of niggling detail punctuated by the Civil War. They also believed they had won both World Wars. World history, apart from early Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, was an account of European contact and, usually, conquest. Real history was Europe, Plato to NATO, and the cultivated mind spent a lifetime fleshing out the time-line. Because of this and because Halifax is a naval and merchant marine port, I looked across the North Atlantic for intellectual riches. My back was to North America. From grade seven or so, I yearned for Europe. Because I had little talent for languages, that obviously meant Britain.

Iwanted an education from university, not scholarships for graduate work. I thus had no interest in first class grades, indeed often got the bare minimum for my second class honours. But I had some rules, which I later recommended to my own students: always go to class, pass in assignments on time, and spend at least an hour a day in the library. I learned from courses, I learned from the library, but I also learned from friends. I’ll not mention all the names or try to recall the subjects, because it would be fragmentary and meaningless without long biographies. The two most influential friends were Lyall Campbell for intellectual rigour, which doesn’t come into the issues you’re asking about, and Michael Kennedy, a poet. I’ll get to Michael later, but first a digression of sorts.

One evening in the spring of 1959, my grade twelve year, Roger Savage said he was going to downtown RCAF Anderson Square to see about joining the reserves. I went along, Roger didn’t sign up, I did. I liked the idea because it looked like a profitable summer job, and Dad would probably be pleased. I figured I was of an age when I should be working during the summer, and this would save me from more vigorous (using influence) applications for jobs at Keltic Lodge, the Banff Springs Hotel, or the kitchen on the Ocean Limited. We were trained as Fighter Control Operators, those people you see in WWII movies watching blips on a radar screen or pushing little symbols across a map of southern England and northern France. We also drilled on the parade square. I enjoyed myself immensely. In the fall, as I entered Dal, I transferred to the University Reserve Training Plan, and became a Flight Cadet, an officer in training. After basic training at Collège Militaire Royale, I spent my next three summers at a radar base in northern New Brunswick, at Maritime Air Command Headquarters in Halifax, and at Air Force Headquarters in Ottawa. At the end of the third summer I got my permanent commission, HM addressing me in the royal “we” as “Our Trusty and well beloved,” and promotion to Pilot Officer; on graduation promotion to Flying Officer which I remain to this day, a name on some forgotten list in Ottawa. Again I enjoyed myself immensely although I was only in administration – I “flew a desk.” Aged only seventeen, I regularly found myself at the bar of the officers’ mess talking with and, more importantly, listening to veterans who had flown over Germany in the war, or who were now on ground duty between squadron assignments in fighters, of which they talked incessantly. I note that minimum drinking age didn’t apply for people on active duty; I also had the privilege of voting in several federal elections before I was twenty-one. In my final year, at AFHQ, I was on staff with the RCAF display at the CNE, and did a week-long staff officer’s visit to several training bases to research a recruiting brochure I wrote, my most prolifically published work apart from journalism.

I wasn’t a particularly adept officer, but I did my best and gradually learned not to make a complete fool of myself. For the first time, I was living and working among adults and being treated as almost an equal. I remain grateful to the RCAF and hope my love of the service as I knew it (before unification and emasculation by politicians) is evident from Jack Bottomly’s scabrous tale.

An honours English degree at Dalhousie in those days meant taking period courses – Old and Middle English, Shakespeare, Eighteenth Century Novel, Romantic Poets, and the like – no thematic courses, no great ideas seminars. I missed Middle English, but put a fair bit of effort into Old English, translating the whole of Beowulf, which was useful later when I tried to pick up something of Dutch, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and so on. I applied myself to Shakespeare and to Modern Poetry. My favourite professor was S. E. Sprott, a diminutive Tasmanian of magisterial authority, knowledge, and judgement. From him I took several courses, the most important, Modern Poetry. He dealt with only six poets – Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Auden, and Thomas, and concentrated on Yeats, Pound, and Eliot. It wasn’t the poetry itself so much as the aesthetics behind it that intrigued me: “Make It New” in Pound’s phrase. It all made perfect and familiar sense to me, I think in part because of my friendship with Tolmie and Savage. If you’re used to thinking of the world visually, imagism is natural. I realized some years later that I was a modernist.

Appropriate, isn’t it, for a Canadian in the 1960s to adopt an aesthetic which flourished in Europe in the period 1890-1939 – think of the revolutionary Group of Seven bringing Impressionism to a shocked Canada when most of the Impressionists were dead and Monet in old age was doing his Nymphéas at Giverny. But unlike such fleeting fashions as pointillism, futurism, or found poetry, Modernism had considerable substance in all the arts and across Europe. I suppose the salient points are that the artist is expected to try new things, and can assume a cultivated audience. I have found it both congenial and fruitful.

At Dal I also realized gradually that the standard dichotomy between style and content is false, at least for the artist. I have written about this at length in “A Refusal to Mourn . . .” so I’ll say only that I didn’t learn to do it on the page until after my first novel, of which more later.

Dal was still trying to turn out a fairly well-rounded arts graduate, so I took other courses such as chemistry (my highest grade), French (my lowest), sociology, art history, Classics in translation, philosophy (Plato’s Republic), and an interesting, informative, and entertaining Plato to NATO. Philosophy confirmed for me that mine is not a philosophical mind. I was grateful for being introduced to Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer, Virgil, Tacitus and others – I read Suetonius on my own. This filled in the history time-line more fully. I was getting there.

Literature courses outside of honours were offered – world drama, American, Canadian. No nonsense yet about science fiction or regional studies and the rest of the current drivel. The American I figured I could read at my leisure, and I certainly wasn’t tempted by a course that had a monster like Moby Dick on the reading list, while The Scarlet Letter looked like being as dreary as anything Canadian. I read Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and a few of the short stories, but while I admired the style, the huffing-and-puffing he-man hunting-and-war themes seemed as simplistic as John Wayne. As for women, had Hemingway had any sense of humour, he might have used that line from The Maltese Falcon, “You’re a good man, sister.” The Great Gatsby’s exalted reputation baffled me. I dipped into some Faulkner and found it turgid. I read On the Road, but was too middle class to be impressed, much less attracted by either the style or the highways of America – give me Graham Greene and the Tottenham Court Road.

Out of duty I several times considered the Canadian course. Bliss Carmen, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, Marjorie Pickthall, Pauline Johnson – I’d been exposed to most of them in school and was not tempted. I could read Callaghan, MacLennan, Raddall, and Garner on my own . . . after War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. When I admitted my authorial ambition to Dr Sprott, he mentioned Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley, a sensible suggestion to a Nova Scotian. I got it from the library, read several pages, and returned it. Some other day. Or year. I still haven’t read it. Besides, I was going to England, and I doubted chat about earnest Annapolis Valley angst would lower many knickers at a Hampstead booze-up. I might add that I’ve never been able to make out why you have spent a good part of your career warring against this stuff – its tiny corner in world literature was obvious to me at nineteen. Why bother? Eric Ambler on a bad day can write them all under the table.

I did write, though not fiction. I didn’t believe I’d lived enough for even a short story, and a novel was unthinkable. Besides, a short story would take all my spare time for weeks. About this time Marie-Claire Blais burst into print with La belle bête; word was she had written it at sixteen. I was humbled. So I wrote poetry, because I could get down a dozen lines at a sitting and fiddle with them in spare moments over the next week or so. And through poetry I met Michael Kennedy at the beginning of my final year.

Michael, who died recently, was a one-off. He had been born in St Andrews, Scotland, during the war and had lost his father. After the war his mother moved to Halifax. Like Tolmie, he had a whimsical mind, and habitually dropped into conversations startling observations. He was a far more blithe poet than I was. We hit it off at once, and soon agreed that after graduation we’d go to Britain together. We’d make a living somehow, teaching perhaps, or writing detective novels in collaboration. His appeal to me was obvious: those brilliant hummingbird perceptions, his wide reading, his geniality, his sense of humour. We started a poetry group, got some money from student council to publish a poetry broadsheet on 24 by 36 inch paper, and became regulars at the Lord Nelson Tavern. Which prompts me to say that Michael and Tolmie are about equal contributors to the character of Paleologue, the source of wisdom in Lord Nelson Tavern. The main difference between them is that Tolmie works in extension, Michael worked in compression.

Dad had wisely put all the baby bonus and family allowance money into accounts for his three sons. When I was twenty-one mine was signed over to me to do with as I wished, and it is a measure of Dad’s forthright honesty that he meant exactly what he said. I borrowed against it for expenses beyond my air force earnings, so on graduation I went to Toronto to get a job and pay back my loan. In Toronto I joined a number of friends who had recently graduated from Dal and made the same move, some for jobs, some for graduate studies. Torontonian Paul Young, another painter friend who will come into this account later, fell in with our bunch which he called The Maritime Invasion. It was taverns, parties, guitars, left politics, ideas, and talk – to be young!

I got a job as a systems analyst; I actually wrote a program for an IBM 1401. It was as big as a fridge and had a whopping 4k of RAM. I also passed a correspondence course with IBM, opening up another job possibility in England.

By February I paid back my legacy, and booked passage for Michael and myself on a freighter from Halifax to Avonmouth, the port of Bristol. About a month before departure, I met Lorna, a nurse; five days before I was to leave Toronto we decided to get married.

This is not autobiography, so I’ll include only the bare essentials about both wives. To include more would be unfair as they cannot reply.

I added Lorna to the booking. We took the train to Halifax, partied for a week, then boarded the ship, a Norwegian freighter with accommodation for six passengers. Lorna’s sister Lynda was making a living as a folk singer in London, and we stayed with her in her Hampstead bedsit. After a few weeks of pubbing and seeing the sights the three of us embarked on a tour – Edinburgh, St Andrews, Skye, Belfast, Dublin, and back to London.

Lyall Campbell had spent a summer in Europe. He said that on returning to London after some weeks on the Continent, he felt he was again breathing free air. Now I understood what he meant. I loved London, and would happily have settled there. I also agreed with Dr Johnson that “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.” I am pleased that after a trip together there last winter, my son Alexander agrees.

However, life in London would be something of a trial. I only realized much later that London was still recovering from the war. As you know better than I do, to get warm one either fed shillings to insatiable gas metres or went to the pub. Hot water also needed shillings and came from a crotchety geyser which threatened to destroy half a street if the complicated cocks were not opened and closed in the correct order. We considered the job possibilities. Writing mysteries we had already dismissed as too risky and too slow. Perhaps teaching in England or, some suggested, Sweden. Nursing for Lorna. Something in computers. Teaching in London, we learned, would likely mean a borstal in some distant and nasty suburb. The Swedish embassy suggested we first learn Swedish. Nurses worked sixty hours a week for a pittance.

Everyone was enthusiastic about Ibiza in those days: you could live for a year on the cost of a week in London. Heating not needed, wine at tuppence a litre, fish and other seafood the same. Lorna and I decided to give it a try; Michael preferred to stay in London and returned to Halifax after a few months. I bought a typewriter (at a shop very close to 221b Baker Street) and a week or so later we arrived in Palma, Majorca. We were expecting a sleepy fishing town; the week we arrived Palma opened its one thousandth hotel and Kwame Nkrumah was there to judge the Miss World contest. We looked at our money. I was beginning to accept that I was simply too middle class to adopt the survival tactics of the English enthusiasts for the frugal life. We had enough to get to Ibiza, then perhaps live for three months. After that, home on a distressed citizen’s passage. In Palma Canadians were handled by the British consul. He kindly agreed to see us for five minutes and made clear to us that we were far from distressed, and should hope we never became so. A clerk at BEA explained that my cash would pay for one fare and the second could be paid for with a cheque which would take a week or two to clear and which a loan against my insurance policy, if quickly arranged, would cover. The next day we were back in Toronto.

I had already begun a novel during a brief stay in Villacarlos in Menorca. Lorna and I made a deal that she would nurse and I would write, planning to finish the novel in one year. Then we would see.

I hit my deadline and began sending it off to publishers. They politely declined my saga of a young man’s angst in Toronto and Montreal. Yes, I had felt duty bound to commit the obvious Canadian Bildungsroman. It was earnest and serious and subtly organized around Eliot’s Four Quartets. Friends who read it were, as always, polite. When Michael browsed through it a little later he remarked, “It would make a good MA thesis. It proves you can construct a novel, manage a scene, float some dialogue. Now you can get on with the real writing.”

Briefly, Lorna continued nursing and I continued writing. In 1968 we moved to Montreal. A few years later she had had enough and moved out. I fell into a job teaching part time at Loyola College, then got a permanent job at Dawson College, where I continued until retirement at age sixty-five.

Before leaving Toronto, I should enlarge on Paul Young. We had known one another since I moved there in 1963, but only became close friends in 1967. Paul is an artist, but gradually put aside the brush for the pencil and taught drawing at several art schools, then for many years at the Ontario College of Art. A film about him in his last year at OCA is entitled The Drawing Master. Paul is also an accomplished guitarist and cook. His name will come into this account in several places. His crisp and direct prose voice, though not his life, informs Ti-Paulo in Lord Nelson Tavern. I might add that the Youngs often moved house and we sometimes lost contact for several years; after I moved to Montreal Paul and I kept in touch with letters and visits and he became my anchor in the visual and musical arts.

As an occasional break from grinding through that first 350 pages of sludge, I diverted myself with a few quirky, whimsical short stories. My notion was that if I enjoyed writing them, perhaps others would enjoy reading them. I don’t know about influences, except perhaps Nabokov among writers, and Ken Tolmie, Michael Kennedy, and Paul Young among friends. My inspiration came not from the great writers so much as from the odd phrase, a memory of childhood, light from a reading lamp in a dark room, the gazebo in the Halifax Public Gardens, the quiet of autumn woods, the curve of West Mabou Beach. Indeed, along with the play of language, capturing, conveying these evanescent moments or tones or moods has always been a prime object in my work. As I said, university showed me that I am not philosophical, and I had also come to realize that I do not easily understand people, that I am often obtuse. I recall a story Tolmie’s brilliant wife Ruth wrote. The depth of her perception about people, of the curves of their thought and feelings, stunned me. In the surviving draft of the final two chapters of Persuasion, we can watch Jane Austen working through her scenes. In an almost telegraphic compression, she lays out the sequence of Anne Elliot’s thoughts; the precision is almost brutal, the steel members of a building, then we can look at the final version and sense the same steel members but covered now in the walls and windows and porticos of a lovely Georgian house, with interiors by Adam and gardens by Repton. Quite remarkable, and quite beyond me.

These stories (and much of my later work) use anecdotes I’d heard such as one in Lord Nelson Tavern which has Grilse appearing out of a storm at sea at the home of Dimitri and Francesca, or Ti-Paulo’s father dining with the cat. And the gentle, ironic, often self-deprecating Cape Breton humour. I don’t know that I can describe it, and I don’t suppose other Cape Bretoners see it in my work, but I sense it is there – only a Cape Bretoner could have written A Night at the Opera.

From time to time during these apprentice years I pondered Canadian literature and my duty to it. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrote about Russia, Jane Austen and the Brontës about England, Balzac about France – surely the injunction “write about what you know” must mean write about one’s homeland. True, Shakespeare set Hamlet in Denmark and Othello in Venice and Cyprus, but they could just as well have been set in England. Hadn’t Henry James set most of his later works in Europe? Although I hadn’t read any James, I had the impression the central characters were usually Americans. Joseph Conrad set most of his works in foreign places, but then he was a Pole living in England and had sailed the world as a merchant marine officer, not an excuse open to me.

What to do? I’d set a novel in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, and it had bored me. I had nothing more to say about those cities. I had never been to the West or the North. I didn’t want to write about Scottish Nova Scotia, because it seemed to me I’d have to use the past to explain the present – the Massacre of Glencoe on page one and the Clearances on page two. No thank you.

Gradually a happy thought formed in my mind: I am a Canadian and have lived my whole life in Canada, therefore anything I write must be Canadian. Problem solved. So in the first collection, apart from the title story and “The Galoshes,” I left out any mention of the country. “The Galoshes” is set in Halifax, and “Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada” arose from the flurry of nationalist sentiment aroused by Centennial year, but otherwise I wanted to avoid connections to Canada which I sensed would be limiting – no dead beavers for me. If foreigners wished to think “Peril” or “Smoke” were set in the US or the UK, it made no difference.

This conclusion served me well through a book of short stories and four novels. Then I made the mistake of writing about Quebec in The Man Who Loved Jane Austen, dreary to write and dreary to read. But more of that later.

In time I had about ten stories. I broke into print when Robert Weaver (inevitably) published “Cape Breton is . . .” in Tamarack, then I passed the stories on to Dennis Lee and in 1968 House Anansi published them as Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada. As related elsewhere, Tolmie did two dozen drawings for the book, but Dennis refused them. I might add that I begged Dennis for a title that didn’t mention Cape Breton and Canada and again lost.

I have written at length about the stories in Cape Breton in the introduction to the Porcupine’s Quill edition, and re-published in the Biblioasis edition. Perhaps this brief quotation will suffice:

I became deeply suspicious of the relevance to me in my work of the standard novel as it developed through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries: The Great Tradition. Much as I admired and admire Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad and their colleagues, I suspected they had had all the adventure of inventing and stretching the form, and that a real artist ought to seek forms from within his own imperatives, that forms should arise out of the raw chaos of the material. I found I was bored writing someone else’s book.

That is in reference to the novel form; all the more so in reference to the short story. I must, however, admit in passing that neither then nor since have I been much of a reader of short stories. I seem to recall having read some Maupassant, a collection by Graham Greene, another by Maugham, some Chekhov. All very interesting but of little use to me. I couldn’t understand the fuss about Dubliners, but then I knew very little of Irish history. Rather than follow their forms, I wanted to do it my way, finding characters, scenes, snatches of dialogue from my own experience and putting them together in ways that amused or intrigued me. Apart from the rather obscure (nearly incomprehensible?) “The Dwarf in his Valley Ate Codfish,” I thought the stories would amuse and intrigue others. I’ll leave that to the judgement of what little of posterity the collection attracts. I should perhaps add that the list of other authors of speculative fiction mentioned in the Introduction to Cape Breton may be misleading. This occurs in a section you insisted I lift from Sixteen by Twelve. In it I was trying to give context or perhaps justification to junior high school students for my rather weird stories “A Cynical Tale” and “Peril” and listed Borges, Nabokov, Vonnegut, Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, and Brautigan. Of these, I had only actually read Nabokov. That is, they were working the same area of the mine, but we never so much as exchanged greetings on the way to the surface.

Surely I don’t need to give any account of those exciting years: Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Rudy Weibe, Kent Thompson, the first few years of the Writers’ Union, then the Montreal Storytellers with you, Hugh Hood, Clark Blaise, and Raymond Fraser. Of those names, Kent has remained my closest friend, and although we talk books all the time (we exchange phone calls once a week) he has, oddly enough, had little influence on what I write. But now I think of it, no one has had a direct influence on my writing. I rarely show work in progress and as you know from experience I have little use for editors.

Those were the years before The Great Stodge, before Regional Literature, before the Appropriation of Voices, before Political Correctness.

After the first novel, I embarked on a second one, a sort of fantasy thriller. After several years of work I had to admit that finishing it was beyond my skills.

The last story in Cape Breton is “Smoke.” I took some of the characters and developed them and others into Lord Nelson Tavern, but before getting to it, a digression. As I have written elsewhere, I was uneasy about one aspect of the Cape Breton stories – too much “Look Ma, no hands!” I find show-off writing distasteful, and while I thought the stories were honest adventures in the form, suspected many readers might have felt they were too much “Look, Ma.” So I resolved that in the future I would grant readers at least some solid ground from which to follow the events. Like Tolstoy and Jane Austen, I would inflict no mysteries about who is talking to whom or where they are. Let at least the surface of the scene be governed by clarity, and let any games be beneath the surface. This is why you find that the later works, “While by no means conventional, do seem to be edging back closer to ‘mainstream.’”

After failing with two novels, I was reluctant to commit myself to three years of work on another unified piece, so I cast about for alternatives. From Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (along with Catch 22 and some other things I expect), I got the idea of telling a story from different points of view. Durrell’s first three novels cover the same events or at least the same period, while the fourth advances the story. I didn’t want to follow the example exactly for it is a bravura performance, but thought at least to write stories with main characters who are minor characters in other stories, and sometimes covering the same events differently in different stories. In any case, I felt no need to follow the rules. Nabokov’s Pale Fire, purportedly a commentary on a poem, was just one of a number of unconventional works I enjoyed. I read Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy and The Erasers, and several of Beckett’s including How it is. And what about Finnegan’s Wake (still unread, of course)? And that notorious rule breaker, Shakespeare? Music was full of examples, as was painting. Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg broke the rules, the Impressionists, the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists broke the rules, so I could break the rules. Indeed, the obvious conclusion is that there is only one rule, not so much “Make it New” as “Make it Work.”

This was not the result of one sleepless night, but of hints and notions over a number of years and from a myriad of sources. Indeed, as early as my university years I’d sensed that the only rule was “make it work,” but putting it into practice took time. The Cape Breton stories did it in individual pieces, Lord Nelson Tavern did it at full length in its series of linked stories. As I remarked, I was trying to protect myself from another full length failure. I thought that if the stories fit together, they’d make a sort of novel; if one or another failed I could discard it. That organizational technique, which is part of what you say is “radically different” about my work was to a large extent a practical strategy.

But I had other aims as well. I found I wanted to write about times which would not make linear sense, so decided to ignore linear time – Paleologue, roughly my contemporary, serves in World War II, and his wife Gussie acts in Noel Coward’s plays during the thirties. Although the characters are in university in the early sixties, they are old by the seventies. I also wanted to access different tones – serious, comic, sentimental, elegiac, whimsical – but the rules demanded consistency of tone. I decided the rules were wrong (the gatekeeper in Macbeth and the gravedigger in Hamlet), and I was free to do as I wished. In any case, my procedure was more fun.

While some might argue that Cape Breton, Lord Nelson Tavern, and Century are all collections of short stories, I have always thought only the first is and that the second and third are novels. Here I’ll deal only with Lord Nelson and tackle Century when I come to it. As I mentioned in the quotation a page or so back, why must a novel progress as Pride and Prejudice does? Elizabeth Bennet’s struggles are forever young, the novel a living delight no matter how many times one reads it. But a form which doesn’t change is dead. And I followed Austen with Dickens and Conrad, thinking perhaps of Great Expectations and Nostromo, both relatively unified works. Perhaps I should have mentioned with admiration the giddy chaos of Bleak House (which I didn’t read until much later) or the narrative tangents of Lord Jim. May I suggest that a novel is an extended and unified fiction? But how is it unified? The unity of Pride and Prejudice is clear and well understood. Lord Nelson Tavern is unified by scenes which recur but are seen differently, by the reappearance of characters, by the general if somewhat dislocated progress of time from the university years to the elegiac walk of Paleologue and Gussie. It is also unified in theme – the question of how one is to live a satisfactory life. This problem drives the book, appearing in every “story,” tested, answered, evaded, avoided, bungled by all the characters. Dimitri and Francesca succeed because they are blessed by fortune, an impossible dream for all but a very few. Lucy and Ti-Paulo’s father perhaps find it in an unconventional but sincere affection. Paleologue, Gussie, Nora, and Ti-Paulo try and largely succeed through art. Gould and Rachel bumble toward happiness with fractured and fighting love, conventional ambitions, a flawed family. Grilse tries through extraordinary adventures to win back his lost love but ultimately admits defeat. The repulsive Naseby fails utterly, finding poetic justice in his watery grave. Sarah’s mature search is yet to come, but we can hope that with her demons perhaps tamed, she may one day find peace and perhaps happiness. And if that’s not unity, I don’t know what is.

This is as good a place as any to unload an irritation and reveal the odd result. As part of the promotional tour for Lord Nelson Tavern I read at Dalhousie, the only time the university has acknowledged me as a writer. The incompetent bozo in charge of the gig promised a lovely room in the new Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, but neglected to book it (and forgot to advertise it), so I had to read in an austere sub-basement only accessible by a long spiral stairway. One of the guests was Jean MacKenzie, a cousin of my father and my geography and grammar teacher in junior high; when she taught parsing it stayed taught. She was an intelligent, adventurous, dedicated, and beautiful woman – she had travelled around the world alone and eccentrically had an MA from a university in Honolulu. At the time of my reading she was in her early fifties, but had cancer and only a few months to live. On the night of the reading, Halifax had an ice storm, but Jean braved the icy sidewalks, then made her way down to the Hitlerian bunker. I read “Sarah’s Summer Holidays.” When I was done, Jean diplomatically mentioned that while she knew it was the fashion and it only appeared in dialogue, she rather wished writers could manage to be realistic with less obscenity. She was right, and the swearing in Lord Nelson, for all the book’s virtues, now grates on my ear, and for the Biblioasis edition I’ll try to cut it back. I have never used the f- or c- words in print since and I’m willing to bet you did not realize they’re missing from Jack Bottomly’s tale. Given his foul mouth, managing that was a piquant challenge.

Really, John, this is all so obvious that it’s hardly worth writing down. After grinding through the above, I must say I would rather be doing something enjoyable, such as painting the window I repaired . . . or having a root canal, or a ten-gallon castor oil enema. Unlike you and Clark, I hate anything like autobiography. My upbringing was all quite ordinary and trivial, my life largely uneventful, and my marriages private. If you have further questions, please keep this in mind and stick to the writing. I might add that were this not an interview, but my own account, I’d have to be paid handsomely; as it is I earn nothing but a splitting headache.

For the masochistic, more detailed accounts of what I was up to in these first two books can be found in my commentaries in Sixteen by Twelve, The Narrative Voice, The Montreal Story Tellers, and the Porcupine’s Quill and Biblioasis editions of Cape Breton. My thoughts on the practice of writing can be found in “Three Propositions on the Art of Writing” and my aesthetic, if it deserves such a big word, in “A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Bullshit of Literature in the Eighties.” I’ll append a bibliography.

As I was finishing Lord Nelson Tavern I met Anja, a Dutch-born flight attendant, and we married a few years later. She introduced me to skiing, which quickly became an obsession. We skied not just in Quebec, but in Vermont, Alberta, BC, Utah, Colorado, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland. I decided to write a ski book, a compendium of travel pieces, anecdotes, descriptions of ski hills, and even some fiction, and with a variety of photos, maps, sketches, and drawings. It would not be an encyclopaedia of skiing, but a sort of companion. Jack McClelland was willing to give me a decent advance, but said I was a novelist and should write a novel. Reluctantly I agreed. The novel I wrote very quickly. As you’ll recall, Jack said it was the worst MS he’d ever seen from an established writer; you said Jack was being charitable.

I decided that I would never again write to someone else’s direction. (So why am I writing this?) In any case the book I had been musing on for some years was going to be a winner – my comic spy thriller, The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins. I began it in 1979 and finished it in 1981. Because it did not get published until 2007, I’ll deal with it later and touch on it but briefly here.

When I conceived The Flush, and as I began writing it, I had never heard of the Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser. By the time I finished it, however, I had read at least one Flashman and saw his similarity with my equally scandalous hero. Flashman was an international bestseller, therefore Jack would be as well. Unfortunately, Canadian publishers disagreed (remember my father’s comment?), and twenty-five years passed before you and Dan Wells finally got the book into print.

As you’ll recall, I was devastated. Nothing in print since Lord Nelson Tavern in 1974, the failed ski book, Jack Bottomly shunned. My writing career, as Jack would say, had gone tits up.

My teaching career was not doing well either. Early in 1983, the government of Quebec imposed on teachers a twenty percent pay cut and a twenty percent workload increase, along with other draconian measures. The Parti Québecois brutally crushed the resulting strike. On a gloomy weekend in the midst of this depressing business, I began a story with an image that had haunted me for a decade or more of a young woman named Jane Seymour visited, tormented by the spectre of Heinrich Himmler. I followed this with a brief romp about Ian and Stephanie, a young couple who travel. In some sequence of musing now lost to memory, I decided the young woman of the first story was the sister of the husband in the second, so wrote a long piece about their father. Recently widowed and retired from his job in Africa with an international aid agency, Bill Seymour takes up gardening.

Since about the mid-sixties I have found politics disagreeable. Anglos in Quebec, however, cannot avoid politics and most of it is highly disagreeable. After the strike, I found I needed to write something political. Setting it in Quebec was impossible for I was both too close to it and too far from it. Never fluent in French, I taught and wrote in English and most of my friends were English. And the research! Some years after I’d finished the book, Mordecai did a long piece on Quebec for The New Yorker, and I remember wondering how he stayed sane reading all that dreck about that nasty priest, Lionel Groulx – whose name graces a major station on the Montreal Métro. So I would have to displace my settings.

The three sections already written were in more or less contemporary time; I decided I wanted something more adventurous and chose Paris in the 1890s for “Red Velvet, Black Lace.” I’d always disliked research, and the burrowing for The Flush of Victory did not change this. But there was nothing for it, and away I went into literature, painting, politics, mores – lots of Colette, all of Theodore Zeldin, Fauré and Saint-Saëns, Toulouse Lautrec and Bourguereau, Lady Randolph Churchill, and so on. One of the three artillery officers Kenniston sees outside the Café de la Paix is almost certainly Dreyfus. An old maxim is “Don’t let your research show.” I hoped it didn’t, but certainly readers would be confronted by what I thought of as “an information overload.” I hoped they would give up trying to catch all the references and assume that I had everything right. I thought it all came off quite well.

But as this was to be a book about our murderous century, the gaiety of Paris needed a dark other half, thus “Red Banner, Black Boots” and its setting on the train across Weimar Germany in 1923. France-Germany, one city-movement, day (largely)-night, cheerful-sombre – altogether a work of numerous contrasts. Again exhaustive research, again numerous historical and fictional characters mixing – the young AJP Taylor arguing politics, Mr Norris changing trains, the real Marie Larisch mentioned in the opening of The Waste Land preparing Kenniston and Lulu for their visit to the Hofgarten, Lulu singing out a sentence the first letters of which, I incorrectly thought, spell out the notes of a main theme of the opera Lulu just as Alban Berg joins them; he in turn quoting from Wedekind’s Erdgeist or Die Büchse der Pandora, together the source of Lulu. The prize find, of course, was the diary of Count Harry Kessler. Again I thought it came off quite well especially as a companion to the Paris section.

I have to admit here that I may have written the Paris-Germany pieces before, not after “The Garden of the Hesperides” but I think I have given the chronology correctly. At any rate, when all these were done, I submitted them as my master’s thesis at Concordia – trying to get back some of the salary Quebec had taken away. The thesis is entitled Two Novellas. Clearly the notion that it was a novel was not yet tenable. But I sensed the unity in politics. Jane Seymour was assailed by the demons of Nazism, and concerned with socialism, feminism, and the anti-war movement of the seventies. In the least political section, Ian and Natasha in their despair at the loss of their daughter, seek solace and find it in the crazy variety of New York life. Having retired from the largely hopeless job of improving the lives of Africans, Bill Seymour is appalled by the parochial obsessions of pampered Canadians and returns to Africa. With the Paris and Germany sections, many of the worst aspects of the century were touched on. I just needed the linking section, and of course it had to be about Gwen Seymour, the wife of Bill and the mother of Ian and Jane.

In preparation for it, I read thirty books about Venice, then travelled to Geneva and Venice with Anja. The writing of “Serenissima” began immediately on my return, and it gripped me with the first sentence which with its sibilant s-sounds was more or less as published. I was teaching long hours and attending evening classes, but the story kept me up after midnight and pulled me from bed before sunrise. Writing it was a transcendent experience, and it is my finest story, mysterious, haunting, uniquely and entirely itself.

What is not clear, seemingly, is that Gwen is the daughter of Lulu-Constance and Kenniston Thorson. To spot this, the reader must note in “Serenissima” that Gwen’s mother Constance, dying in the white room, whispered a secret name which Gwen has forgotten. The reader must recall this when at the opening of the train ride forty pages later, Connie orders, “From now on, call me Lulu.” While preparing the Biblioasis edition of Century, I tried to find a place to strengthen this identification. Having Gwen remember “Lulu” or something like it would have done violence to her memory; an admission by Lulu that she is pregnant, or of a possible daughter named Gwendolyn would have torn the fabric of the story.

But I knew the basis for the family unity, and knew attentive readers could spot it. Beyond that, the title and the thematic concerns with the horrors of the twentieth century unify the work to my satisfaction. In a conventional novel, the other unifying element is plot. I have never been much interested in plot, and use it only when it can’t be avoided, as in Jack Bottomly’s tale. So if Lord Nelson Tavern and Century have unity in theme and character but not in plot, are they novels? On the cover of the first edition, M&S calls LNT a novel, as does U of Edinburgh/ Polygon. Stoddart calls the first edition of Century a “collection of fiction,” Polygon calls it “fictions” and Biblioasis calls it “A novel.” I think they’re both novels, but they are obviously not novels in the orthodox sense, so I must let readers decide for themselves.

Iwas happy with Century, and considered it the beginning of a second career. Because of the political and historical dimensions, it was obviously an “important” work, and if it had a big success my career might move to the next level. But while Century got some good reviews, it won me no prizes, no great sales, and no breakthrough. As you know, I’ve never cared about the politics of the Canlit scene, never wanted to know who was on the jury, what reviewers are in so-and-so’s pocket, who’s out to knife whom. So I was only just aware that this was the era of the lists. One was out of Calgary, I think, and named the one hundred great Canadian books or writers; I was not included. A rival group compiled a list of the finest writers under forty-five, and although I was eligible I was left off this one as well. I drew the obvious conclusions.

A second career, but of what sort? A career like Mordecai’s which would support me for the duration? A career of eminence enough for prizes which would pay off the mortgage? Or a career of obscure publication, but earning enough to pay the insurance and taxes on the house? For the first two the literary world of agents, publishers, and reviewers wants definable work with the author’s particular scent, and preferably a book every two to five years. I manage a book every six years or so, works which are wildly different and each too eccentric for popular or even academic taste, but if I could get things published I would be satisfied with the third sort of career. And I remembered an anecdote – about 1970, I applied for a Canada Council grant and Robert Weaver wrote me a letter. Al Purdy was on the jury and later told me that Weaver had said, “He’s a fine writer, but writing as he does he’ll never make any money from it, so you might as well give him the grant.” Prescient. When you joined The Porcupine’s Quill I was fairly confident you would publish whatever came next. At about this time an artist friend saw his career go down the toilet (a federal tax rep was anthropoidally insulting), so I considered myself blessed. I also had a reasonable job, a first son, Nicholas, then a second, Alexander, and house payments, so financial stability had to take precedence over the bubble reputation.

And I did have the honour and pleasure of being writer in residence at the University of Alberta and Canada-Scotland Writer in Edinburgh, of seeing Lord Nelson Tavern and Century both published in Edinburgh, the edition of Cape Breton with the Tolmie drawings published at last. Readings and such took me and sometimes Anja and Nick around Scotland including Orkney, on a tour of Germany, to London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Venice, and Nice. That’s considerably more than anyone can reasonably ask of life, and as much as I could have expected when I took up the business. Despite some initial disappointment, I accepted my position with equanimity. And, twenty years later, so I continue.

This is as good a place as any to mention The Professors’ Table. In the early seventies, a group of us began meeting on Friday evenings for beer and talk at the Royal Pub. Our usual waitress Marie gave our table the name, and put a reserved sign on it. The Royal is gone but the table goes on, nearly forty years later, with a core of half a dozen members in Montreal, and others in Vancouver, Texas, Singapore, Hong Kong, Delhi and so on. I’ll mention but two of the regulars, Aaron Krishtalka and Neil Cameron, both CEGEP history teachers. In one of those bizarreries of Quebec life, Neil was the Table’s Member of the National Assembly for five years. Their interests, particularly European history, set the tone and the subjects of the weekly conversations and as I mentioned, that was my idea of real history. The table was also an inexhaustible source of research hints. I had only to ask about France in the 1890s to have Zeldin recommended, or Weimar Germany to be steered toward Viscount D’Abernon’s memoirs. The Professors’ Table inspired aspects of Century and the books which followed it – it actually appears in The Man Who Loved Jane Austen.

A Night at the Opera began as an anecdote which I believe I have recounted elsewhere, but which I’ll repeat here. Researching Century I had visited a certain European city – I think I’ll be coy about which one. While we were in Edinburgh, Anja and I visited the same city. The first time we took the U-Bahn, she listened in amazement to the announcement, then said, “I didn’t believe you when you told me about that ridiculous voice, but you were right. You have to write a story about it.” Thus the Dutch dedication to her, “die het stem gehoord heeft” – “who has heard the voice.” Back in Edinburgh I began trying to discover how a city came to use an entirely inappropriate voice.

The story simply grew. For fourteen years Herr Einzelturm (lonely or isolated tower), the able if stodgy director of the Waltherrott Transportation Board, oversees the modernization of the city’s transportation system. The final touch is the recorded announcements for the trams, and with no acceptable alternative Herr Einzelturm shoulders the responsibility, with grotesque results. During a celebratory performance of the opera Der Hosenkavalier he is humiliated and takes an extended leave until the fuss dies down. Out of curiosity, he researches the life of Carl Maria von Stumpf (of or from the stump, la vieille suche), the local composer of the opera. In the standard reference works he finds brief and dismissive entries on von Stumpf. He also finds two full length works. The first, from the Waltherrott University Press, is deconstructionist lunacy, and the second a hasty and ambiguous biography written by a friend shortly after the composer’s early death in 1848. In the manuscript room of the library he digs out a lengthy fragment of von Stumpf’s journal, written while the composer was working on his historical opera about the life of the town’s founder, Graf Walther vom Faß (of the beer barrel). (The ß is the German double-s; I wanted to make the text as exotic as possible.) Von Stumpf himself got access to the annals of Father Adalbert, the priest of the village at the time of Graf Walther’s arrival in the 1340s; these annals and von Stumpf’s journal are quoted in full. These finished, the text returns to Herr Einzelturm and his reaction to his findings.

The story had grown far beyond its original scope because every new revelation demanded further enquiry. With my confidence solid, I was happy to let the work wander where it would, and delighted in constructing the various documents. Although I have enough Dutch to get by in shops and bars, my German is not strong, but I had enough for the book. During a bibulous day and evening, I had help from Walter Larink of the Canadian Embassy in Bonn and his wife Renate. Although Anja is fluent in German, I asked her help for some corrections and a few suggestions.

The German is more for atmosphere than for meaning, and readers are not expected to know the language. Any amusement is simple, even simple-minded: Herr Bach (stream) is in charge of traffic flow, Herr Stahlmeister (steel-master) is superintendent of equipment, Fräulein Farber (dyer, stainer) runs the design office, and Herr Wassertor (watergate) is manager of advertising and public relations. I rather like “Why again to Paris, Herr Schmetterling?” (butterfly) and “Herr Schmetterling’s voice was too fluttery.”

Beyond that the wordplay is in English, and putting it together was like splashing about in the ocean on a sunny summer day. After reading the lugubrious nineteenth century text, Angus Calder suggested I must have cribbed from Carlyle; with delight, I admitted I had read 2,000 pages of Carlyle to get what I wanted. “Yes,” replied Angus, “the sheer awfulness of the prose is unmistakable.” Out of courtesy to my readers, I hinted that they need not read all of this “sheer awfulness” by having Herr Einzelturm skip sections. After three pages of quoted material, he wakes from a text-induced sleep, and “He had read perhaps half a page: only a fool would have read more.” In deference to Tim Inkster who worries about lawsuits, I’ll not name the sources of the moronic modern criticism. I thought the wine and guidebook quotations fun, gradually revealing that Waltherrott and its people are not quite what the Waltherrottners think they are. You give me undeserved credit for the invention of the conversational fragments – surely you invented them at least as early as “The Nipples of Venus.” I’m pleased with the tourists waiting for the noontime display of the figures on the Rathhaus clock:

odds are it’s early and you’re off in the can
better with the zoom
guidebook says the last guy actually moons us and then farts
a bit skunky or something?
the wrong ASA
gross you out, eh Harv?

And of course the bits of musical manuscript by Paul Young make the book special. Some such as “La Marseillaise” are transcriptions, some he adapted such as the Holzshuhtanz which is, as I recall, the theme of the famous waltz from Der Rosenkavalier upside-down. Several, such as “The Morning of Civilization” he composed himself. Paul went to the Royal Ontario Conservatory library for facsimiles of nineteenth century German musical manuscript in order to develop von Stumpf’s calligraphy. For anyone who can play them, the scraps of music should provide a few chuckles. For the musical perfectionists, I should add that I suggested Paul include a few errors in some of them.

Looking through it nearly twenty years later, I’m pleased at the number of different texts and sorts of texts making up the book. I wonder that some modern critic didn’t jump on it as a shining example of some sort of layered or juxtaposed text thing forever subverting itself or whatever it is the best texts are supposed to do. But I suppose it’s not clever enough for the academics.

One aspect of it which is obviously too clever for any reader is the identification of Watherrott with Quebec. Well, it was my private template for some of the absurdities of the city, and I simply used my sense of the similarity to make decisions: when in doubt, think Quebec. Thus Waltherrottners shamelessly prettify their history, look with amazement on anyone who moves away, and blandly claim everything in Waltherrott is the best when it is gradually revealed as mediocre and derivative:

Here was the new Kaufhof, there the C&A, next a McDonald’s, then Benetton, Bally, Burger King, Herti, Mövenpick, Nordzee: national and international companies were showing their confidence in Waltherrott.

Waltherrott, like Montreal, is a chain shop backwater. As I said, a private template.

As you remarked when it was going through the press, it is one of the most bizarre books ever published in Canada. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and still delight in the ponderous Herr Eizelturm’s guided tour, in the performance of Der Hosenkavalier, in Walthers Versuchung the disgusting local treat “consisting of suet sausage, boiled potatoes, red cabbage, and brown beans” (think poutine), in the city’s crest with its two hills topped by the castle and the church, and below the bush with the stream flowing down from it (trying drawing it), in poor von Stumpf’s impotent artistic rages, in Graf Walthers triumphant crusade to the Holy Land, in Sister Renate’s explanation of sainthood . . . And finally, the men are clowns and the women dreadnoughts.

I suppose you’re right to say it darkens toward the end but I had no sense of that – it went where and how it had to go, to Herr Einzelturm in his clown suit:

At last, as the band swung into the beloved Holzschuhtanz from Der Hosenkavalier, he began an ungainly shuffle, waving his arms, flapping his feet, and heaving his great bulk about like a bear, a pudding, a quaggy bucket of Walthers Versuchung.

What’s dark about that bucket?

Afriend who shall remain nameless was responsible for the next book. A Night at the Opera was an amusing romp, she said, but it was time for Ray Smith to come home and write about Montreal. I should have ignored her. What the hell, the guilty party is my old office mate and dear friend, Judy Adamson, and she and her husband Alan are the models for Eleanor and Magnus Rowan in the book she prompted me to write next, The Man Who Loved Jane Austen. I should have remembered the disastrous ski novel I wrote for Jack McClelland. But I had long had a picture in my head of Christmas shopping on St Catherine Street, of stopping at the corner by Ogilvy’s and seeing Mount Royal in snow, lit from beneath by the lights of downtown, somehow a magical vision, so I started there.

You needn’t be apologetic for criticizing it – I think Jane my weakest book. But although it has autobiographical elements – the children are portraits of my sons, and Frank’s teaching job is mine – Frank is not me, and his marriage is not mine. In answer to the question many (well, let’s be honest – six) readers have asked, the in-laws have no relation to Anja’s parents who are and were (her father died several years ago) kind, generous, and amusing – well, they’re Dutch.

The scheme is simple enough – Frank Wilson is an Anglo, and his in-laws are stand-ins for Quebec nationalists, thus Frank can do nothing right, and he is always guilty. With his wife dead, Frank finds himself under increasing pressure to relinquish his children to his childless sister-in-law and her husband. The story unfolded itself with inevitable logic. The idyllic Tobermory in Cape Breton is obviously Mabou, but although Frank tries he fails to achieve my escape here.

The only stylistic aspects worth noting are that I stole Aunt Norris from Mansfield Park for Mrs Hatcher, and I relentlessly excised every blithe phrase, every hint of brio, keeping the prose flat and tight just as Frank must always keep himself in control.

I suppose the best that can be said for the book is that it achieves itself; itself, however, is not very interesting.

But Quebec was not finished with me. The Man Who Loved Jane Austen didn’t give any idea of just how insane a place Quebec is. So I felt compelled to invert everything in a comic novel in which Will Franklyn, an innocent Anglo, moves to Montreal and discovers that nothing is what it seems. Did you know that “Heidi Felsen” is German for “Heathcliff”? I think The Man Who Hated Emily Brontë is considerably better than its companion, because despite your “grindingly dour” remark, it does have some amusing scenes. Surely you see nothing dour about the hippos, about Gudrun’s gruesome snack, about the English department meeting with the rustic retirement villas, the gender equality report (the committee searching out the queer subtexts in the works of Metcalf, Wiebe, etc), and “Girls and boys, can we spell Ouija board?”

That said, I have to admit that both books are, as you complain, didactic. I hadn’t thought of that word, but it’s apt. Quebec is nasty and insane and Cape Breton is the idyllic alternative. The message is perhaps most succinctly put in Margaret’s comment to Will on the Quebec flag: “The Bourbon lilies weren’t emblems of liberté, égalité, fraternité.” And I betrayed my muse, ignoring my greatest strengths as a writer – they are both conventional novels. But I will not, as you request, “talk about what the books came out of.” If you have to have a nonfiction account of my views on Quebec, read any of Mordecai’s pieces on the place and assume I concur. Everything I have to say on the subject can be found in these two books as well as implied in Century and A Night at the Opera. But with Jane and Emily out of the way, I had the joy of seeing The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins at last achieve print.

Ishould briefly remind you that I’d been musing on a spy thriIler since at least the early seventies and began writing it in 1979. I’d enjoyed detective stories and thrillers since my school years; for some reason a lot of fiction writers seem to share the taste. Of course, I’d read some James Bond, but soon discovered Ambler, and in a few years LeCarré came along, then Len Deighton. I read many others going back to The Riddle of the Sands, but Ambler was and remains my favourite – I’ve just finished re-reading what Hughie used to call his oeuvre, all except The Schirmer Inheritance which is missing from my collection. Musing on the difference, I concluded that a thriller is a detective story with border controls and other languages, often with Swiss banks, and perhaps a military angle. It had to have a plot, no matter how unlikely (consider some Deighton has got away with) so that was going to be a challenge. But I decided to give it a try.

My spy, properly an intelligence agent, would have to be a Canadian, therefore the book had to be a comedy, perhaps more correctly a farce. In order to use my own experience, I made him an air force officer. By this time, of course, the noble air force blue was gone, the RCAF abolished in the shotgun marriage to the other services, “and nothing Royal about it,” as Jack remarks. The establishment (the necessary numbers) was down from 120,000 in my day to half that number or less. The aircraft were all long in the tooth with replacements promised . . . sometime. Canada’s armed forces were a NATO joke. I guessed (with deadly accuracy, I expect) that Jack’s office, the Department of National Defence Intelligence/Air, was also a joke, subsisting on little better than PR handouts from USAF, NATO, CIA, SIS and the rest of the alphabet soup. And the several plots, especially the attempted theft of an obsolete Argus anti-submarine patrol aircraft, appeared to be absurd but were ultimately credible. I was away.

I took as my text the internationally accepted view that Canadians are the world’s most boring people, and wanted to show that at least one Canadian was not boring. Major Jack “Bummo” Bottomly may be a foul-mouthed drunken bum-pincher, but he is not boring. To protest that he is prejudiced is wrong – without prejudice he insults every race, colour, creed, class, and profession, every sexual orientation, and every national group except the Dutch. What no one seems to have recognized is that his most devastating exposure is of middle-aged white Canadian males – himself. I caught Jack’s voice on the first page and it saw me through some three hundred pages of manuscript. And while he often admits he is a lout, the prose belies him and is often elegant in its own way, and he is always scathing about bad grammar or sloppy usage. The second volume of his memoirs, on which I am now working, reveals that Jack actually has a degree in history, mostly by correspondence, from The University of Moose Haunch.

As the title suggests, the book features a great variety of bathroom humour, with attendant gurgles, grunts, hisses, sniffs, and explosions. The challenge was to keep all this vulgar farcical nonsense somehow believable. The solution was research, which I was determined should be exemplary. I travelled to Vancouver, Australia, Zurich, Basle (the details about the airport including the toilet are quite accurate), Amsterdam, and London to be sure locations were exact. While Jack frequently admits he speaks no foreign languages, he uses as I recall eighteen including Schweitzerdeutsch and Latin. I consulted a myriad of books, maps, airline schedules, and such. I pored over histories of the RCAF and the RAAF. For Squadron Leader Bluey Jones of the RAAF, I mined several books on Australian idiom. To give but one example of my burrowing, Jack’s opposite number in the US Defense (with an “s” down there) Department mentions a war game called “Son of Nifty Nugget.” My inside source assured me that anyone familiar with Pentagon war gaming in the late seventies would shudder at the name, as the original game, Nifty Nugget, had been an embarrassing snafu. If, as rumoured, the CIA studies all published spy thrillers, that little gem caught the attention of someone in Langley, and my name and Jack’s are on file.

I hoped the research anchored the farce. Beyond that, and beyond his “finely honed vulgarity,” Jack is a frustrated romantic. He joined about the time the Avro Arrow was going to give Canada the finest interceptor in the world. Like me, he met any number of World War II and Korean War vets, some of them decorated heroes. He was proud to join that honourable band, and hoped one day to earn the respect of his fellows. But Dief killed the Arrow, and with few exceptions it’s been budget cuts ever since. Bluey Jones is included in part to remind readers that in 1979 Australia was keeping the RAAF in far better combat trim than was Canada the CAF. From the web sites of the two services, I gather this is still true today. Perhaps the second volume will make Jack’s romanticism a bit more clear to readers who can see beyond the T&A, beyond the booze.

The review in the official air force magazine was, of course, one of shocked horror – well, it had to be or the reviewer would have been spending the rest of his career counting paper clips on Baffin Island – if the politicians give the air force enough money that it can still defend Baffin Island. Jack’s shenanigans “bring the honour and pride of those who serve in Canada’s air force intelligence to a never-before-reached low” etc. But I noticed that the reviewer did not criticize Jack for technical inaccuracies – my memory and my research had apparently done the job, and the farce was solidly grounded. I have always thought the book a masterpiece.

Not long after Jane was published, Anja asked for a divorce. Fortunately, because of the sons, we remain cordial. Two fine women, two divorces – again I drew the obvious conclusions. So in the spring of 2006 after my mother died I chose the house as my share of her estate. A year later I retired from teaching, and with Nicholas at McGill and Alexander at Dawson, I did the sensible thing – I left a ground floor apartment near shopping, good bus service, and teaching hospitals and moved home to Mabou. I have eleven rooms, just what a retied fellow needs. The stairway is long but easy on the legs, the shopping is surprisingly good, but there’s no public transport and the hospital is twelve miles away. I am delighted.

And that’s it. Having wasted over three months on this project of yours, I can get back to It Floats: Jack Bottomly Among the Politicians. As we used to say when I was a kid here in Cape Breton, it’s the same only different. I’d like to think it will gore a few oxen, but for that to happen an unlikely number of people will have to read it. We’ll see.

August C. Bourrè: You’ve said before that science fiction is your “native literary culture.” Has your view of that culture changed since you began writing? Is it still a single culture? Was it ever?

William Gibson: I think the key to this is Dennis Danvers’ “narrative strategy” of SF, opposed to the genre of SF. The narrative strategy is a lot older than the genre. I’d date the genre as we’ve known it to Hugo Gernsback. I grew up as a reader amid the genre, but the narrative strategy was present too, to whatever extent.

I suspect that I was rather quickly drawn to the edges of SF-as-genre. A lot of the core texts of mid-century SF never attracted me. Quite by accident I went from Heinlein juveniles to Alfred Bester, and it was the Bester that stuck. And I was reading Bester during SF’s New Wave incursion, being introduced to Ballard and probably even Borges by Judith Merrill’s Year’s Best SF collections, which were really splendidly subversive. So by the time I was fifteen I had no sense of the genre being one thing; quite the opposite. I’d had my first exposure to a revolutionary schism in art.

AB: I’ve recently heard it suggested that the Industrial Revolution was in fact the (or perhaps a) Singularity, and I wonder if you think SF – the narrative strategy – might have emerged as a way of coping with that.

WG: I’ve never thought of it that way, but probably because the idea of the Singularity has always looked to me like a sort of secular Rapture. One of [the] impulses that led to The Difference Engine, though, was a sense [Bruce] Sterling and I had of the Industrial Revolution having been a far deeper and more intense shift than we ordinarily, culturally, give it credit for having been.

AB: You’ve never shied from the science fiction label, but some, literary authors in particular, will bend over backwards to avoid such associations, even when borrowing heavily from the conventions of genre fiction. Beyond marketing, do those kinds of rigid divisions matter?

WG: Readers who are excessively concerned with genre, and the boundaries of genre, don’t strike me as particularly sophisticated readers. And that can be true on both sides of that fence. The fence itself I regard as parochial, but nothing the literary side has ever said about SF has bothered me quite as much as SF’s subcultural use of “mundane” as a descriptor for the whole of literature that isn’t genre SF. I haven’t encountered that usage for decades, but it was quite prevalent when I began writing.

AB: A number of interviewers have asked about your use of Twitter in Zero History, but I’m more interested in the Gabriel Hounds line, which is this very high quality, very rare brand of denim clothing. Like Cayce’s Buzz Rickson jacket in Pattern Recognition, it’s an almost fetishized revisiting of an older fashion, an older technology, yet still highly functional in addition to being cool. Is this how nostalgia plays out in an increasingly atemporal culture?

WG: That stuff is all very literally real, and I watch it playing out in our culture. I don’t know what it means, but I find it poignant, and admire and am friends with some people who do it. My friend Kiya, in San Francisco, will sell you a pair of $600 jeans, but only if you really want them. If you ask him why they cost that much, he’ll probably shrug and tell you you don’t need them. And his clientele isn’t particularly wealthy. Passionate, in a way. But I don’t see it as nostalgia, which I assume ordinarily to be the conservative modality. It’s about pushing back at the shabbiness of simulacra, maybe. Kind of a William Morris move for the 21st Century.

AB: The relationship between physical and digital space has always figured heavily in your work, but both the Sprawl trilogy and the Bridge trilogy had strong ties to a single place even when they weren’t explicitly used as settings, an element that’s gone from the Blue Ant books. Despite that, the relationship between the physical and the digital seems even stronger, just more distributed. Has there been a shift in how you see location as a concept?

WG: In Spook Country I made the point that cyberspace has everted, colonised the physical. That was a big deal for me, and I signaled it by actually using “cyberspace,” a word I hadn’t used in fiction since Mona Lisa Overdrive. The eversion continues to distribute itself, and here we are.

AB: In your conversation with David Mitchell at the International Festival of Authors one of you – and I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten who – raised the point that authors of historical fiction require a very similar set of tools to those of science fiction writers. Are the tools required for writers from different genres becoming more and more similar in general?

WG: That was me. That’s always been true. Imaginary futures are history backward. What we call genre fiction is often much less demanding, and promises in effect to only surprise in ways that won’t surprise us. The purchaser of an airport thriller isn’t buying it to experience, say, an unreliable narrator. But any genre can, potentially at least, be written to any level. The westerns of Cormac McCarthy, say. Though the mechanisms of genre as commerce and subculture exist to prevent that happening.

AB: You wrote yourself into the not-quite-a-ghost-story “Dougal Discarnate,” something I don’t recall seeing in your work before. How did that piece come about?

WG: I entirely misunderstood what the collection was meant to consist of! I somehow thought that that it was a collection of Vancouver stories, with some stress on psychogeography. No idea where that came from. It was a break from writing Zero History, so I opted for first-person as least familiar, biggest change.

AB: Was Dougal named for parapsychologist Serena Roney-Dougal, by any chance?

WG: No. Not sure where it did come from. I had a sense of it sounding archaically Canadian. I wouldn’t name a character that directly after anyone. The names are important to me, but not in any way I can easily explain.

AB: Having spent three novels with Hubertus Bigend in the here and now, I wonder if you have any sense of what’s next?

WG: As usual, I have no idea. I’m not even entirely sure that Bigend is fully ready to let me go.

Sam and I met in August, 1999. I’d co-written a script for a short film produced through the Canadian Film Centre. The short was being screened, along with five others, at the old Uptown Theatre in Toronto. I was twenty-six. I’d written a short story and conceived of writing a collection of inter-connected stories. A friend knew Sam, who ran a publishing company called Gutter Press, in reference to the type of sensational journalism that thrives on tales of perversion, but also as an allusion to Oscar Wilde’s maxim, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” I thought that was cool. I’d long romanticized the artist repudiating the comforts and decorum of mainstream society, living in squalor. I also thought it was cool that Sam published “edgy, risky fiction.” My story collection in-progress would fit the criteria. I invited him to the screening.

I liked Sam right away. He was pot-bellied and his black hair hung over his forehead in greasy wisps. He had the dark, round, jolly face of Buddha. A crowd was milling and chattering around us as we stood in the hallway outside the main auditorium.

“I was thinking, if you dig the short, you could read my story. It’s gonna be part of a collection called Rotten Kids.”

“Great. Though you might want to re-consider the title.”

“Why?”

He squinted and shook his head.

“It simply isn’t sellable because, you know, if a reader saw that title on a bookstore shelf, I’m sure he’d avoid it like the plague.”

“Okay.”

“You might also consider turning it into a novel.”

“Why?”

“These days, given the shrinking market for literary fiction, first-time fiction writers need to debut with a novel. A story collection from, you know, a no-name simply won’t get any attention.”

“I’m on it. I really like what Gutter stands for. So much crap gets published in Canada.”

He smiled and nodded.

“I created Gutter entirely to go against the grain of Canlit, and because I have such a passion for new authors, I’m always on the lookout for exciting new talent. I have the instincts of a gambler.”

“Has it been tough to make a go of it?”

Still smiling, Sam glanced upward, as if at the stars.

“I lose money on every book I put out, but I’m simply not in it for the money, you know? For me it’s always been a labour of love.”

“That’s awesome. You do get a fair bit of press, though.”

“I have absolutely no problem with exploiting myself in the media. Good press, bad press, it makes no difference to me, because it’s all to promote my authors and their books.”

He’s so honest and shameless and full of integrity. And he’s got balls. He stands for something real. I wanted to be his “exciting new talent.” He liked the short film and the story and offered to take me on. I wrote a draft of the novel in sixteen days.

“I love it. But it’s raw and it still needs a lot of work.”

“Awesome. So . . . Where do we go from here?”

“Keep working on it, and when it’s ready we’ll sign a contract. I’m very excited. This is exactly the kind of gritty novel that could be a real breakout for Gutter.”

“Really?”

I had a vision of the hardcover edition on a bookstore shelf with “Rotten Kids” and “a novel by Marko Sijan” emblazoned on the front jacket.

“But consider changing the title.”

I had no intention of changing the title. I thought it was perfect: edgy and nailing the novel’s content. After expressing his indifference to profit, I wondered why Sam wanted me to come up with a more “sellable” title. I thought little of it, though. I was going to be a professional writer!

I spent the next two years refining the manuscript, though unfortunately I was unable to work on it as much as I would have liked because I was very busy teaching English as a Second Language and having sex with my Japanese, Korean, Brazilian and Mexican students. And smoking pot. A lot of pot.

During that time, Sam ushered me into the Toronto literary scene. At his swanky loft on Power Street, just north of King Street East, he hosted what he referred to as his “Coke and Sex Parties.” I never saw any coke or sex. I did see hardwood floors, bay windows, a sanded deck and well-dressed literary hipsters sipping wine and nibbling hors d’oeuvres on napkins in their palms, chatting about their latest projects. There was, however, a bathroom with a sign on the door that read: “Coke and Sex Bathroom.” I liked being around these important, established artists because of the validation they offered my ego. Their nods of approval as I told them Gutter was publishing my novel and the enthusiasm with which they greeted its pitch swelled my vision of self-importance. I fancied myself a better writer than all of them combined.

But what I liked most about Sam’s “Coke and Sex Parties” was meeting women. Young female students in the Creative Book Publishing programme at Humber College served as bartenders and waitresses. One of them talked from the left side of her mouth and wore purple pixy glasses, crooked. She drank too much the night we met and slipped on the stairs leading from my bedroom down to the foyer, her ass thumping each step on the way down. From the top step I looked down on her as she looked up at me, glasses perched on her lower lip, cackling.

I saw that Sam was erecting himself as a monument to sex. He’d earned some notoriety from a Globe and Mail article in which he’d been interviewed about bad sex scenes in Canadian novels and he’d skewered what he thought was an especially bad one in Andrew Pyper’s The Lost Girls. It involved a couple fornicating in a canoe. Tell-all memoirs of former strippers also aroused Sam’s interest and some of these reformed pole-dancers attended his parties. One of them claimed to be in the process of writing her memoir. She had a nasally voice and a laugh like a punctured accordion, both of which she attributed to her nose job. To protect her surgeon’s work she wouldn’t let me kiss her, and to keep me far away from her nose, we had sex in the manner of dogs.

In the fall of 2001, Sam published Lie With Me, a semi-autobiographical account of the life of a female nymphomaniac. He was aiming to resurrect an old genre called “erotic fiction,” coupling literature with smut. I saw it as another one of his brave attempts to subvert and invigorate the dull tradition of Canadian literature, and it deepened my respect for him. Lie With Me generated some buzz for Gutter and at the launch I met the author, Tamara Faith Berger. I tried to hit on her but she took no interest in me. Good. Your book is shit. I hadn’t read it.

At one of Sam’s parties I also met Azm-ul Haq, who remains among the most ebullient people I’ve known. Pudgy, uni-browed, with a smile so large it sealed his eyes shut, Azmi had recently emigrated from Pakistan, where he may have been director of its national television station. I relished our conversations, enjoying his formal diction and syntax and sing-song East Asian accent, as well as his liberal use of the term “Paki.”

“Why’d you move here? Didn’t you have it made in Pakistan?”

“Ah, Marko, the Paki life is teeming with repression and menace. I would have never been able to render the stories of complex human mosaics about which I’m terribly passionate.”

“What do you wanna do here?”

“It is my raison d’être to write and to direct films and television series. I am currently composing a screenplay about the Paki community east of Yonge, and the bifurcation of their identity subsequent to immigration.”

Azmi used his wealth and connections to build a niche for himself in the Toronto arts scene. He hosted parties at his Bloor Street West condo where I encountered more writers, editors, agents and publishers. There I met author Russell Smith, his chiselled jaw line and flawless coiffure framing a scowl I found inviting. I hadn’t read his fiction but I’d heard they were honest explorations of male sexuality and I liked his “Virtual Culture” column in the Globe and Mail. We stood in the kitchen beside a huge silver fridge, surrounded by the lavish spread of delicious Paki food Azmi’s wife had laboured over. I tried to impress Russell by telling him the humiliating story of an ex, a story I’d promised never to tell anyone, and since the ex was part of the scene and I didn’t want her to learn I’d betrayed her trust, I wouldn’t tell Russell who she was. I said she was a “fellow colleague.” The story had to do with her threatening to kill herself if I dumped her.

“Did you have a notion before that she might be insane?”

“Only late in the game when she started accusing me of gazing at men on the street and wanting to fuck them.”

“Did you?”

I shook my head.

“I had no clue where the gay vibe was coming from.”

The furrows of Russell’s brow thickened.

“Maybe you weren’t aware of it.”

“Yeah, that’s what she said.”

“Sorry.”

“No-no-no, deep down I might be a fag.”

Russell didn’t laugh.

“Anyway, I stayed with her a whole extra year before calling her bluff.”

“At least you were a noble sucker.”

“Yeah, but I fucked a lot of women during that year.”

Finally, Russell grinned and leaned in.

“So who is she? Is she here?”

He kept grinning, but the moment he knew I wouldn’t tell him, the grin vanished and his eyes turned to stone. I thought about inviting him out for a drink in the hope he might help me develop a pitch for the Globe and Mail and get it accepted, but I didn’t. I ran into him at subsequent parties and pretended to ignore him, hoping my feigned indifference would elevate his opinion of me.

During these two years of occasionally refining the manuscript, I presumed my “literary career” had been consolidated. Azmi said I may be “the finest writer in Toronto,” and I kept telling myself that once the novel was published, I’d commit myself to writing. I thought I had time. I made the mistake of actually believing the praise and letting it enlarge my already swollen ego; besides, Faulkner, then my hero, hadn’t published his first novel till his early thirties. I was in my late twenties. And though I felt guilty about it and knew I had to quit, I liked getting high. Every day. Fuck it. You’ll quit when the book comes out. Keep going to industry parties, secure contacts for future projects, get your name out there. Get laid.

In the summer of 2002, I fell in love with Alma Luz Guerrera Contreras Moral, a Mexican ESL student. She was a prophetess of doom with raven hair and small, baby-soft feet.

“I love you.”

“You are professional liar.”

“Why?”

“You are writer. Just you want to feel.”

I decided to move to Mexico. I told her I’d have to return to Toronto for the book launch and my career would likely necessitate my remaining there.

“You are writer. Just you want to have adventure.”

I finished refining the manuscript, finally, and on New Year’s Eve, Sam and I signed a contract. It was still called Rotten Kids, and since he never again took issue with the title I thought I’d won “the battle” to preserve the integrity of my vision. I received an advance of $300 for signing the contract, another $300 for producing a manuscript “satisfactory” to the publisher, and a contractual promise of $400 “upon publication of the Work.” In section #3, under the heading, “Obligation to Publish,” the contract stated:

The Publisher agrees to publish the Work in a quality trade paperback edition within twelve (12) months following the receipt of the manuscript. Should circumstances beyond the control of the Publisher (such as financial constraints, loss of funding, etc.) delay publication, the date of publication may be extended for a reasonable period of time [italics mine], up to eighteen (18) months from the date of the receipt of the manuscript.
Should the Publisher fail to publish in accordance with these provisions, the rights shall, at the author’s option, revert to the author.

Despite the fact that the contract imposed on “the Publisher” no real obligation to publish, as far as I was concerned, my book was going to get published. Sam told me it would launch in September, 2003; I told him I’d return to Toronto by August.

My parents tried to dissuade me from moving to Mexico: “A dangerous place,” according to Mom, “full of ignorant peasants.” When I showed her a picture of Alma, she said, “Oh, she’s really Mexican.” I was twenty-nine and had never been financially independent. Mom still put three-hundred dollars a week into my account so that I could afford the comforts I’d grown up with, my father being a doctor. Neither she nor Dad believed I knew how to take care of myself or had any sense of responsibility or purpose in life. On January 5, 2003, back in Windsor, Ontario (the armpit I was born and raised in), they drove me to the Detroit airport. I cried all the way there. At the airport security gate, Mom said, “See you in a week.”

In early February, after a week-long bout of food poisoning from Mexican lettuce during which time I’d lived in the shower alternately shitting or vomiting, I got an email from Sam that he’d sold Gutter Press and I’d have to re-negotiate my contract with Ed Sluga, the new owner. Sam must have been considering giving up on Gutter for some time, but I’d heard nothing about it. He’d joined the Lavin Agency as a literary agent and said he’d represent me but wouldn’t get involved in my negotiations with Ed, citing “conflict of interests.” I didn’t understand what “conflict of interests” meant. For the first time, I was scared the book deal might fall through.

I was generally scared in Mexico, being tall and white while the majority was short and brown and eyed me with contempt, speaking a language I had no interest in learning. We lived in Tampico, a rancid industrial town with pocked streets, sidewalks caked in soot and buses spewing plumes of black exhaust. Tenements leaned on each other like leprous dominoes. Fat brown cockroaches shared the apartment with us; huge mosquitoes gave me giant red welts. I was teaching English at a private school with students whose parents worked for the multinationals (like Coke and Dell) that funded the school. The kids were spoiled and arrogant and treated me like one of their servants who cleaned their bedrooms and did their laundry.

Alma and her family were Catholic. Had her father and seven older siblings become aware of my existence, they might have killed me. If they came to visit, we’d stuff my belongings in the closet and I’d spend the night in a motel. Every day I thought about leaving, but since I didn’t know what was happening with Gutter and I’d succumbed to the cliché that I could squeeze some material from an ordeal in the abyss, I chose to stay.

Alma and I had told the landlord we were married because Mexicans believe a man who lives with an unmarried woman has fled his wife and children to fornicate with a whore. Alma may have wanted me to marry her, but in truth she was married to her father. Upon his wife’s death twenty years earlier, he’d promised his eight children never to remarry and to sacrifice his life to ensuring they all received postsecondary educations, established themselves in careers and started families of their own; except Alma, who, being the youngest, was obliged by Mexican tradition not to marry but to care for her father as he grew old and sick. At twenty-eight, her trip to Toronto the year before had been her first excursion from home. Her father had diabetes and was blind in one eye and paralyzed in one foot.

Meanwhile, Sam had me forward the manuscript to Siri Agrell, Gutter’s new managing editor. In June, after four months of not getting a single response from several emails I’d sent her, Sam informed me she’d been “very sick” and was now no longer with Gutter. For four months I’d been emailing Ed but he hadn’t replied, either. Sam kept in touch.

“Why won’t this Ed fuck reply to me?”

“He’s reorganizing Gutter and, you know, simply has a lot of admin work he has to take care of first.”

“All I’m asking for is an acknowledgment of my fucking existence.”

“Don’t worry. When he’s ready he will tell you when your book is coming out.”

“Whatever. I’m working on a second novel.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“In the worst-case scenario, when I finish it I’ll come back to Toronto and have two manuscripts to whore myself with.”

“That’s great news, Marko.”

On August 30, I turned thirty. Mom put five-hundred dollars into my account. I called but she wouldn’t talk to me. Dad mumbled a happy birthday wish and kept clearing his throat.

“What’s wrong, Dad?”

He sighed.

“If you don’t come home soon, I don’t know if we’ll survive.”

Dad’s threat only strengthened my resolve to stay. Besides, being Alma’s dirty secret in her closet seemed my proper place. Suck it up, you gutless worm. Being an adult means not being afraid of the dark!

September, 2003, the novel’s supposed month of publication, came and went. On October 30, Sam forwarded an email he’d gotten from Ed: “I’m about halfway through the book [Rotten Kids] and I want to know if we can do this for Fall 2004. What is the guy’s name again? How do I reach him? Are you his agent?” I failed to notice that Ed seemed to be seeking Sam’s permission to publish the book; I was too concerned about Ed’s mental constitution since my name was on the title page of the manuscript and at the bottom of all its 132 pages and I’d been emailing him for the last eight months. That’s okay! He’s going to make me an author! I only have to wait till Fall 2004!

By December 23, Ed still hadn’t contacted me. I called Sam.

“I think Gutter’s dumped my book.”

“I’m not sure that Gutter has dumped your book.”

“I haven’t heard shit from Ed.”

“He’s having some kind of personal crisis.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“You have a contract with Gutter. They can’t just dump it.”

“If you say so.”

“How’s the novel coming?”

“Good. I’m over halfway through.”

“That’s great news, Marko. I’m very excited that you’re well into the new book.”

I hadn’t written a word of a new book.

On January 23, 2004, I forwarded Sam an essay I’d written about infidelity in Mexico for a grotty English language rag published through a university in Tampico.

“This is brilliant. If you ever want to do a non-fiction book about infidelity, let me know.”

“That’s an awesome idea. I’m gonna do it right after I finish the novel. Thanks!”

“If you write a good proposal and a sample chapter or two, I’ll aim to get you ‘50K.’”

“Really?”

“There’s much more money in non-fiction. You could do a brilliant job!”

I thought I understood for the first time why Sam wasn’t pushing the manuscript with Gutter and what “conflict of interests” meant: my interest in getting published versus his interest in making money.

Still, Sam’s reference to the essay as “brilliant” bloated my ego, which was then engorged on January 24 when Azmi – apparently “shooting a series for the Showcase network” – forwarded an email he’d sent to Ed and Vanz Chapman, Gutter’s new managing editor:

. . . did you get a chance to read rotten kids ms? . . . i really think that you guys are sitting on a potential super hit of a book . . . i had the great privilege of reading . . . quite frankly i was blown away . . . in the right hands it’ll probably make a huge 6 x one hour tv series . . . the writer marko sijan is probably the finest talent north of mexico . . . i’ll bet anything that he’ll be huge in the coming years! . . . this is the kind of book that may sell well (if translated in urdu and hindi) in south asia – the market is huge out there, as we discussed!!!!!

Ed kept ignoring me. Vanz, too, till March 24, when I got his number from Azmi and called him.

“I wrote you two months ago about Rotten Kids coming out in August.”

“Marko, am I mistaken, or have I not responded to you every time you’ve contacted me? I could be wrong.”

“Has Gutter dumped my book?”

“No, we haven’t dumped it. We’re just clearing up some admin stuff.”

“August, then?”

“We don’t usually release books in August. If anything it’ll be in the fall.”

“Look, I’ve been with Gutter since December 2002 and had a Fall 2003 release pushed back to Fall 2004, only to be ignored for the last six months.”

“Again, I’m new here so I could be wrong. But all I’m saying is it’d probably be a September/October release as opposed to an August one, the difference being a matter of weeks. I’m meeting with Ed today. I’ll confirm and get back to you tonight.”

He didn’t. The next day I called Sam.

“They [Ed and Vanz] can both fuck themselves and pray they never meet me face to face.”

“I talked to Ed. He wants to do the book in the fall.”

“Bullshit! I’ve heard fuck-all from that asshole.”

“I told him you might not want to, in which case he’s saying you’d be breaking the contract and he would like the advance back.”

My skull started melting.

“I’m gonna cut his throat.”

I was living in a state of epic delusion. I saw myself as a victim whose drive to succeed had been crushed by publishing industry charlatans. Not only did I believe I was fed up with Gutter and wouldn’t deal with them anymore, I empowered myself by resolving not to tell Ed and Vanz I wouldn’t allow them to put out my book. Though it was under contract till September, I decided to send it elsewhere.

Not that I actually did. But author Elyse Friedman was generous enough to put me in touch with Michael Holmes, publisher of ECW Press, where another friend, Jen Hale, happened to work as an editor. On May 4 Jen informed me that Michael had found the manuscript “very strong, but he already has several projects on the go for the next few seasons.”

She did include links to other presses to whom to forward the manuscript, adding:

It would be tough with you in Mexico, but it’s worth a shot. This must be very frustrating for you. I know how our authors get if the book comes out a couple of weeks or even days after we told them it would. You sound like you’re much more accepting of things.

That night, Alma and I got drunk. It was the eve of Cinco de Mayo, the day 200 years before when Mexico had driven out its French invaders. With the bathroom window open we were having loud sex in the shower, till the old spinster sisters next door started slapping their brooms against the wall, screaming, “Alto, los diablos!”

I put on shorts and was about to head out the front door.

“Where you are going?”

“To get my smokes from the car.”

“I will bring them.”

Alma stumbled towards me, naked.

“Ha ha,” I said.

“I am serious.”

She reached for the door and opened it. I slammed it shut with one arm and wrapped the other around her waist. She tried to wriggle out of my grip and pry the door open with both hands.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” I asked.

“I am a hooker!” she screamed, clawing at the door. “I am a whore!”

The next morning it must have been a hundred degrees. Beside me Alma lay enclosed in a nimbus of sweat, softly snoring. I could hear men in the surrounding apartments, yelling and laughing as they watched the annual Cinco de Mayo soccer match between Monterrey and Mexico City, for which they’d prepared by drinking all night. Suddenly, the power went out. A moment of awed silence seemed to bend the walls, as if the seventh seal had been opened. Then the men started cursing and screaming, knocking over television sets, smashing bottles against walls. The dozens of homeless dogs squatting around our apartment started howling: first one, then two, then slowly a multitude. I lay in a fetid pond of sweat and stared at the ceiling.

I sent the manuscript to none of the presses Jen had recommended. On May 23, I got an email from Michael Guy-Haddock, Gutter’s layout designer.

“I have an update on your book. Call me. “Rotten Kids” will be coming out this fall.”

I told Alma the wonderful news. She dumped me. I was ecstatic.

At the airport security gate, we kissed and wept.

“Are we really doing this?” I asked.

“You made me so happy. You made me to live again.”

On the plane I resolved that this time I’d return home and finally start writing seriously: three hours a day, every day, as I told Sam I’d been doing since the late nineties.

A friend picked me up at Pearson airport. We drove to his place and got high.

On June 6, I met Michael and Vanz, not Ed, at the Gutter office on the Esplanade. Vanz was tall, sturdy and Afro-Canadian, a writer of “Caribbean fiction.” The sides and back of his head were shaved; on the crown sat a patch of cactus-dreads. I’d sent them the manuscript for a final copy edit and we discussed cover design and layout. As for the fall release, they were still waiting for confirmation from Ed. I was starting to wonder if Ed existed.

I left the Gutter office and visited Sam. He was living at the Drake Hotel, in the process of starting his own agency, “The Rights Factory.” (A rumour held that the Lavin Agency had sacked him.) It was mid-afternoon and I’d woken him up from a nap. He sat up and yawned. His hair stood up in shoots of grease, his belly stretching his t-shirt, underwear taut around his testicles.

“How’s the book coming?”

“Oh, it’s done but it’s . . . hundreds of pages of handwritten notes. It’ll be a while before you can see it. I’m actually working on the proposal for the infidelity book.”

“Great. When can you get it to me?”

“In a week.”

We signed a “Rights Factory” contract and I became his client. Again.

In early July, I handed Sam a twenty-page proposal for a book on Mexican infidelity. In fact, the first two pages summarized the infidelity stories I’d recorded; the last eighteen chronicled my relationship with Alma, though I hadn’t cheated on her. Shamed and castrated for lacking her father’s integrity, I hadn’t dared sneak out of her closet and cheat.

Sam was not pleased.

“It’s just an uninteresting story about two people who should have broken up a long time ago.”

And then, at long last, I met Ed. It happened in late July in a chance encounter at a Drake Hotel literary event. Sam happened to be there and he happened to be talking to Ed, though I didn’t know it was Ed till Sam introduced us. Short and balding, Ed wore a red polo shirt under a brown tweed jacket. At first he was polite and friendly, but when I kept scowling at him, he stiffened and stopped smiling. Sam tried to warm the air by mentioning to Ed how excited I was for the launch, then swiftly excused himself. I recalled Sam’s reference to Ed’s “personal crisis” as Ed fixed a cool gaze on me and broke the silence.

“Sorry about all this . . . Dirty Rotten Kids will be out in the fall.”

“When exactly?”

“We have a number of things we still have to do.”

“Like what?”

“The design and layout come next.”

“I thought Vanz and me had taken care of that.”

“Right. He and I will be getting together . . . We’ll be in touch.”

He nodded with the speed of a woodpecker.

“Please . . . I just wanna know if Gutter’s actually gonna publish Rotten Kids.”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

I scoffed, but he didn’t flinch.

“To start with, I’ve been waiting over a year now.”

His eyes started wandering.

“I understand your loss of . . . But Gutter’s more organized now, and we’re all jazzed up to publish your book.”

“For sure?”

“We’ll be in touch next week.”

“Okay, but – ”

He locked his eyes on mine.

“Look. I can’t say when in the fall just yet. I’m under the gun on several issues here.”

I suddenly felt timid. Assuming his “personal crisis” involved whatever “issues” had him “under the gun,” I was pinched with guilt and gave up pursuing an unequivocal guarantee of publication. As Ed excused himself, I decided he’d given me just enough to float my turd of hope.

On September 1st, my contract with Gutter expired and the book rights were available to me. I hadn’t heard from Ed or Vanz in over a month. I wanted to withdraw the manuscript, again, and now I had legal recourse to do so, but it was easier to sustain the illusion that Gutter would come through. I called Vanz.

“Is there any reason for me to think there won’t be a Rotten Kids published by Gutter Press?”

“It was in the catalogue we sent to distributors, so it will be done. I’m meeting Ed tomorrow. I’ll get the details and call you back.”

He didn’t.

On October 2, I attended a friend’s wedding in Stratford. She was marrying Andrew Pyper. Andrew looked august with his salt-and-pepper curls, black-rimmed glasses and pin-striped suit, and since he was arguably Toronto’s hottest author, I seethed with envy. A crew of Toronto literati were in attendance and I held them in contempt, including veteran literary agent Anne McDermid. She sat across from me at dinner. Her short hair looked auburn-dyed, her eyebrows pencilled-in. I recalled the gossip I’d heard: apparently she preferred to represent young men and if she liked you, she would make you successful. Our eyes met. She smiled; I didn’t. She asked who I was. I mentioned my novel was coming out in the fall.

“Who’s putting it out?”

“Gutter.”

“They’re having troubles, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is your novel about?”

I’d done this so many times I recited the synopsis in a breath.

“Rotten Kids spans ten hours in the lives of five teenagers whose stories intersect and influence one another’s outcomes and illustrate how exploitation is a basic function of human intercourse.”

Her smile turned mischievous.

“It sounds very intriguing. Do you have representation?”

“I do, but thank you.”

I looked down at my plate and resumed eating. I felt empowered to have turned down such a powerful industry figure. Besides, I was committed to Sam. Contractually.

On October 7, I had coffee with Azmi. He seemed measured and aloof, his uni-brow waxed down the middle. He’d also lost at least fifteen pounds. He wore a tight t-shirt pressed to his flat stomach. He said he was “very busy” and our meeting was brief. I mentioned I’d been high every day since returning from Mexico. He shook his shrunken head.

“Ah, Marko, your mind is an indispensable asset. As a writer, it is your only invaluable possession. I do hope that you will take better care of it.”

I didn’t. That was the last time I saw Azmi.

On October 12, Vanz sent an email.

“Ed thinks late October/early November, but email him to confirm.”

I did so. Ed replied the same day!

“We’ll be in touch next week.”

That was the last time I heard from Ed.

On November 17, I emailed Vanz.

“Late October/early November, huh?”

“I’m still waiting to hear specifics from Ed.”

I was numb. By this point, I was smoking four or five joints a day. I convinced Vanz to meet me for coffee.

“I’m withdrawing the book from Gutter.”

Vanz looked down, pressed his lips together and nodded.

“I understand. I’m sorry, man. Wish I could do more, but Ed runs the show.”

“So . . . Can you just level with me? Was Ed ever gonna publish my book?”

“Of course.”

“Of course?!”

“Listen. Gutter hasn’t paid its dues to the OAC this year. All our publications are suspended.”

“Is Gutter going under?”

“I really don’t know.”

On February 4, 2005, I got an odd email from Sam, which contained a string of correspondences between him and Ed.

“Marko has expressly withdrawn Rotten Kids.”

“Are you telling me as Marko’s agent?”

“He has no faith for the way he’s been treated the last 16 months. I’m trying to get clarification on the status of the book at Gutter.”

“Are you asking as Marko’s agent?”

I emailed Sam.

“Thanks for the update. Just a reminder that I legally withdrew Rotten Kids last November. It officially has NO status at Gutter.”

I emailed Ed.

“My contract with Gutter expired on September 1, 2004. I’m seeking publication elsewhere. You’re a fucking prick. I’m going to hang you by your scrotum and throttle you like a piñata.”

For a few minutes I stared at the last two sentences, deleted them and sent the message.

On February 21, I got another odd email from Sam.

“I may have found a new publisher for Gutter and if Ed agrees to hand it to her, then we can submit to whomever we want.”

What are you talking about?! Why can’t we “submit to whomever we want” now? I also didn’t understand why he cared about Rotten Kids, or why he was trying to find a new publisher for Gutter. I thought he’d turned his back on it. Any affiliation would be a “conflict of interests,” remember? Fucking charlatan. At the time I often wondered what “conflict of interests” really meant, and what constituted Sam’s relationship to Gutter after he’d become an agent. I failed to invent any satisfactory answers, but trying to do so was easier than just asking Sam for the truth.

On March 24, more than a month after our last email correspondence, I paid Sam a surprise visit on Wellington Street at his “Rights Factory” office in a low-rise building with hardwood floors and the plumbing and ventilation system outside its walls. He was sitting at his desk and reading something on his laptop, clicking the mouse. I pulled up a chair and sat facing his profile, the space of a metre between us.

“I wanna start freelancing for magazines. Try and get my name out there. Start over.”

“Great.”

Since I’d long ago attained the bliss of the liar who believes his own lies, it never occurred to me that Sam must have known my claims to wanting to freelance and writing daily and working hard on a number of projects were false. In the five years we’d known each other, all I’d produced was a novel, a short essay and a lame non-fiction book proposal.

“So . . . How does it work?”

He kept his eyes on the monitor.

“How does what work?”

My fingers started tingling.

“How do I write a pitch?”

He looked at me as if to blurt something out, then turned back to the monitor.

“As soon as I have a chance, I will send you some sample pitches along with links to how to pitch to Details, Maxim and Playboy.”

The clicking of the mouse reminded me of the cockroach scuttling across the bedroom floor as I’d watched Alma sleeping and thought, What the fuck am I still doing here?

My hands were heating up.

“What about Rotten Kids?”

He said nothing for a few seconds.

“Start with the big houses like Knopf and Penguin. Submit it to them, and when they…you know, if they pass on it, send it to the mid-sized presses: Thomas Allen, Anansi and so on. If they pass, send it to the small ones.”

A web page he was on froze and he shook the mouse, clicking rapidly. It reminded me of when Alma had been doing the dishes and a cockroach scuttled between her legs. She screamed. I tried to stomp on it but it kept scuttling left and right.

“Okay . . . Do we submit it through ‘The Rights Factory’? How does it work?”

“For a small novel like yours, it simply wouldn’t make a difference. You might as well submit it yourself.”

I remembered chasing the cockroach in circles around the kitchen, stomping and missing. Alma kept screaming.

“Won’t it just end up at the bottom of a slush pile? If it’s submitted in a ‘Rights Factory’ envelope, won’t it get read faster?”

“Not necessarily. Small novels like yours are a low priority for big houses, regardless of who’s submitting it. It’s a real long shot.”

As he spoke I watched the profile of his jowl ripple, his belly doubled over his belt, the creases of his pants bunched up around his crotch. I clenched my warm fists as I recalled the cockroach crunching under my foot. Alma stopped screaming and fled the kitchen. I watched its pink innards glistening, and as I thought about not wanting to wipe them up, I stood there and remembered the conversation I’d had with Mom a few days earlier. She mentioned she was old and would soon be dead. When that happened she wanted to be cremated and flushed down the toilet.

“Why?”

“Funerals are a charade, like everything else in life.”

Sam looked at me. He raised his eyebrows and I sensed he was preparing to tell me how busy he was and I should leave. His eyes seemed to bulge with unwavering confidence. I stared at his jolly serenity and imagined lunging at him and tackling him to the floor. I pinned his arms under my knees and mashed his face to a pulp. During the beating, however, his expression remained jolly and serene.

“You all right, Marko?”

“I should go.”

I left his office and haven’t spoken to him since.

It took me a long time to understand that Sam didn’t betray me. He was a friend and mentor who introduced me to an exciting world and facilitated many happy memories. Sam tried to help me so much as the limits of his time allowed; once he smelled I was a fraud, he rightly tossed me aside. He had his own ambition to pursue and I no longer fell within its purview. As for Ed, his “personal crisis” could have involved any number of issues, and he may have been powerless against the juggernaut of his own dysfunction. Gutter was. And like the contract, neither Sam nor Ed ever guaranteed my book was going to get published.

I left Toronto and gave up writing (while assuring friends and family I was writing every day), then eventually started again by scrutinising every comma in the manuscript, re-writing it multiple times, and re-titling it Mongrel. Eventually, with help once again from Elyse Friedman, I did secure a publisher for it, but the truth is I’m still bitter it didn’t get published seven years ago. These seven years have involved a lot of brooding over what happened and what should have happened, and the result is now I’m largely indifferent to my book’s impending publication. I wish I could say I learned a great deal from my ordeal with Gutter Press and I’m a better person for it, and that years later, I no longer hate Sam. But I can’t. I hope I never see him again. And now the thought of calling myself an “author” or “professional writer” makes me want to punch another hole in my bedroom door.

. . . To date, I have written three full-length fictions that nobody would ever class as sociological realism: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Are these books “science fiction,” I am often asked? Though sometimes I am not asked, but told: I am a silly nit or a genre traitor for dodging the term, because these books are as much “science fiction” as 1984 is, whatever I might say. But is 1984 as much “science fiction” as The Martian Chronicles, I might reply? I would answer not, and therein lies the distinction.

Much depends on your nomenclatural allegiances, or else on your system of literary taxonomy. Back in 2008 I was talking to a much younger person about “science fiction.” I’d been asked by the magazine New Scientist to answer the question, “Is science fiction going out of date?” But then I realized that I didn’t know the answer, and one of the reasons for this was that I didn’t really grasp what the term “science fiction” meant any more. Is this term a corral with real borders that separate what is clearly “science fiction” from what is not, or is it merely a shelving aid, there to help workers in bookstores place the book in a semi-accurate or at least lucrative way? If you put skin-tight black or silver clothing on a book cover along with some jet-like flames and/or colourful planets, does that make the work “science fiction”? What about dragons and manticores, or backgrounds that contain volcanoes or atomic clouds, or plants with tentacles, or landscapes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch? Does there have to be any actual science in such a book, or is the skin-tight clothing enough? These seemed to me to be open questions.

This much younger person – let’s call him Randy, which was in fact his name – did not have a hard and fast definition of “science fiction,” but he knew it when he saw it, kind of. As I told New Scientist, “For Randy – and I think he’s representative – Sci-fi does include other planets, which may or may not have dragons on them. It includes the wildly paranormal – not your aunt table-tilting or things going creak, but shape-shifters and people with red eyeballs and no pupils, and Things taking over your body.” Here I would include such items as Body Snatchers – if of extra-terrestrial rather than folkloric provenance – and Pod People, and heads growing out of your armpits, though, as I’ve said, I’d exclude common and garden variety devils, and demonic possession, and also vampires and werewolves, which have literary ancestries and categories all their own.

To continue with the results of my informal interview with Randy: Sci-fi “includes, as a matter of course, space ships, and Mad Scientists, and Experiments Gone Awfully Wrong. Plain ordinary horror doesn’t count –- chain-saw murderers and such. Randy and I agreed that you might meet one of those walking along the street. It’s what you definitely would not meet walking along the street that counts, for Randy.” Randy judged such books in part by their covers, which means that my speculations about jacket images are not entirely irrelevant. As one friend’s child put it, “Looks like milk, tastes like milk – it IS milk!” Thus: looks like science fiction, has the tastes of science fiction – it IS science fiction!

Or more or less. Or kind of. For covers can be misleading. The earliest mass-market paperbacks of my novels, The Edible Woman and Surfacing, had pinkish covers with gold scrollwork designs on them and oval frames with a man’s head and a woman’s head silhouetted inside them, just like valentines. How many readers picked these books up, hoping to find a Harlequin Romance or reasonable facsimile, only to throw them down in tears because there are no weddings at the ends?

Then there was the case of the former Soviet Union. No sooner did the Wall come down in 1989 than pornography flooded across the one-time divide. Porn had hitherto been excluded in favour of endless editions of the classics and other supposed-to-be-good-for-you works, but forbidden fruit excites desire, and everyone had already read Tolstoy, a lot. Suddenly the publishers of serious literature were hard pressed. Thus it was that The Robber Bride appeared in a number of Soviet-bloc countries with covers that might be described as – at best – deceptive, and – at worst – as a Eurotrash slutfest in flagranto. How many men in raincoats purchased the Robber Bride edition sporting a black-satin-sheathed Zenia with colossal rocket-shaped tits, hoping for a warm one-handed time in a back corner, only to heave it into the trash with a strangled Foiled Again! curse? For the Zenia in my book performs what we can only assume is her sexual wizardry offstage.

Having thus misled readers twice – inadvertently – by dint of book covers and the genre categories implied by them, I would rather not do it again. I would like to have space creatures on offer at my word-wares booth, and I would if I could: they were, after all, my first childhood love. But, being unable to produce them, I don’t want to lead the reader on, thus generating a frantic search within the pages – Where are the Lizard Men of Xenor? – that can only end in disappointment.

My desire to explore my relationship with the SF world, or worlds, has a proximate cause. In 2009, I published The Year of the Flood, the second work of fiction in a series exploring another kind of “other world” – our own planet in a future. (I carefully say a future rather than the future, because the future is an unknown: from the moment now, an infinite number of roads lead away to “the future,” each heading in a different direction.)

The Year of the Flood was reviewed, along with its sibling, Oryx and Crake, by one of the reigning monarchs of the SF and Fantasy forms: Ursula K. LeGuin. Her 2009 Guardian article began with a paragraph that has caused a certain amount of uproar in the skin-tight clothing and other-planetary communities – so much so that scarcely a question period goes by at my public readings without someone asking – usually in injured tones – why I have forsworn the term “science fiction,” as if I’ve sold my children to the salt mines.

Here are LeGuin’s uproar-causing sentences:

To my mind, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books to be called science fiction. In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is ‘fiction in which things happen that are not possible today’. This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.

The motive imputed to me is not in fact my actual motive for requesting separate names. (If winning prizes were topmost on my list, and if writing such books would guarantee non-wins, my obvious move would be to just avoid writing them.) What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to earth in metal canisters – things that could not possibly happen – whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such – things that really could happen, but just haven’t completely happened yet. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. Not because I don’t like Martians, I hasten to add: they just don’t fall within my skill set. Any seriously-intended Martian by me would be a very clumsy Martian indeed.

In a public discussion with Ursua LeGuin in the fall of 2010, however, I found that what she means by “science fiction” is speculative fiction about things that really could happen, whereas things that really could not happen she classifies under “fantasy.” Thus, for her – as for me – dragons would belong in fantasy, as would, I suppose, the film Star Wars and most of the TV series Star Trek. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might squeeze into LeGuin’s “science fiction,” because its author had grounds for believing that electricity actually might be able to reanimate dead flesh. And War of the Worlds? Since people thought at the time that intelligent beings might live on Mars, and since space travel was believed to be possible in the imaginable future, this book might have to be filed under LeGuin’s “science fiction.” Or parts of it might. In short, what LeGuin means by “science fiction” is what I mean by “speculative fiction,” and what she means by “fantasy” would include what I mean by “science fiction.” So that clears it all up, more or less. When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance.

Bendiness of terminology, literary gene-swapping, and inter-genre visiting has been going on in the SF world – loosely defined – for some time, if not forever. For instance, in a 1989 essay called “Slipstream,” veteran SF author Bruce Sterling deplored the then-current state of Science Fiction and ticks off its writers and publishers for having turned it into a mere “category” – a “self-perpetuating commercial power-structure, which happens to be in possession of a traditional national territory: a portion of bookstore rack space.” A “category,” says Sterling, is distinct from a “genre,” which is “a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent aesthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will.”

Sterling defines his term “Slipstream” – so named, I suppose, because it is seen as making use of the air currents created by Science Fiction proper – in this way:

. . . I want to describe what seems to me to be a new, emergent ‘genre,’ which has not yet become a ‘category.’ This genre is not ‘category’ SF; it is not even ‘genre’ SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a ‘sense of wonder’ or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction. Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.

His proposed list of slipstream fictions then goes on to cover an astonishing amount of ground, with works by a wide assortment of people, many of them considered to be “serious” authors – from Kathy Acker and Martin Amis to Salman Rushdie to José Saramago to Kurt Vonnegut. What they have in common is that the kinds of events they recount are unlikely to have happened to anyone in a piece of naturalistic fiction such as Mr. Bailey, Grocer – itself an invention of George Gissing’s, who was also a naturalistic novelist. In an earlier era, they all might have been filed under the heading of ‘traveller’s yarn’ – for example, Herodotus’s accounts of monopods and giant ants, or mediaeval legends about unicorns, dragons, and mermaids. Later they might have turned up in other collections of the marvelous and uncanny, such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or – even later – the kind of You-won’t-believe-this hair-raiser to be found in assortments by M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft or – occasionally – R.L. Stevenson. But surely all draw from the same deep well – those imagined other worlds located somewhere near our everyday one. Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Sword and Sorcery Fantasy, and Slipstream Fiction: all of them might be placed under the same large “wonder tale” umbrella.