Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak Out on the Literary Marketplace. Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.

This is a book of interviews that most serious North American writers would benefit from reading parts of, though not necessarily each part. A couple of the interviewees don’t entirely understand or share the assumptions of the book they are helping to create – a problem that may have stemmed from the requirements the editors were obliged to meet in their project design. Some of these requirements are, rather ironically, among the matters that the editors have set out to investigate: the silent co-authorship of many contemporary books by the practices of chain bookstores, the financial needs of publishers, the temptation of awards, and the hope of pleasing granting agencies. As co-editor Kamboureli tells Erin Moure, “one of the things we are trying to determine is whether there is a certain kind of cultural grammar, as it were, a grammar of economics, that determines the work that gets done” (97). Various of this book’s institutional co-authors are listed on its acknowledgements page and in Kit Dobson’s introduction – among them the Canada Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose “ethics” policies required preapproval and standardization of the questionnaire the editors used to structure each of the interviews.

There was a time in Canadian Literature when a book of interviews like this would have featured on its cover, or within, fetching photos of the authors interviewed – a quizzical Margaret Atwood, a sultry Michael Ondaatje. There are no photos offered here  of its interviewees, although Christian Bok, Larissa Lai and others do often appear on Twitter or Facebook as similarly photogenic. The visual fetishization of authors is one of the practices of the literary marketplace that the editors have reservations about and have hoped to investigate. Instead on the cover are images of the cutting parts of a late nineteenth-century meatgrinder – presumably offered as a metaphor for the standard

I lived in Victoria from 1963 to 1969 and often bought books about Vancouver Island at Munro’s Book Store – Alice Munro was sometimes the cashier. In 1968 she was less often the cashier but there were tall stacks of Dance of the Happy Shades on the counter. Many book readers in Victoria were happy too. In 1973 I was in Toronto writing From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960, and encountering arguments that the writing of Daphne Marlatt and David McFadden was not yet sufficiently significant for me to include, but I met no such arguments about Munro, whose second short story collection,  Lives of Girls and Women, was already a popular required text in Canadian literature courses across the country. The photo here is an early-1970s one that Munro or her publisher sent me for my book.

In 1977 I was coordinator of York University’s creative writing program, and heard that Munro, despite the Canadian popularity of her books and her recent writer-in-residency at the University of Western Ontario, was seeking more income. I engaged her to teach a creative writing course at York, but after a few months she told me that she thought she was not being helpful to her students – I don't think her students

believed that – and asked me to replace her, which I did. My personal guess was that the teaching and travel – she was commuting from London – may have been taking much too much time from her writing.

I did not see Munro again for another decade. Then my friend Professor Ileana Cura of the University of Belgrade, a passionately committed reader of Munro, asked me during a visit to Toronto whether I could arrange for them to meet. Munro graciously agreed – somewhat to my surprise, given her well-known care for her privacy. I drove Ileana to Clinton, where Munro served us tea and biscuits. That afternoon was the highlight of Ileana’s visit to Canada.

Munro, however, had been very much on my mind. A York doctoral student from France, Héliane Daziron, had come to me some years before to ask me to supervise her Greimassian dissertation on Munro’s stories. She was the first student I’d encountered who was more interested in the complex construction of Munro’s stories than in their perceptive portrayals of women. She was also one of the first indications for me of a European curiosity about Munro. Héliane completed her thesis in 1985, and returned to France, where her Canadian PhD was not greatly respected (I believe she had to supplement with a French one), but made her way nevertheless to significant faculty positions at the universities of Strasbourg, Orleans, and presently Toulouse, under her married name of Héliane Ventura. She organized and co-organized several conferences on Canadian literature, including one on Robert Kroetsch at Strasbourg in 1995  and one on Munro at Orleans in 2003, where the well-known theorist of biography and autobiography, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, gave the key-note address, and various scholars from the UK, Spain, Italy, Poland and Canada, including Ventura and her co-organizer Mary Condé, contributed fascinating papers. I published the proceedings as the Fall-Winter 2003-4 issue of my journal Open Letter. Copies of that issue are still available, and offer a wide view of how Munro has been read and appreciated outside of Canada – i.e. a wide view of the Nobel-winning Munro.

FD