The Bleak Future of the Arts

With all the new funding cuts to the arts, you might wonder what the arts will look like.  How better to express it than with something visual?  Thanks to artist Perry Haddock for forwarding this beautiful, if tragic, view of the arts.

Why the Orange Prize is important

Robert McCrum writes on why the much-derided prize, accused of everything from discrimination to ghettoization, has accomplished its goal of bringing female writers to readers (read: women), and so much more.

In 1996, I was not alone in wondering how long this quixotic attempt to redress the wrongs inflicted by generations of literary turkey cocks would last. For instance, would an upstart mobile phone company indefinitely squander a massive publicity budget on champagne and canapes for a bunch of pushy metropolitan literati?

Yet Mosse and her friends had a point. In 1996, no question, literary London was a boy’s club. The imprints were run by men. The books they published were mainly written by men and the critics who reviewed them would mostly pass in the catalogue as members of the male gender. Sex is a poor basis on which to evaluate a work of art, but the dominance of the male in the book world was hard to overlook.

Yet here was the puzzling thing. None of this bore any relationship to the truth about the reading public. Everyone in publishing knew it was women who were the devoted fiction buyers, women who avidly read and discussed novels and women who kept the business ticking over.
…
Chicken or egg? If fiction by women came into vogue, was this a cause or an effect of Orange?

“John Ennis, chair of the Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland, will launch his newest anthology. How the Light Gets In, just published in Ireland, is a significant advancement of the ongoing literary exchange between that country and Canada. The volume contains generous selections from some of Canada’s major established and emerging poetic voices. Poets Mary Dalton and Tom Dawe will read from their works in the collection; Randy Drover, Monica Kidd and Leslie Vryenhoek will read some of their favourite poems in the anthology.”

UFV hosted a reading with Marilyn Bowering this afternoon, and I went feeling tired, ready for the day to be over. The crowd was intimate, Marilyn’s reading engaging and poised, and the whine of the bookstore doors annoying. And then a strange thing happened: I got that familiar, just out of reach desire to pick up a pen and write something. Anything. A note about a novel I’m working on. A line for a poem. An image, even, that came to me suddenly about a woman at a sink and the thick curves of soapy water. I can’t pinpoint exactly what did it, what brought back the urge to write, what made me remember that it’s what I’ve always wanted to do, what I need to do to feel sane and complete and whole, but something in the act of hearing another author read from her work and discuss the process–the often demanding, frustrating, brilliantly satisfying process–of completing a project sparked that light in me again.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I tell students to read, write, surround themselves with anything that might inspire them. Perhaps it’s time to follow my own advice.

I really enjoy teaching, seeing new work from students, talking about the process, offering advice on manuscripts. I enjoy a lot of it. What I don’t enjoy? Becoming so consumed with that aspect of my life that I find I don’t have time for my own work. I’ve had an idea for a new novel percolating since last August and an auspicious holiday, but I haven’t found the time to start it until now. I’ve had moments, of course, to scribble notes to myself, maybe even lines that I will include, but no solid block of time to sit down and write.

I completed two novels and two poetry collections by the time I was 30. Since then, I’ve finished [maybe finished? close to finished?] a draft of a new novel and worked on some poems, here and there. What was I doing with the time that I used to save, greedily and unabashedly, for writing? I taught four classes of Introductions to Creative Writing, four English Composition classes, two Children’s Literature classes, three classes of Short Fiction, two Poetry classes, two Historical Fiction classes, two Novel writing classes and three Directed Studies. And that was at one institution.

So this week off seems like a dream–the dream, once, of what my career would look like: at home, in front of the computer in my office, working on a new project. Researching, writing, drinking excessive amounts of tea. I know it’s not plausible [yet?] for this to be the way my career looks every day, every month, every year, but for this week it feels perfect.

Need I say more?

The four that apparently we [that is the collective we, not the me-we by any means] can name are Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Farley Mowat and Michel Tremblay. That’s it. Seriously.

What happened to Michael Ondaatje? Elizabeth Hay? Ann-Marie MacDonald? Alice Munro? Timothy Findley? Or some other, perhaps less well-known [if that is possible, according to this poll!] like Madeleine Thien? Camilla Gibb? Ami McKay? It’s incredible to me that we don’t know or recognize so many wonderful authors. Do we need more Canadiana in the schools? More contemporary titles? Do we all just need to read more?

Read the complete article here.

So, here’s my list — it’s not as long as some, but they are the ones I felt strongly about this last year, when I wasn’t reading first drafts from keen, intelligent students.

The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
The voice, the use of language and description, the layering of POV, the slow revelation of mystery, the seamless historical detail, the use of alternate forms of storytelling, the — spoiler alert! — we never actually discover the truth to what happened in this small house, in this small town: I loved everything about this slim, spectacular book.

The Dream World by Alison Pick
I’ve been a fan of Alison’s work since we did a reading together years ago in Calgary. She writes challenging, dense, complex poems that sit with you for days after you have put the book down.

Double Lives ed. Cowan, Lam & Stonehouse
Admittedly, I only first read this because my friend Jane Silcott was included — her essay won the CBC Literary Awards Non-Fiction prize in 2006 –but I found myself drawn into these essays very quickly. Disparate voices, but a real strength and craft in an often challenging form.

Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott
An engaging voice, a slow unravelling of connected lives, luminous prose — what’s not to like?

Who By Fire by Diana Spechler
Forgiveness and big, messy families — religion and violence and all that implies — haunting.

This got me thinking. I like to laugh. I really do. But I tend to reside in the shelters of irony and sarcasm; I’m never going to be the one doing a crazy costumed dance for your viewing pleasure. So why do these elements not translate to my writing? I appreciate and enjoy novels that combine the tragic and the comedic — I just finished Lesley Kagen’s Whistling in the Dark, a very humorous story about a hospitalized mother, a rampant pedophile and a dead father: I know, sounds hilarious, right? But it is — but these are not stories that I write. My characters don’t roll on the floor laughing, they don’t dance in their skivvies until they are breathless, they don’t point out the ironic in life. Is it perspective? Voice? I think sustaining a story involving humour in such a natural and integral way might tire me out. It’s tricky, that fine line, the need to balance the tragi-comic.

So, I’ll just say I am not endlessly surrounded by suicides, doomed love affairs, depressed and lovely women, horrible and handsome men, tragic deaths, fires and missing children. Maybe that’s why my characters are.