As Canadian as Possible... under the circumstances

November 10, 2009

Canadian poet Randall Maggs reading at UVM on November 12

POETRY READING BY RANDALL MAGGS

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November 9, 2009

Northwest Passages to shut down its retail operation

Below you'll find the latest newsletter from Northwest Passages. Closing down our beloved site after 14 years is hard, but necessary for us. There are lots of good books for sale at our site right now, so make sure to check it out.   

NWP moves on

Greetings from Northwest Passages. I know that it has been a long time since you have heard from us, but I’m writing today with important news. As of December 31, 2009, Rob Stocks, Sarah Bagshaw, and I will no longer be in the business of selling books. Northwest Passages will cease operation at the end of this year.

This decision has been coming for some time and probably should have been made a long time ago. We’ve loved much of what we’ve done at NWP and have had a hard time letting go of our passion for selling and promoting Canadian literature. With the directions our lives and careers have taken in recent years, not to mention the changes to the landscape of publishing and bookselling in Canada, we feel it is time for us to close our store.

We are very grateful to all those of you who have supported us over the 14 years our site has been online. This newsletter’s editorial talks in more detail about our history, but suffice it to say that we have loved working with so many great authors, publishers, distributors, and, most important, customers from across Canada and around the world. Northwest Passages never made us anything close to enough money for us to even consider this a part-time job, but the site did help

Although we have stopped bringing in new books, we still have a considerable inventory of fine Canadian books that we are hoping to clear out by the end of this year. If you’ve supported us in the past, we hope that you will take some time to look through our inventory. Any of these books would make great Christmas gifts for your loved ones or excellent additions to your own personal library of Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism.

To see which books we have in stock, just go to our website at http://www.nwpassages.com You can either go genre by genre and see what’s “in stock now” or head right to the “On Sale” heading on our site. Either way, you’ll discover many great works of Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism at excellent prices.

The future of Northwest Passages?

Over the next seven weeks, Northwest Passages will be clearing out all of its inventory and preparing to close down our retail operation. We will, however, entertain any offers from parties interested in taking over Northwest Passages and carrying it on into the future. As mentioned below, with Twitter and blogs and espresso book machines these days, perhaps someone might want to take this established brand and bring it back to life in a new form. We’ll definitely be willing to talk to anyone who’s interested. If this interests you, please contact Paul directly at paul -- at -- nwpassages.com

Passages: 14 years of Canadian Literature Online

In the fall of 1995, my best friend Rob Stocks and I came up with an idea that, for better worse, would go on to be part of our lives for the best part of fourteen years. Rob, an early Internet entrepreneur in the days long before this would become a common term, and I, a grad student just starting a PhD program in Comparative Literature, thought we might be able to combine our interests and expertise to create an online bookstore. What would make this online bookstore unique was that it would focus solely on Canadian literature. In the years since, we have put thousands of hours of work into our business and have helped sell thousands of Canadian books to readers around the world. Much of this work has been done by Sarah Bagshaw, who for years now has been the heart and soul of NWP.

When the Northwest Passages website went live in the summer of 1996, Amazon.com was still a new enterprise that many doubted would ever be capable of turning a profit. Although there was no Canadian equivalent to Amazon whatsoever, but Rob and I didn’t have much interest in the “everything for everyone” approach to bookselling online. We envisioned that the Internet could become home to a multiplicity of niche booksellers who could provide both a deep selection of an online store and the knowledgeable customer service of an independent bookseller. Northwest Passages would target the valuable and, still to this day, underserved market of Canadian literature.

In the early days of Northwest Passages, many people in the publishing industry viewed us great suspicion. As crazy as this might sound today, it sometimes took me weeks to persuade certain publishers that putting a picture of a book’s cover up on our website would neither violate copyright nor anger the book’s author. While publishers gradually warmed to my argument that this was no different than putting a copy of the book in a store’s front window, they were clearly unprepared at that time for the massive changes that the internet would soon bring to bookselling and publishing. When we launched, many publishers did not even have websites and none had any people on staff devoted to online marketing of any sort. Furthermore, most publishers were either unable or unwilling to provide us with digital data of any sort. Many of the early book covers and book descriptions that still exist in our database were all painstakingly scanned or entered by hand.

One of the things at the heart of our early vision of Northwest Passages that long set us apart from other online stores of any sort was that we wanted our site to be as much of an information resource as it was a retail store. Ultimately, as the three of us will readily admit, Northwest Passages was always more successful as a hub for information about Canadian books than it was as a store. At its peak, Northwest Passages saw thousands of different visitors accessing our site each month and over 1000 readers subscribed to our newsletter, The Compass. At the same time, however, we never sold enough books to pay even one of us a salary that would enable us to look after the store full-time. Because we held limited inventory and brought in books as people ordered them, it was very difficult for us to compete with the behemoth online bookstores (Amazon.ca and Chapters-Indigo) or local stores where you can walk in a find a book within a few minutes. The lure of immediacy was hard for us to overcome in the minds of our customers.

Where we did succeed commercially was mostly in sales to customers outside of Canada. Accustomed to moderate to long shipping times for purchases made by mail or online, these clients were more than willing to wait a few weeks for a book to arrive. More important, they appreciated having a bookseller like Sarah who was eager to help them obtain the books they wanted and who would keep them apprised of the latest Canadian releases and literary news. We also did well selling course books for Canadian literature courses taught everywhere from Australia to Italy. These customers especially will feel the loss of Northwest Passages acutely.

Looking back at what we began 14 years ago, it’s clear that Northwest Passages was ahead of its time. In some small ways, perhaps, we helped push some Canadian publishers on to the Internet more quickly than they might have otherwise done. With the technologies that surround us today such as Twitter, blogs, ebook readers, and Espresso Book Machines, I can’t help but wish sometimes that we were starting out again today with the same youthful energy and enthusiasm Rob and I shared in those early days of the Internet. We are once again at the dawn of a new and exciting era for publishing and bookselling in this country that will require us to start thinking in new and innovative ways about what it is that we do.

Over fourteen years, our lives have grown in rich and wonderful ways. So too has publishing and the selling of books. Today, Rob, Sarah, and I are ready to leave Northwest Passages behind and to go our separate ways. With his company ideaLEVER, Rob continues to innovate in the world of ecommerce and content management. Sarah, who has really kept NWP running for much of the last decade, has taken her expertise as one of the best booksellers around to KidsBooks in Vancouver. I, as many of you know, am now in the US teaching Canadian literature at the University of Vermont and directing its Canadian Studies Program.

We are incredibly grateful for the support we have received from family and friends, publishers and authors, professors and students. Most of all, we want to thank our incredibly loyal customers, some of whom have stuck with us since our first days online. It has been our great pleasure to get to know so many interesting people from all corners of the world.

Canadian literature, as we have seen firsthand, continues to have a wide international audience. We have been honoured to have helped readers everywhere get their hands on thousands of Canadian books.

On behalf of Rob, Sarah, and myself, thank you again for all of your support.

Paul Martin

October 20, 2009

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September 19, 2009

Joseph Boyden to read at UVM on Sept 25

I'm excited to announce that, at 4:00 pm on Friday September 25th, award-winning Canadian writer Joseph Boyden will be reading at Memorial Lounge in Waterman.
The author of a short story collection Born With a Tooth , novels Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce , and his recent biography of Métis leaders Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, Joseph Boyden has quickly ascended the ranks to be one of Canada's most widely read writers working today. His novel Three Day Road (2005) won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year, the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in the US was also featured as a pick on the Today Show book club. In 2008, his second novel, Through Black Spruce, won the Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious fiction prize.
Born and raised in Toronto, Boyden completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans and then returned to the northernmost regions of Ontario where he worked for two years in the James Bay region as a Professor of Aboriginal Programs. His time there working with the Mushkegowuk Cree, not to mention his own Métis ancestry, have made the land and people of this region his "muse and obsession" and the setting for much of his work. Today he divides his time between Northern Ontario and New Orleans where he and his wife, novelist Amanda Boyden, are currently Writers in Residence.
Joseph and Amanda will both be reading at the Burlington Book Festival on September 26th, but I've managed to arrange for Joseph to do a reading at UVM at 4 pm at the Memorial Lounge. I've taught his novel Three Day Road to hundreds of students over the last three years in courses ranging from English 180 and 182 to my TAP class. It's an extraordinary book and I think this will be a great opportunity for students to hear him read and to ask him questions about his work.

For more information on Joseph Boyden and his work, see his website at http://josephboyden.com.
Reviews of Through Black Spruce:
"Powerful and powerfully told. . .Much of this novel reflects its crisp, poetic title…Will speaks with the straight-faced good humor of Louise Erdrich's Nanapush…in the novel's most moving section, Will flees to live along in wilderness few people ever even see. It's an experience beautifully rendered in the raw poetry of Boyden's prose."
—The Washington Post

“Anguished, angry Uncle Will’s revenge drama is almost perfect in pitch and execution. Tragedy and comedy unspool together in a startlingly casual manner when Will speaks, they way they do in life.  When Boyden is at his best, as he often is here, he is matchless.”
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Reviews of Three Day Road: "Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road is a brilliant novel. You will suffer a bit, but it's overwhelmingly worth the voyage."
—Jim Harrison

"Three Day Road  is a devastatingly truthful work of fiction, and a masterful account of hell and healing. This is a grave, grand, and passionate book."
—Louise Erdrich

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September 18, 2009

Spotted Cow Press makes history with innovative double espresso book launch

Later this afternoon, Edmonton publisher Spotted Cow Press will make history by launching its latest book simultaneously in two Canadian cities.

What makes this event unique is that Spotted Cow Press will be printing off copies of S. Minsos' novel Squire Davis and the Crazy River in each of these locations on Espresso Book Machines, making this the first "Double Espresso book launch" in history. After a reading by the author, both the University of Alberta Bookstore in Edmonton, owner of one of the very first Espresso Book Machines ever produced, and the Titles bookstore at McMaster University in Hamilton, who acquired their machine more recently, will start printing copies of the book simultaneously for customers to purchase on the spot. Customers at the Titles bookstore will be able to watch the book launch in Edmonton, 3000 km away, via live video.

Spotted Cow Press and the University of Alberta bookstore already made history on this front when it launched (PDF) Twice in a Blue Moon, a new collection of poetry by Joyce Harries, using the Espresso Book Machine on November 15, 2007, which might well be the first launch of a new literary title using the machine. The cutting edge approaches of both Spotted Cow Press and the U of Alberta bookstore are only just now becoming more mainstream with more Espresso machines starting to appear in bookstores such as the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, VT, and with Google announcing just yesterday that it will being to sell copies of over 2 million currently out-of-print book titles via the Espresso Book Machine.

(Here's a PDF link to the Spotted Cow Press press release about this afternoon's event)

If you're interested in following along online, I expect that there will be a few people twittering from each event. Just look for the hashtag #doubleespresso or follow @pjmartin or @MACBookstore on twitter.

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March 10, 2009

Welcome to Canada

Had a wonderful few days in Edmonton where I was giving a paper at the "Transplanting Canada" colloquium put on by the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. Click here for a PDF of the conference program if you're interested to learn more about what went on there.

It was really great to see such exciting things happening at the U of A these days. There are many new young faculty there and a herd of super-smart graduate students (they travel in herds on the prairies). Meeting many old and new friends from across the country and hearing some really interesting talks made this one of the best conference experiences I have had.

The folks at the CLC who planned the conference thought of everything, by the way, including hiring this guy to greet potential conference goers as they drove in to Canada.

(okay, everything I said above was true except for this last part)

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February 23, 2009

Freedom to Read Week

It's Freedom to Read Week in Canada this week. It's interesting to take a look at their list of challenged books to see how many of Canadian literature's most canonical texts are on that list, including Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, Timothy Findley's The Wars, and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Censorship at all levels is an ongoing issue. Just this past year, as discussed on this blog, there was a challenge to the presence of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale on the high school curriculum in Ontario.

It's important for us all to speak out against such challenges when they occur, but also to pay attention to the quieter forms of censorship such as when certain books are simply not ordered for school libraries (perhaps we should start protesting when certain books aren't on the shelves!) or even when teachers avoid putting particular books on the syllabus because they don't feel equipped (or paid enough) to handle the reactions that might ensue.

If you start to look through the documented cases of people trying to have particular books pulled from the shelves, you might find your anger and disbelief occasionally turn to laughter. As I was reading through a list of such cases that I found on the Freedom to Read website, I came across this entry:

Gill, John (ed.). New American and Canadian Poetry.

1994—The school board in Sechelt (BC), responding to a parental complaint, removed

this book from student use in Chatelech Secondary School.

Cause of objection—Anthology was said to present an anti-establishment view and to

present sex and four-letter words in a positive light.

Update—The school board decided, following a review, that the book should remain in

the library. The sole copy has since been stolen and not replaced.

These complaints all sound ridiculous to most people and it's easy to dismiss them. But we also cannot be complacent. Our authors deserve to be defended from such actions by all of us. So, the next time you hear of a complaint like this in your town, make sure to call up the school board or library to voice your support for keeping those works on the shelves. And, maybe plan on stopping by the library at a later date just to make sure that book hasn't mysteriously disappeared.

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February 16, 2009

The Literary Landscapes of Canada

Here's a list of 40 books or so that I mentioned in a talk given today on Canada's Literary Landscape. This is anything but a complete list, but it's not a bad start for anyone looking to learn more about Canadian literature.

Canada’s Literary Landscape:

A list of suggestions to help you read your way across Canada

Paul Martin, February 16, 2009

Paul.Martin@uvm.edu http://pwmartin.blog.uvm.edu

NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR

Donna Morrissey, Kit’s Law (2001)

Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998)

Lisa Moore, Alligator (2005)

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)

NOVA SCOTIA

Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief (1999)

Alistair Macleod, Island: collected stories

George Elliott Clarke, George and Rue (2005)

Lynn Coady, Strange Heaven (2002)

NEW BRUNSWICK

David Adams Richards, Mercy Among the Children (2000)

Antonine Maillet, Pélagie: The Return to Acadie

QUEBEC

Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues (1983)

Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version (1997)

Anne Hébert, Kamouraska (1970)

Marie-Claire Blais, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (1964)

ONTARIO

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (1996), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2001), Cat’s Eye (1988)

Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (2005)

Anything at all by Alice Munro

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1983)

Timothy Findley, The Pianoman’s Daughter (1995)

Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (1995)

MANITOBA

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (1974)

Gabrielle Roy, Street of Riches (1957)

Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998)

Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness (2005)

SASKATCHEWAN

Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Englishman’s Boy (1997); The Last Crossing (2004)

W.O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen the Wind (1947)

Sharon Butala, The Perfection of the Morning (1995)

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (1955)

ALBERTA

Thomas Wharton, Icefields (1995)

Robert Kroetsch, The Studhorse Man (1970)

Rudy Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers (1994)

Richard Harrison, Hero of the Play (1997)

BRITISH COLUMBIA

Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach (2000)

Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981)

Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel (1954)

Emily Carr, Klee Wyck (1941)

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief (2006)

Yukon, NWT, & Nunavut

Richard Van Camp, The Lesser Blessed (1996)

Robert Arthur Alexie, Pale Indian (2005)

Alootook Ipellie, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993)

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December 19, 2008

New course on Women's Writing from Canada

This is one of the courses I'll be teaching this spring. It's new for me, as are a few of the books on the syllabus. Should be fun!
English 180: Women's Writing from Canada
From the beginnings of Canada’s literary history, women writers have played a key role in the development of that nation’s rich and distinct literary voice. Especially over the last 50 years, it is safe to say that women writers are at the heart of the Canadian literary canon. Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Gabrielle Roy, and Margaret Laurence are some of the greatest (and best known) Canada has ever produced. At the same time, writers such as Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, and Sheila Watson have been on the front lines of innovative writing in Canada. In this course, we’ll look at women writers from across Canada who have paved new ground for the literatures of Canada both in terms of stylistic innovation and Canada’s international literary reputation. Although we'll be focusing primarily on fiction, we will be reading poetry and some non-fiction throughout the course as well.

Montgomery, LM. Anne of Green Gables (Norton Critical Edition only). 9780393926958
Gabrielle Roy, Street of Riches and The Road Past Altamont
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel.
Watson, Sheila. The Double Hook.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale
Munro, Alice. Carried Away: Selected Stories.
Brossard, Nicole. Mauve Desert.
Brand, Dionne. What We All Long For.

Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach.

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November 25, 2008

Canada Reads 2009

Here are the titles for Canada Reads 2009 and the celebrity panelists who will be lobbying for their book to win Canada Reads.

The Outlander, by Gil Adamson. Panelist: Nicholas Campbell

Fruit, by Brian Francis. Panelist: Jen Sookfong Lee

Mercy Among the Children, by David Adams Richards. Panelist: Sarah Slean (Paul's favourite!)

The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, by Michel Tremblay. Panelist: Anne-Marie Wittenshaw

The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. Panelist: Avi Lewis

If you're not familiar with Canada Reads, this is a feature CBC Radio runs every year where five celebrity panelists battle it out over which book should be the one that all of Canada reads next year. Surprisingly, even to me, this has been a remarkable success over the last few years, with the winner (and often the runners up) become bestsellers in Canada. The books chosen are always excellent and, frequently, challenging works (over the years titles chosen have included Hubert Aquin's Next Episode and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers).

Although I usually find the Canada Reads panel discussions and the "voting off" of particular titles to be frustrating to listen to, this is a great program that does a tremendous amount to promote Canadian literature. How can anyone complain about that?

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November 11, 2008

And the Giller Prize goes to....

Joseph Boyden for his novel Through Black Spruce! What a great win for him. Joseph and I were in touch via e-mail a few weeks ago and he's agreed to come to UVM to read sometime in the very near future. Congrats, Joseph!

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September 21, 2007

Jacques Poulin comes to the USA...

One of my favourite writers in the world is Jacques Poulin. I teach his works here frequently and he is an important part of the online course here I teach every summer on three Canadian writers: Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Jacques Poulin.

For that reason, I was excited to see that Archipelago Books, a wonderful not-for-profit press out of Brooklyn has purchased the US rights to Poulin's novel Spring Tides (Les Grandes Marées). I am thinking I may well teach that book next semester or in 2008/09.

The first US review I've seen of that new book has just come out in the New York Sun. It would be great to see Poulin start to garner the attention outside of Québec that I've always believed he deserves.

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August 20, 2007

The future of the book....

Wow, so much to say about this topic with the prospect of Espresso Book Machines, higher quality e-book readers, and new models of publishing headed our way. Unfortunately, pending deadlines leave me no time to say it! (how's that for a cop out?)

In the meantime (and please don't hold your breath -- I would hate for anyone to harm themselves while reading my blog), read this interesting article by Jon Evans from this month's Walrus Magazine, one of the finest Canadian magazines we've seen in a long time.

Both e-books and sheaves of paper have pros and cons. Sheaves never lose battery power; you can flip through them quickly, use them as bricks, or take them to the bath; and they are still relatively cheap. On the other hand, digital readers can store hundreds of e-books, including those available for free, and their contents can be updated, searched, and annotated. In the near future, the number of digital readers will skyrocket, and making copies for friends will be simple. All things being equal, you’d expect e-books to have grabbed a significant share of the book market by now. So why haven’t they?

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August 13, 2007

Canadian literature in the news

A few things I've been meaning to blog about over the last few days as I settle back into work after a week off.

I was saddened a few days back to hear of the death of Margaret Avison, one of Canada's great poets of the 20th century, I think. You can find a few of her poems online here.

One of the books I'm looking forward to reading is William Gibson's Spook Country. There have been a number of articles about him and the new book over the last few weeks, but here's a link to one of the best and to an audio interview with him.

Toronto's Michael Redhill is one of thirteen writers on the long list for this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He was nominated for his novel Consolation.

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June 25, 2007

Richard Harrison

A nice post on rob mclennan's fab blog reprinting a piece by Richard Harrison about the late Canadian poet Riley Tench, who Richard mentioned to me in a Northwest Passages interview with him a few years back. Rob's blog is fascinating reading, and I'm always amazed at how much he's able to write on a regular basis. Happy to see, too, that he'll be Writer-in-Residence later this year at the University of Alberta, in my own home and native land. He's even started a blog on Alberta writing and has published a pretty impressive piece on the topic that I think might well become required reading for a grad seminar on prairie writing that I've got in the works .

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May 29, 2007

Divisadero reviews

Lots of Divisadero reviews in the media over the past few days, as the book is released today in the US. I've still not had a chance to start the book yet, so I'm ignoring these reviews. I'm posting links to them here though in case anyone else is interested... :)

Speaking of Canadian literature, nice to hear a review of Karen Connolly's The Lizard Cage on NPR the other day. It's getting some good buzz south of the border these days.

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May 27, 2007

Leonard Cohen in words and pictures

Thie weekend's Globe and Mail has a great feature on Leonard Cohen, which is accompanied online by a great multimedia portrait of Cohen and his artwork. (interesting to see him working on a black MacBook, too!)

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May 4, 2007

Richard Van Camp on aboriginal comics

Here's some info from Richard Van Camp on the current state of comics by aboriginal writers. Van Camp's one of the writers I would love to have squeezed on to the syllabus this semester. His novel The Lesser Blessed is fantastic, as are his short stories. I'll definitely be including him in one course or another in the near future and hope to bring him to campus someday as well.

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April 27, 2007

Ondaatje and Atwood in the news

First off, I've been eagerly awaiting Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero (currently in stock and ready to ship from Northwest Passages, by the way) since the moment I heard it was coming out. I now have a copy of the Canadian edition in my hands (it doesn't get released in the US for another month) and just need a bit of free time to get started. I can hardly wait!

There's been lots of press and reviews in the last few weeks about the new book, and I expect we'll see a lot more in the US in the coming months. As usual, Aritha Van Herk's review is as much a pleasure to read as the books she discusses:

A lesser writer might strive to unite these characters, but Ondaatje refuses such obvious resolutions, and instead simply presents the lamellate of their lives. The method of this segmented novel is archeological, revealing itself in fragments and between the lines. The multiple strands of the story are never insistent or chronological; any causal tyranny is stifled. Nor is this a tripartite story, but a slow fanning through the shale of memory and connection, the characters encountering other lovers and lives. "With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time."

Collage is the novel's central metaphor. Anna ventures, "Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross."

Such poetic measure is one reason why the reader is content to pace these pages slowly. Ondaatje's imagistic prowess flavours every line. Yet -- and here is his true power -- the style is modest rather than flamboyant. Wonderfully, its purity means that the narrative explains little, simply shows the characters living through their moments and within their own skins. Although the attentive reader will delight in every sentence, will revel in the vividly original language and narrative approach, Divisadero refuses the aggrandizement of pyrotechnics. By virtue of that reserve, the novel accomplishes an intimacy that is extraordinary, nakedly beautiful.

There's a nice audio interview with Michael up at the M&S site here.

If I had more time, money, and childcare, I'd be in Montreal this weekend hearing him read as part of the incredible Blue Metropolis writing festival.

--------------------------------------

Margaret Atwood has also been in the news a lot of late and some of this attention is due to her upcoming appearance at the Blue Met festival where she will be receiving the festival's Grand Prix this year.

She's also been quite outspoken about the lack of support for the arts coming from the current Tory government in Canada, saying that the feds are out to 'squash the arts.' I really like that about Ms. Atwood, as she knows that these statements have more of an impact coming from someone of her international stature.

She's also been talking about Oryx and Crake a bit recently in The Guardian. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it's a book that's seeming all the more prescient every day. There's a good podcast of her discussion of the book here.

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March 29, 2007

Canadians are more likely to read books than attend movies, says Stats Can

From today's Globe and Mail:

Canadians are more likely to read a book than attend a movie, and they're visiting art galleries and historic sites more. At least that's what appears to have been the case two years ago, according to an analysis released yesterday of a "social survey" of 10,000 Canadians completed by Statistics Canada in 2005.

The analysis by Hill Strategies Research Inc. of Hamilton found that, in 2005, 17.4 million Canadians 15 years of age and older -- or 66.6 per cent of that total population group -- read at least one book in the course of 12 months. In fact, about four in 10 Canadians read at least one book a month in 2005. By contrast, in that same period, 15.9 million Canadians (61 per cent) went out to see at least one movie in a theatre or at the drive-in.

Wow, this impresses me, although I would still like to see more Canadians reading. And, of course, we really don't know what they are reading. Nevertheless, the fact that we have 40% of Canadians reading at least a book a month is a good start. I think the question now is "What can we do to increase those numbers and encourage more people to read Canadian books?"

Does anyone out there know what the similar stats are for the US?

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March 28, 2007

Certainty, by Madeleine Thien

A nice, albeit brief review on NPR of Madeleine Thien's first novel Certainty, which was just released in the US this week.

NPR : A First Novel that Pits the Far East with Canada:

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March 6, 2007

Essential Toronto Reads

Discovered the great blog Imagining Toronto today. This list of books is a perfect starting point for students in my Canadian lit classes wanting to know more about Toronto (you know who you are...).

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March 1, 2007

Hockey and Canadian lit

I'm writing this the day after the NHL trade deadline, the day after Edmonton Oilers fans saw the heart and soul of the team, Ryan Smyth (sometimes referred to as Captain Canada after playing for the Canadian national team on so many occasions), traded to the New York Islanders. The fact that this came on the same day as the Oilers retired the number of the former hometown hero Mark Messier, one of hockey's greatest players of all time, added further insult to injury. Having lived in Edmonton through the trades of great Canadian heroes like Gretzky, Messier, Coffey, and now Smyth, I can say that one of the things that made these trades hurt even more was not only the realization that our Edmonton team could not afford to keep these great stars of the game but also that the only teams who could were from the United States. Smyth lived, breathed, and bled for the Oilers and I think many of us envisioned him playing out his entire career in Edmonton.

So why does that rub us the wrong way? After all, these are all teams from the same league, the strangely titled National Hockey League that lumps together two countries under one hockey nation. Well, for most Canadians, I'd guess it's because we still, rightly or wrongly, think of this as our game, a game that's been played here for as long as anyone can remember and whose reach connects people from coast to coast to coast. More than that, there's a way that the game is indelibly connected with Canadian identity in ways that no sport in no other country seems able to match. Even baseball or football in the US still doesn't cut as wide a swath through the collective imagination as hockey does for Canadians. I find this hard to put into words, especially when talking to my students and colleagues here in the US. In fact, this is the only place I've ever had to put that into words. If you're a Canadian and reading this, I don't need to say anything to persuade you of this.

I do spend a good deal of time talking about this in my freshman seminar on Canadian culture that I teach here each fall. I'm retitling this fall's class "From Pucks to Parliament: Canada's Cultural Landscape," after having called it "The Great White North" for the last couple of years, in part to reflect how much we do seem to wind up talking about hockey. It turns out that none of the students had heard of Bob and Doug MacKenzie and so didn't really get the joke; I was beginning to worry that most people reading the title without that reference in mind might have been seeing it as boasting about Canada's greatness or as some reference to a lack of visible minorities in Canada, one of the common misconceptions I routinely come across here about Canada. At any rate, one of the best ways I've found to explain some of this connection between national identity and hockey in Canada is by having the students read Richard Harrison's introductory essay from the tenth anniversary edition of Hero of the Play.

Referring to the debates in Canada over where the game was first played, Harrison contends that "[what's] important isn't where the origin of hockey is found in Canada, but how Canada finds at least part of its origin in hockey." If one searches for a mythic origin of Canadian psyche, hockey may be as good a place as any to look first. "[. . .] perhaps most important, in terms of the intensityof the origin-of-hockey debate, is that creation myth insists that the distinguishing features of a people's character are things born with them, created when the people were created. Hockey emerges in the Canadian past at the time the Canada we lived in then as separate communities was being made into the Canada we live in now as a people. In mythic terms, hockey is one of the few things that could be said to be ours from before the beginning of Canadian time" (16-17).

Harrison's work is only one of many examples of the great writing about hockey and hockey players we've seen emerge from Canada over the last few years. The non-fiction front ranges from books about the love of playing the game as an adult -- Dave Bidini's The Best Game You Can Name, the great Bill Gaston's Midnight Hockey, and Tom Allen's The Gift of the Game are some of the best recent examples -- to more reflective books like David Adams Richards' wonderful Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn't Play, Stephen Brunt's Searching for Bobby Orr, or Roch Carrier's Our Life With the Rocket, proving that the world of hockey writing is far more than simply books documenting the careers of particular players or teams. While Canadian fiction and poetry about hockey don't always spring immediately to mind, books like Harrison's Hero of the Play, Gaston's The Good Body, Roy MacGregor's The Last Season, Stephen Galloway's Finnie Walsh, and Mark Anthony Jarman's Salvage King Ya! top the list of the great hockey literature of our day.

Ryan Smyth's press conference today at the Edmonton Airport, said it all, both about the man and the game. Crying, shaken, and, in Harrison's words, "smiling ugly" in the way only a hockey player can get away with, Smyth vowed "I'm going to go there and do my best and make the playoffs and win that (Stanley) Cup, so I can bring it down here to Edmonton — because that's where my heart is." I can't imagine another country where this would make all the headlines, and, frankly, I kind of like it that way.


Suggested Reading:

Tom Allen, The Gift of the Game
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0385660790

Dave Bidini, The Best Game You Can Name
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=9780771014604

Stephen Brunt, Searching for Bobby Orr
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0676976514

Roch Carrier, Our Life With The Rocket
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0140280073

Stephen Galloway, Finnie Walsh
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=1551928353

Bill Gaston, The Good Body
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=1551926938

Bill Gaston, Midnight Hockey
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0385661908

Richard Harrison, Hero of the Play: Poems Revised and New. (10th Anniversary Edition)
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0919897959

Dale Jacobs (ed.), ICE: New Writing on Hockey
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=0969466544

Mark Anthony Jarman, Salvage King, Ya!
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=1-895636-13-2

Michael P.J. Kennedy, Going Top Shelf: An Anthology of Canadian Hockey Poetry
http://www.nwpassages.com/profile_book.asp?ISBN=1894384997

Roy MacGregor, The Last Season
(currently out of print)

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November 29, 2006

Hockey season just wouldn't be the same without this....

I've had my students in English 005 listen to a recording of Roch Carrier reading his story, The Hockey Sweater. The goal of this assignment is partly to read a Canadian classic that tells us something essential about Canadian and especially Québécois culture. The other aim, though, is to give them, I hope, some sense of the importance of hockey to Canadian identity and the place of Montréal Canadiens and Maurice Richard in the history, culture, and identity of Québec. Although I have the sense that many Vermonters might think of the Boston Bruins as being "their" team, there are many I've met (including many former Quebeckers) who will forever be life-long fans of the Habs. Despite my continued obsession with the Oilers, I too am feeling a greater connection to the Canadiens just by being so close to Montreal. They're now my second favourite team and I'm dying to get up to Montreal to experience a game there for the first time.

The story, the children's book, the audio book, and the National Film Board film short are all touchstone's in many Canadians' memories of childhood. A true classic which, thanks to Google Video, I can post for you here. It's well worth tracking down the original on DVD though. Just don't forget to read the story as well.

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November 21, 2006

GG Awards Winners

From the latest NWP newsletter, hot off the press:

Just a few minutes ago the Canada Council announced the winners of this year's Governor General's Awards in simultaneous press conferences in Toronto and Montreal. This marks the peak of awards season in Canada and the beginning of another round of great publicity showcasing the winners.

Just two weeks ago, we learned that first-time author Vincent Lam had won the Giller Prize for his wonderful short story collection Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Lam's book was part of a very rich shortlist that also included works by Rawi Hage, Pascale Quiviger, Gaétan Soucy, and Carol Windley.

The great thing about the Governor General's Awards, that to my mind makes it the most important award in the country, is that it recognizes most genres of writing and looks at both literature written in French and English. For those of us in English Canada, it's a great chance to get a glimpse of what's happening in Québec and in francophone communities outside of Québec. That only works, though, if the media reports equally on the winners from both languages.

I've used this space in the past to vent my frustration at English language media outlets trumpetting the winners of the Governor General's Award while failing to even mention the winners for the French language categories. If anything, we should be going out of our way to learn about those winners, who quickly disappear off the map in English Canada once the awards hoopla has died down.

So, definitely take a few minutes to peruse the list of this years' winners. More importantly, take some time this fall to read some of these books to get a sense of how truly rich are the literatures of this country.

And remember, books make the best holiday gifts!


Complete list of winners of the Governor General's Award

Northwest Passages congratulates all of the winners and nominees.

ENGLISH FICTION: Peter Behrens for The Law of Dreams

FRENCH FICTION: Andrée Laberge for La rivière du loup

ENGLISH POETRY: John Pass for Stumbling in the Bloom

FRENCH POETRY: Hélène Dorion for Ravir: les lieux

ENGLISH DRAMA: Daniel MacIvor for I Still Love You

FRENCH DRAMA: Évelyne de la Chenelière for Désordre public

ENGLISH NONFICTION: Ross King for The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism

FRENCH NONFICTION: Pierre Ouellet for À force de voir : histoire de regards

TRANSLATION - FRENCH TO ENGLISH: Hugh Hazelton for Vetiver (Joël Des Rosiers' Vétiver )

TRANSLATION - ENGLISH TO FRENCH: Sophie Voillot for Un jardin de papier (Thomas Wharton's Salamander )

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE (ENGLISH) - TEXT: William Gilkerson, for Pirate's Passage

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE (ENGLISH) - ILLUSTRATION: Leo Yerxa, for Ancient Thunder, text by Leo Yerxa.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE (FRENCH) - TEXT: Dany Laferrière, for Je suis fou de Vava, illustrations by Frédéric Normandin

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE (FRENCH) - ILLUSTRATION: Rogé (Roger Girard), for Le gros monstre qui aimait trop lire, text by Lili Chartrand

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November 3, 2006

A Welcome Controversy

[My editorial from this month's Northwest Passages newsletter]

Burlington, Vermont, USA (in body)
Somewhere on the Canadian Prairie (in heart and mind)

October 30th, 2006

It’s Giller and GG season again in Canada, the tenth such awards season we’ve seen from up close since we launched Northwest Passages way back in 1996, a time when we had to work hard to persuade publishers to let us sell their books online. Although the face of publishing and bookselling has changed tremendously, the debates that ensue once the finalists for these major awards are announced are usually pretty much the same. Readers, booksellers, and the media are quick to note the big names left off the lists (notable absences this year include Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and David Adams Richards) and then scramble to find out all they can about the lesser known writers and books that have made the final cut.

The fact that there are always major surprises on these shortlists is a testament to the work done by the individual juries who, after reading all of the submissions, settle upon what they deem to be the most worthy books of the year. In so doing, they produce a shortlist which often differs greatly from the most popular or critically-acclaimed books of the year. In any case, what’s left off the list is usually far less interesting than what’s on it and this is especially true with this year’s fiction lists for both the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award. Each of these lists is notable in a number of ways, but both the English-language lists have received a lot of attention for the fact that many of the writers are not terribly well-known by most Canadians and all but one book on each list is published by a small press. There is also, for the first time in recent memory, a complete absence of women writers on the Governor General’s English fiction list – something that seems almost ludicrous in the country of Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart etc., although Munro pulled her latest book, The View from Castle Rock, from Giller contention as she accepted the chance to be on this year’s jury. The fiction list that seems the least eclectic of the three and which includes three male and two female writers all in mid-career is the French language GG shortlist.

The most remarkable of these three shortlists, though, is undoubtedly that created by the jury of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, whose task it is to award $40 000 to “ the author of the best Canadian full-length novel or collection of short stories published in English.” This year’s jury, comprised of writers Alice Munro, Michael Winter, and the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s former Governor General and a writer in her own right, has made an interesting and controversial choice in selecting for the shortlist two works in translation: The Immaculate Conception, Lazer Lederhendler’s translation of Gaetan Soucy’s 1994 novel L'Immaculée conception; and A Perfect Circle, Sheila Fischman’s translation of Pascale Quiviger’s 2004 novel Le Cercle Parfait.

I’ve talked before in this newsletter about the importance of translation in this country and the real lack of awareness among anglophone and francophone Canadians of each others literatures. Ask the average English-Canadian about Québécois literature and you’ll most likely hear him or her fondly reminisce about reading “The Hockey Sweater” or seeing the animated short of that story by Roch Carrier; ask the average francophone Quebecker, and you’ll most likely hear the names Atwood or Richler, authors whose works were translated into French and published by publishers in France, not Québec. Despite the best efforts of publishers like Anansi and Cormorant in English-Canada and Boréal in Québec, the willful amnesia that allows each language group to overlook the incredible literary works produced every year by the other does not seem to have ameliorated much over the last thirty years.

In this respect, the decision made by this year’s Giller jury is a courageous and important one. First, it seems that the jury is hoping to bring greater attention to works in translation. Translated works are always a hard sell for publishers, especially in the English-speaking world. In 2004, for instance, less than half of one percent of all books published in the US were in translation, a much lower rate than in the rest of the world (sadly, I don’t have similar stats for Canada close by). The figures are higher in Canada, but one of the things that often draws potential buyers away from translations is the notion that somehow the translation is a lesser version of the original. This sentiment is so prevalent that in recent years Canadian and American publishers have publicly mused about omitting the names of the translators from the front covers of books, hoping that this will lead more readers to pick up these books and, in the process, discover how great translated works can be.

If, as I suggest above, this decision is both courageous and important, it is also, as André Alexis persuasively argues in the Globe and Mail of October 14th, unavoidably flawed. Alexis’ commentary entitled “Since when can the ‘best’ English novel be written in French” begins by highlighting the fact that both of the original versions of these two novels are deserving of recognition. Both won awards when they were published and Lederhendler’s translation of Soucy’s novel is also up for the this year’s Governor General’s award in the “Translation (French to English)” category, as is a translation by Sheila Fischman. Alexis argues -- and I disagree with him here -- that “taken from its original linguistic contexts, [a translation] does not have the same resonance, or the same meaning” as the original.” That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that a translation doesn’t have its own unique resonances and meanings in its own language (English, in this case). For us to recognize that, though, we also have to acknowledge the artistry of the translator and this, as Alexis astutely points out, is exactly what the Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations fail to do.

Alexis writes: “The members of the Giller jury, in nominating The Perfect Circle and The Immaculate Conection for this year’s Giller Prize have, I think, tacitly suggested that the original language of a novel is less than essential to the novel itself. At least, that seems to be what the jury is saying, in that the names of the translators [. . .] are nowhere near as prominent in the announcements/press releases for this year’s Giller Prize as the names of the writers of the French originals.” The only problem I see with Alexis’ complaints is that he lays the blame for this “great insult to the translators” on the shoulders of the jury, when it’s clear to me that what is really at issue here is the Canadian publishing industry and the media’s continuing unease at promoting the role of literary translation in this country. The translator for them seems to be merely a vehicle for transforming a French novel into an English one, as if the “essence” of a novel is “a story, a plot, characters” and not “the ‘language’ play of the originals”. If Sheila Fischman and Lazer Lederhendler were truly being recognized as artists, writers in their own right, then, as Alexis suggests, they should be receiving equal attention and an equal share of the prize money (all authors on the shortlist who don’t ultimately win the prize still receive $2500).

Flawed as it may be, and I think Alexis is mostly dead on with his criticisms of the decision, I still think this was a positive decision by the jury. Placing works in translation alongside works in their original language should, ideally, lead us to ask these questions about translation (as Alexis has done) and to think differently about the role of the translator. In this year alone, the Giller has been more effective in getting us to consider these issues than any recent award or nomination in the translation categories of the Governor General’s Award, which recognize the importance of literary translation but also ghettoize it. More importantly, it has drawn our attention once again to the fact that many of this country’s most talented writers write in French. And, without the thankless and underestimated collaborative artistry of translators like Sheila Fischman and Lazer Lederhendler we might never get the chance to read their work. A translation might not help us to understand completely “the language and tradition” from which the original has emerged, but it always serves to remind us that our own “linguistic contexts” are not all that Canada has to offer.

The Giller Prize will be awarded on November 7 and the Governor General’s Awards on the 21st. Watch for the special Giller Prize and GG bulletins from Northwest Passages alerting you to the winners of the awards.

Works Cited
Alexis, André. "Since When Can the 'Best' English Novel Be Written in French?" The Globe and Mail October 14 2006, sec. R: 7.

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October 25, 2006

from the page to the screen...

Looks like Canadian lit is going to have a fairly prominent role on Canadian television next year. Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy and Mordecai Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman are both being turned into mini-series. It might be interesting to see if I can teach both of these books at the same time as the mini-series are being shown in Canada. We're reading The Englishman's Boy in English 180 right now, and my students are weighing in on what they think about turning books into movies.

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September 29, 2006

Eden Robinson coming to UVM October 3-5

I'm thrilled to announce here that we'll be welcoming Eden Robinson to the University of Vermont from October 3-5. She'll be visiting my Canadian literature classes, Jamie Williamson's Native American lit classes and giving a public reading on the afternoon of October 4th.

Please join us on October 4th if you can to hear one of Canada's most exciting young writers.

Public reading by novelist Eden Robinson
Date and time: Wednesday October 4, 4:30 pm
University of Vermont, 315 Commons, Living/Learning Center
Open to all members of the public

Robinson's first collection of stories, Traplines, won the Winifred Holtby Prize for the best first work of fiction by a Commonwealth writer and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Notable Book of the Year. Her first novel, Monkey Beach, won the B.C. Book Prize for Fiction, was a finalist for the 2000 Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her latest work of fiction, the Canadian best-seller Blood Sports (2006), has been described as “A gripping page-turner of a tale that should have Quentin Tarantino knocking down her door.”

Writes The National Post, “Eden Robinson writes with the violent beauty of a seasoned knifefighter…She writes with a cool economy, a parsed precision; no wasted words, no wasted motion. In her hands, language is a weapon that can leave you bleeding, unsure of just how you were cut.”

Eden Robinson's visit to the University of Vermont is co-sponsored by the University of Vermont's Department of English, Canadian Studies Program, Global Village Residential Learning Community, and The James and Mary Brigham Buckham Fund.

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September 8, 2006

CanLit? An editorial from the latest issue of the Northwest Passages newsletter

Sitting at my desk today at UVM’s Canadian Studies office, it’s hard to fathom that fall has arrived here once again. The classic signs are all there: the leaves are starting to turn colour (a bit early, I think, for this area), students have all been back in class now for nearly two weeks, and there’s that sense of excitement and anticipation in the air as we all dive into new classes, fresh projects, and find ourselves surrounded by many people we’ve never met before. The other familiar signs are there, too: that feeling in the pit of your stomach as you ask yourself “Where did summer go?” or “Whose bright idea was it to spend the every day of the last few months in the office and not at the beach?” For me there’s also that all-too-familiar pile of work from the summer I really needed to get done before classes started and the overflowing e-mail inbox (I’m sorry everyone. I’m getting there! I promise).

The best thing about the fall to my mind, and to every avid reader out there is getting to sample another crop of new books. Publishers usually save their best for the fall, and this year is no exception. New titles by some of the biggest names in Canadian literature hit the shelves this month, including books by Alice Munro (who says The View from Castle Rock will likely be her last book), Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder), and David Adams Richards (The Friends of Meager Fortune), Wayne Johnston (The Custodian of Paradise). There are also many new books on the way from some lesser-known writers who deserve to be at the top of your list of books to read this year. The latest books, for instance, by Dennis Bock (The Communist’s Daughter), Richard Wagamese (Dream Wheels), and Michael Redhill (Consolation) are all getting great reviews (make sure to see our in-house-reviewer Meghan’s review of Bock’s novel on our NWP News page).

I’m not sure how many people saw Douglas Coupland’s rant on the state of “CanLit” a couple of weeks ago as part of the New York Times “TimesSelect” subscriber’s-only portion of their website. Coupland begins by defining “CanLit” as follows: “Basically, but not always, CanLit is when the Canadian government pays you money to write about life in small towns and/or the immigration experience. If the book is written in French, urban life is permitted, but only from a nonbourgeois viewpoint.” He goes on to say that “One could say that CanLit is the literary equivalent of representational landscape painting, with small forays into waterfowl depiction and still lifes. It is not a modern art form, nor does it want to be. [. . .] CanLit is not a place for writers to experiment, and doesn’t claim to be that kind of place. CanLit is about representing a certain kind of allowed world in a specific kind of way, and most writers in Canada are O.K. with that.” Reading this, I couldn’t help but ask “What CanLit is he reading?”

While one can obviously find fault with the fact that there’s clearly a lot of Canadian literature out there that Coupland has not noticed, that is not loaded with “grimness and despair” (though, as my students will tell you I happen to have a thing for books loaded with these two qualities), his characterization of Canadian literature is something I’ve heard from many a student back in Canada, and typically a student who hadn’t taken a Canadian Literature course, from me anyhow.... So where doe these stereotypes come from? Could those of us who teach Canadian literature actually be perpetuating these? Just look at the list of ten essential Canadian books that a panel from the Toronto Star came up with this past Canada Day. “Here are 10 novels and books of poetry,” they stated, “you need to read to understand the inner lives of Canadians, our fears and frictions, our cultural history.”

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Stephen Leacock

The Tin Flute/Bonheur d'occasion (1945)
Gabrielle Roy

Poésies complètes (1952)
Émile Nelligan

The Watch That Ends the Night (1959)
Hugh MacLennan

Beautiful Losers (1966)
Leonard Cohen

The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
Margaret Atwood

Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
Alice Munro

Obasan (1981)
Joy Kogawa

In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
Michael Ondaatje

Green Grass, Running Water (1993)
Thomas King

Now, I wouldn’t deny that any of the works here are significant and indeed some of the most important books in my vision of the Canadian canon, but that’s also part of the problem. These books might be crucial in helping to understand our “cultural history” but do they all really illuminate “the inner lives of Canadians, our fears and frictions” today? A list of books that tells us something about Canadians today is something that I’d like to see someone publish rather than another list of classic Canadian books.

One of the roots of that perspective voiced by Coupland might be just how little contemporary literature we include in our Canadian Literature courses. One of the problems we face, especially in small department like mine where I’m the Lone Canadianist, is trying to balance our desire for coverage of the entirety of Canadian literary history with our interests in promoting the work of living authors. When we try to fit contemporary writing into a large survey course, we have one or two slots we can fill with a contemporary novel. Who does one choose? Do we stick with the big names? It’s hard not to feel obliged to create a class with a book by Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje on there. Or, do we try to promote a new and up-and-coming author?

In the three years that I’ve taught our Canadian literature course here at the University of Vermont, I’ve approached the class differently each year. The first year, I taught it as a course on the 20th century novel. The second year, I offered a survey course, starting with (transcribed) oral narratives and working our way in one semester right up to the present day. Both of those classes worked out very well. Students fell in love with everything from books like The Tin Flute and The Double Hook, to the excerpts we read from Moodie and Parr Traill and the poems of Dorothy Livesay. Last year, though, I decided that I wanted to do more to teach contemporary literature. So, I ditched the old classics and focused solely on books written in the last 20 years, with an emphasis on more recent work. That class was a great success, and this year I’ve tried to stick to works written within the last ten years.

For the final book on the course, each student has to go out and find a Canadian novel or short story collection published in the last two years. They will present to the class a short synopsis of the book and their reasons why they think the book would be a perfect complement to the others on the course. Then, the class will vote on which book we will read. It will be just as new to me as it is to them, and the students will have a much better sense of what Canadian literature is today. This, I hope, will keep anyone from leaving the course and saying that Canadian literature is primarily about people living grim and desperate lives in small towns.

If you want to follow the progress of our course, please feel free to stop by our course blog at http://pwmartin.blog.uvm.edu/180

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September 5, 2006

It's that time of year again when we hear the dreaded question "Did I miss anything?"

Whenever a student asks me that, or something like "please let me know if I've missed anything important," I always think first of Tom Wayman's wonderful poem on the topic. Instead of answering, I think I'll just have an autoreply for e-mails that directs them to Wayman's poem.

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August 27, 2006

A great thought with which to begin the semester...

ALISTAIR MACLEOD
'This may well be what the "writing life" signifies; that it is a life of comunication which helps us to recognize the great within the small and makes us feel less lonely than we are.'

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July 3, 2006

What is "Essentially Canadian"

The Toronto Star had a great feature over the holiday weekend. They came up with top-ten lists of Canadian books and films, but also things like architecture and children's entertainment.

I'm not usually a huge fans of lists like these and the choices they made definitely fall on the safe side. Still, it's a great starting point. I've printed these off to give out to my students this fall in my Intro to Canadian Culture class. It's important they know who Mr. Dressup was, if you ask me.

Here's their list of ten essential Canadian books:

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), by Stephen Leacock
The Tin Flute/Bonheur d'occasion (1945), by Gabrielle Roy
Poésies complètes (1952), Émile Nelligan
The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), Hugh MacLennan
Beautiful Losers (1966), Leonard Cohen
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood
Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Alice Munro
Obasan (1981), Joy Kogawa
In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Michael Ondaatje
Green Grass, Running Water (1993), Thomas King

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July 2, 2006

A Canada Day editorial from the latest Northwest Passages newsletter

Canada and the ImagiNation

Burlington, Vermont
July 1, 2006

I began Canada Day in my new office at the University of Vermont. It’s my first official day as Director of Canadian Studies and, it being Canada Day and all, I thought the Canadian Studies office was as good a place to be as any. It’s been a few years since the Canadian flag flew outside our building, as the last time we put it up our secretary was confronted by a troubled man who apparently has psychological issues about seeing any non-American flag flown in his country. After a mediation session with our staff, the man’s therapist, and campus police (I kid you not), it was decided that perhaps we’d best keep the flag inside for a while.

Given that this all happened a few years ago, I decided as I pulled into the office at about 7 this morning that it was time to dig out the flag once more. My first act as Director, then, was to open up a brand new Canadian and American flag and to put them both outside the front of our building, with the US flag positioned appropriately on the left (apparently we didn’t follow proper flag etiquette the last time around). It’s not often you see people hoisting flags on Main Street here at 7 AM, but there were only a few stares from passing motorists. It’s not really that unusual to see Canadian flags in Vermont, much to the chagrin of that fellow who stopped by to yell at, I mean, visit us one day. While Canada might not get much attention from the US -- a survey this past week showed that only 4% of Americans polled correctly identified Canada as its largest supplier of oil -- it’s not all that far from the minds of Vermonters. Furthermore, there are many Canadians who live here.

As most of us know, one of the things that makes Canada unique is that we’re a nation whose creation does not stem from violence via war or revolution. Canada was created, rather, out of ideas, out of conversation and imagination. If you think about it more, in fact, Canada today is not that much different. Canada is still a creation of the mind, as much, if not more so, as a physical and tangible space that we know through experience. As Canadians, most of us think that we know Canada, and yet 90% of us live within 100 miles of our southernmost border. How many of us have actually seen in person more than a minute fraction of our country?

We might well be a northern nation, but within the context of Canada’s borders it’s safe to say that there’s nothing very northern about Toronto, Calgary, or Halifax. For as much as we talk about Canada being the “true north strong and free,” few of us have actually seen the true north. For that matter, how many British Columbians have ever been to New Brunswick? How many Ontarians or Quebeckers have spent spring break in Victoria or the Rockies compared with those who head south to Florida? What holds us together as Canadians today, then, is still primarily a set of ideas, an ongoing act of the ImagiNation.

The other thing that’s been intriguing me of late is how technology is making the boundaries between nations more porous, the notion of citizenship more complex. The Internet, cell phones and cheap long-distance calls, the ease and inexpensiveness of air travel, and the influence of multinational corporations on the global economy make it easier than it's ever been to feel more connected to a country or community outside of the one in which we physically reside. As we all understand, it takes far more than residency to make a citizen; we all know people who’ve lived somewhere their entire lives but who choose not to vote, not to read the newspaper, not to connect with anything more than their immediate circle of family, friends, and co-workers. In earlier times, though, it was virtually impossible to be a citizen, and certainly to feel as if one was contributing as a citizen, without being physically present in that community.

In my case, while I may not reside in Canada right now, I can still participate. I vote, watch the national news every day (which even if I didn’t get CBC and CTV here in Vermont I could still do over the Internet), listen to CBC (mostly Radio 3 these days) and I read my hometown paper (The Edmonton Journal). I even help to run a business in Canada, selling and promoting the literature of my country. And yet, the Canada that I occupy, is not one that I connect to on a physical level on a daily basis, though frankly I feel comforted by the fact that the border is only about 40 minutes from my house. My “Canada” is an intangible, and ultimately imaginary one, that I connect to daily through ideas, words, sounds, and images – more “nationspace” than nation state. Undoubtedly, for me, “Canada is a fiction,” as I recently heard Noah Richler say in an interview about his upcoming book This is My Country, What’s Yours?. It has to be a fiction for me. But it is for everyone else as well, even for Canadians living in Canada day in and day out.

So, where does literature fit in with all this? One of the things that has been fascinating for me teaching Canadian literature to American students is to watch what kinds of Canadas they create for themselves as they read everything from Susanna Moodie and E.J. Pratt to Eden Robinson, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Lynn Coady. I expected in coming here that I’d find the students’ visions of Canada to be reductive, simplistic, and not as rich as those of my students back home; that just hasn’t proven to be the case. Last week, I read, too, about a talk given at a recent conference on LM Montgomery that dealt with the huge following her books have had with young female readers in Finland. For those girls, their Prince Edward Island is no less real or strongly imagined than that envisioned by any Canadian who has ever read the Anne of Green Gables but never been there. There are many, many people around the world who regularly occupy “Canada,” without ever having been there. You only need to travel outside of Canada and meet one of the many people who are avid readers of writers like Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, or Margaret Atwood, to realize that Canada belongs to readers in a different but almost equally powerful way than it does to its own citizens.

From my Canada to yours, happy Canada Day.

Paul Martin

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June 29, 2006

Resurfacing

Wow, it's been an insanely busy couple of weeks. I've been wrapping up teaching my online course on Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Jacques Poulin, getting settled in as the new Director of Canadian Studies (as of July 1), and prepping for teaching starting next week for the National Writing Project Summer Institute here at UVM. On top of all that, I managed to squeeze in teaching a one-day writing workshop and a three day holiday with Mona!

The online class has been great, though not surprisingly given everything that's going on I fell behind by a couple of days. The students have been excellent, though, as I usually find to be the case with online teaching. As usual, I wind up at the end of an online course wondering if I should be teaching all of my classes online, rather than the reverse. For the next month or so, I'll also be facilitating a course for UVM faculty on Teaching Effectively Online. It helps to be doing that right after finishing an online course myself.

The writing workshop in St. Albans was invigorating, too. I taught to a group of students ranging from incoming high school freshmen (given that we don't use those terms in Canada, I still find them bizarre) to recently graduated seniors. The school, Bellows Free Academy, is a really interesting one. I met with Don Tinney's Canadian Lit class a couple of times earlier this year and was thoroughly impressed with the people there. I gave the students some challenging reading this time: a chapter of Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction and the first few chapters of Poulin's Volkswagen Blues. This is material I usually cover when I teach English 086: Critical Approaches to Literature. The group did great work with the material and really impressed me. Some of them could have easily fit right in with my sophomore 086 students at UVM.

It's been a busy summer! But an interesting one and, while I sometimes dream of just getting a little bored once in a while, it's hard to complain about getting a chance to do for a living some of the things you love to do.

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March 21, 2006

The two Margaret Atwoods

"There are two Margaret Atwoods - one an ordinary woman who has children and bakes bread, the other a writer exploring the darker reaches of her unconscious."
Helen Brown profiles Atwood for the Telegraph

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March 20, 2006

La littérature tranquille

A provocative and interesting piece from David Homel on Québec literature's reception outside of Québec.

Le grand succès du Canada comme société civile nuit à l'exportation de ses auteurs. Le Canada est un pays très tranquille. La paix sociale, qui suscite l'envie internationale, n'est pas forcément une bonne chose pour les écrivains qui rêvent de marchés étrangers. Il vaut mieux être ressortissant d'un pays difficile, qui fait la "une" des quotidiens. En plus, les écrivains québécois ne bénéficient pas de la vague postcoloniale, qui a vu une popularité grandissante des auteurs de pays dits en voie de développement, anciennes colonies européennes. Pensons, dans la francophonie, aux pays d'Afrique noire, du Maghreb ou des Caraïbes. Le Québec n'a pas eu son Patrick Chamoiseau, son Tahar Ben Jelloun, son Ahmadou Kourouma.

La littérature québécoise n'est pas un produit d'exportation, par David Homel
LE MONDE DES LIVRES (PDF) | 16.03.06

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March 19, 2006

"Viva crabbiness! Pure Morrissey."

Via Bookish, I found this great Observer piece by the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland on interviews and interviewing Morrissey.

Am really looking forward to this album. I thought his last album, You Are the Quarry, was great.

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March 6, 2006

Margaret Atwood, inventor

This past weekend, Margaret Atwood successfully debuted the LongPen, her invention for signing books from a distance. I love how Atwood has named the company she has formed to create this unotchit, as in "you no touch it."

This is a great thing that I can see Northwest Passages benefitting from someday in the future.

We've had great success selling copies of Jack Whyte's A Dream of Eagles series of books via our online bookstore. In the past, we've taken orders from customers and then taken a big stack of books to Jack for him to sign. Then, we mail the signed books to the customers. We've also run live chats with him that were enthusiastically received by his fans.

Imagine being able to do a live signing and reading over the internet, with the author being anywhere in the world and NWP handling the books in Vancouver! How cool would that be?

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September 21, 2005

Pulp Fiction, eh?

Here's a great site that I just came across on Canadian pulp fiction from 1940-52. It's one of the many great online exhibits created by Library and Archives Canada. They do amazing work there. Being so close to Ottawa now, I am looking forward to going back there to do some research in the near future.

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August 24, 2005

Here's the book I'm hoping they don't choose to read this fall

One of the things I'm doing this fall in my contemporary Canadian literature course is having the students propose and, by election, select the final book that we will study in the course.

The great thing about this exercise is that it will oblige them to start looking to see what's out there. The other fun thing about it is that they and I will likely be discovering this book simultaneously. I'm looking forward to going along with whatever they choose.

That said, here's the book I'm hoping they won't pick, even if it is written by a fellow Albertan. I'm looking forward to reading it eventually, though. The website for the book has some great features.

If you're interested in reading Paul Anderson's Hunger's Brides: A Novel of the Baroque, you can buy the Canadian edition right now from Northwest Passages.

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August 15, 2005

iPods in the classroom

I am happy to announce officially that in my TAP class this fall UVM will be lending all of the students 20g color iPods. This is the result of a $5000 Instructional Incentive Grant I received earlier this spring from the Center for Teaching and Learning, which is enough for iPods and iTalk microphones for 15 students. The College of Arts and Sciences recently came through with additional funding for me that will allow me to outfit all 21 students with iPods and iTalks.

This project will allow us to test this technology as a teaching tool that, hopefully, we will be able to deploy on a wider scale in coming years for courses that would most benefit from access to audio materials. I will be using the iPods in my TAP class on Canadian culture. In this class, which I've entitled The Great White North (a reference, of course, to cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie), we'll be looking at Canadian literature, film, comedy, art, and media. Texts we will be using the iPods to access will include a wide variety of Canadian music, readings or lectures from important writers and thinkers, and excerpts from Canadian radio with a particular focus on comedy programs like The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour, the Vinyl Cafe, and the Vestibules. Because in Vermont we also get CBC television, my students will also be watching a lot of Canadian TV!

Of equal importance will be what the students do with the iPods themselves. As TAP classes are intended to be writing-intensive, first-year seminars, I will be having students write and record audio essays that we will make available on the web as podcasts. One of their assignments will see them podcasting about their experiences visiting Ottawa for the first time. We'll be headed there on a field trip late in October and it will be interesting to hear their reactions.

I'll soon be launching a separate blog for the course, that will have the syllabus, student comments and assignments, and a discussion area, all of which are open to the general public. I'll be using this space on my own blog to reflect as regularly as possible on how this great experiment is going. It's taken a lot of time and energy to get all the technology lined up and to figure out how we will be using it to distribute content. Now, as the start of classes is only two weeks away, I am suddenly scrambling to pull together the content itself. It's going to be wild ride!

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April 8, 2005

NH Elegy: hockey poetry hits the news

One of my favourite poets is Richard Harrison. While he writes poetry on a wide variety of subjects -- his book Big Breath of a Wish was nominated for the Governor General's Award -- his hockey poetry gets a lot of well-deserved attention. I can't think of many poets, though, who have had a single poem become the subject of a Canadian Press wire story. A quick Google search brought up 46 hits, and I'm sure this will increase over the coming days as this story is making the news across Canada and into the US. How cool is that?

One of my favourite poets is Richard Harrison. While he writes poetry on a wide variety of subjects -- his book Big Breath of a Wish was nominated for the Governor General's Award -- his hockey poetry gets a lot of well-deserved attention. I can't think of many poets, though, who have had a single poem become the subject of a Canadian Press wire story. A quick Google search brought up 46 hits, and I'm sure this will increase over the coming days as this story is making the news across Canada and into the US. How cool is that?

The great buzz is about Harrison's latest poem "NH Elegy" which he wrote in response to the cancellation of the NHL season. The poem was published online a couple of days ago, the one-year anniversary of the start of last year's playoffs, and the story got picked up by media far and wide. This poem is the final piece of what Harrison now refers to as his Stanley Cup Trilogy. The first two, "Stanley Cup" and "View from the Top," can be found in Harrison's celebrated book of hockey poems Hero of the Play, released last year in an extended 10th anniversary edition with an added section appropriately entitled "The Hero in Overtime."

Next week, Harrison and I will both be attending a conference at Bridgewater State College where I will be giving a paper on Harrison's hockey poems. Canada's Game? Critical Perspectives on Ice Hockey and Identity will be the second interdisciplinary, international hockey conference I've been to in the last several year. The first was in Halifax and it was a terrific event -- I got to meet Jean Beliveau, after all. I'm sure this one will be just as interesting.

Like Harrison points out in his interview with the Canadian Press, this is the moment that most of us are in mourning for a lost springtime ritual, the NHL playoffs. Last year's playoffs hit close to home, too. Calgary wound up in the finals (though I am an Edmonton boy, I had to cheer for the other Alberta team) and Martin St. Louis of the Tampa Bay Lightning played for the UVM Catamounts and still has a home here in South Burlington. It's hard to go from a playoff series like that to nothing.

While this is clearly a bad time for professional hockey, it's a great time for hockey literature -- not to mention, of course, the Canadian women's hockey team. Spotted Cow Press is about two weeks away from unveiling its reprint of ICE: New Writing on Hockey, with a new introduction by Roy MacGregor. I also received an e-mail from New Brunswick poet Matt Robinson, whose collection of hockey poetry entitled no cage contains a stare that well will be coming out this fall from ECW Press. Make sure to watch for both of those books.

So, with no further ado, courtesy of Richard Harrison and abebooks.com, here's the poem that's voicing so beautifully what many of us are feeling right now.

NH Elegy

Once, men came home from war,

or from the sides of family graves,

to lace up skates and play for it

as if everything could be remade

in a silver bowl passed hand to hand.

For years it etched the seasons

with their winning names,

and took the touch of triumph

into each triumphant house. It paused

just once – to mourn the dead, and

stayed unmarked to mark their passing.

Today, left idle in the Hall of Fame,

while rich men quarrel to no profit at its base,

untouched upon its plinth it stands.

And all who see it can tell you now

how a fallen thing is one that no one holds.

Richard Harrison

P.S. If you're interested in picking up any of Richard's books, all poetry books are 30% off this month at Northwest Passages

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March 30, 2005

Montréal, World Book Capital 2005

The 7th annual Blue Metropolis Literary Festival launches today in Montreal and runs until April 3. While a great deal of it is focused on French writers, there are always quite a few interesting sessions in English.

There will be many literary events in Montreal this year, as UNESCO has named Montreal as World Book Capital for 2005. That status begins on April 23 and will be marked by a two day launch festivity, which includes the grand opening of Montreal's new Grande Bibliothèque (the Big Library), which has been under construction for the last several years. It promises to be an amazing library. You can find out more about the World Book Capital events at the official website.

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February 20, 2005

Latest issue of the Compass

One of the things I try to write on a regular basis is the newsletter for Northwest Passages. The Compass is a newsletter that talks about the latest Canadian literature news, new books hitting the virtual shelves on our online bookstore, and, when I get a chance to write my monthly editorial (which is conspicuously absent in February's issue), my thoughts on the world of Canadian literature.

So, in case you haven't read the Compass, here's the entire February issue for you to take a look at if you wish. To subscribe, simply e-mail subscribe@nwpassages.com

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February 7, 2005

Books and borders

This article from the Vanguard asks about Nigerian literature some of the same questions we've been asking about Canadian literature in my Canadian literature class. While Canadian books today are almost always published in Canada as well as abroad, we certainly do have a number of prominent Canadian writers who have long lived outside of Canada, such as Mavis Gallant or Nancy Huston. Is there still a certain Canadian sensibility or style that qualifies these works as Canadian literature? I would argue so. To define a national identity or literature purely around geographical location oversimplifies and impoverishes both.

And yet, we in the West have also eagerly appropriated the diasporic literatures of other nations as our own, often as quickly as someone arrives and begins to write in his or her new country of residence. Can a book or writer be both from his or her country of origin and from the country in which the writing takes place? My inclination is to answer yes, though I would have a hard time accepting someone referring to my own work as that of an American professor or critic of Canadian literature.

Mcphilips Nwachukwu asks some excellent questions here:

I do not presume to be troubled by the same broad questions raised by Obi Wali, but I am compelled in this essay to ask: what is Nigerian literature? Is it only literature written by Nigerians living in Nigeria and published in Nigeria? Does this literature have to express itself idiomatically and ideologically as a Nigerian experience? What in fact is the Nigerian experience? In other words, if a Nigerian writer living in Nigeria writes lyrically about the streets of New York City with African-American characters realistically conveying a lived experience, and if such work is published in Nigeria by a Nigerian based publisher, would it be considered Nigerian literature? In other words, what has residency in Nigeria got to do with it? What qualifies a Nigerian writer to claim identity?

Literature itself is an identity marker, but it does seem that geography has upstaged consciousness and aesthetic perception in how we are beginning to define the new Nigerian literary canon. I ask because we already sense that the Nigerian writer living in Europe or America or Asia no longer qualifies to be known as a Nigerian writer by what I sense to be a blind criterium established by the Literature Committee of the LNG Prize.

As I said, I think these are all interesting questions, and not just for Nigerian literature, obviously. In terms of literary prizes, though, is there not also something to be said for a national prize that helps to encourage writers living in Nigeria who have chosen not to leave?

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January 31, 2005

"You don't deke Margaret"

"As in the world of literature, sometimes hockey's not pretty." -- Margaret Atwood

Check out the video of Margaret Atwood's tips on how to stop a puck from this week's episode of The Monday Report. I can't think of much better than seeing Margaret in goalie gear as she says: "I don't like to hotdog, but if the puck carrier's really putting lumber on it, then Momma can get nasty!"

If this piques your interest in the connections between hockey and literature, check out Richard Harrison's book Hero of the Play or the anthology ICE: New Writing on Hockey. In April, I'll be giving a paper on Harrison's work at a conference called “Canada’s Game? Critical Perspectives on Ice Hockey and Identity.“ If only I could bring Margaret along with me....

Note: you can now find the video clip of Atwood on the Back Issues page of the Monday Report website. Look for the segment in the week of January 31, 2005.

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November 28, 2004

"Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret."

I've been meaning to link to
Maisonneuve magazine's memorable interview with Margaret Atwood for some time. Atwood has a reputation for making ill-prepared interviewers regret ever choosing their own line of work and one can see this interview quickly heading down that path. She turns out here, though, to be patient and generous, which makes me wonder about the accuracy of those stories I've simply accepted as the truth.

Maisonneuve is also turning out to be a site that I visit regularly. Hope to pick up a hard copy of the magazine next time I'm in Canada.

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November 12, 2004

Munro wins the Giller Prize

Alice Munro has won the Giller Prize for her latest book, Runaway.

The latest great article I've read about her is in Newsday.

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October 24, 2004

Alice Munro

Great story on Alice Munro today in the NY Times Magazine. Her new book Runaway is available, of course, from Northwest Passages.

In the coming weeks and months, I'll be blogging more about Canadian lit and especially Northwest Passages, a company that Rob Stocks and I created and launched way back in 1996, when the internet was a much different place. Today, NWP sells books to readers around the world and is run nearly entirely by our other partner (and Rob's wife) Sarah Bagshaw. She is doing an amazing job keeping NWP going as Rob's is busy running MediaWeb Solutions and time is frequently consumed by my duties at UVM and with family responsibilities.

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