Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace

By Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace brings to light the relationship between writers in Canada and the marketplace within which their work circulates. Through a series of conversations with both established and younger writers from across the country, Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli investigate how writers perceive their relationship to the cultural economy—and what that economy means for their creative processes.

The interviews in Producing Canadian Literature focus, in particular, on how writers interact with the cultural institutions and bodies that surround them. Conversations pursue the impacts of arts funding on writers; show how agents, editors, and publishers affect writers’ works; examine the process of actually selling a book, both in Canada and abroad; and contemplate what literary awards mean to writers. Dialogues with Christian Bök, George Elliott Clarke, Daniel Heath Justice, Larissa Lai, Stephen Henighan, Roy Miki, Erín Moure, Ashok Mathur, Lee Maracle, Jane Urquhart, and Aritha van Herk testify to the broad range of experience that writers in Canada have when it comes to the conditions in which their work is produced.

Original in its desire to directly explore the specific circumstances in which writers work—and how those conditions affect their writing itself—Producing Canadian Literature will be of interest to scholars, students, aspiring writers, and readers who have followed these authors and want to know more about how their books come into being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781554586400

Kit Dobson

Kit Dobson is Professor of English at the University of Calgary. His research and teaching are concerned with literatures in Canada, transnational studies, and questions of affect and ecology.

Book preview

Producing Canadian Literature

TransCanada Series

The study of Canadian literature can no longer take place in isolation from larger external forces. Pressures of multiculturalism put emphasis upon discourses of citizenship and security, while market-driven factors increasingly shape the publication, dissemination, and reception of Canadian writing. The persistent questioning of the Humanities has invited a rethinking of the disciplinary and curricular structures within which the literature is taught, while the development of area and diaspora studies has raised important questions about the tradition. The goal of the TransCanada series is to publish forward-thinking critical interventions that investigate these paradigm shifts in interdisciplinary ways.

Series editor:

Smaro Kamboureli, Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature, School of English and Theatre Studies and Director, TransCanada Institute, University of Guelph

For more information, please contact:

Smaro Kamboureli

Professor, Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature

School of English and Theatre Studies

Director, TransCanada Institute

University of Guelph

50 Stone Road East

Guelph, ON N1G 2W1

Canada

Phone: [phone] ext. 53251

Email: [e-mail]

Lisa Quinn

Acquisitions Editor

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

75 University Avenue West

Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5

Canada

Phone: [phone] ext. 2843

Fax: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Producing Canadian Literature

Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace

Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dobson, Kit, 1979–

Producing Canadian literature : authors speak on the literary marketplace / Kit Dobson

and Smaro Kamboureli.

(TransCanada series)

Includes bibliographical references.

Issued also in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-355-3

1. Economics and literature. 2. Authors and publishers—Canada. 3. Canadian

literature—Publishing. 4. Booksellers and bookselling—Canada. 5. Government aid to

literature—Canada. 6. Authorship. 7. Authors, Canadian—Interviews. I. Kamboureli, Smaro

II. Title. III. Series: TransCanada series

PN151.D63 2013           070.5’2          C2012-907186-2

Electronic monograph in multiple formats.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-639-4 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-55458-640-0 (EPUB)

1. Economics and literature. 2. Authors and publishers—Canada. 3. Canadian

literature—Publishing. 4. Booksellers and bookselling—Canada. 5. Government aid to

literature—Canada. 6. Authorship. 7. Authors, Canadian—Interviews. I. Kamboureli, Smaro

II. Title. III. Series: TransCanada series (Online)

PN151.D63 2013               070.5’2                C2012-907187-0

Cover design and text design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Front cover image courtesy of LEM (www.lemproducts.com).

© 2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Contents

Foreword: Producing a Globalized Canadian Literature and Its Communities

Jeff Derksen

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Kit Dobson

1. Too Bloody-Minded to Give Up: Interview with Christian Bök

Kit Dobson

2. The Politics of Our Work: Interview with Ashok Mathur

Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson

3. Change the Way Canada Sees Us: Interview with Lee Maracle

Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson

4. A Very, Very Uncertain Way to Make a Living: Interview with Jane Urquhart

Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson

5. To Hear This Different Story: Interview with Daniel Heath Justice

Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson

6. Crossing Borders with Our Work: Interview with Erín Moure

Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson

7. No Reason to Fool Yourself: Interview with Aritha van Herk

Kit Dobson

8. Literature Survives through Its Variety: Interview with Stephen Henighan

Kit Dobson

9. Under Conditions of Restraint: Interview with Larissa Lai

Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson

10. A Book of Poetry in the Mix: Interview with George Elliott Clarke

Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson

Appendix: Timeline of Canadian Cultural Bodies since the Massey Commission

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

Producing a Globalized Canadian Literature

and Its Communities

Jeff Derksen

The small modernist library in New Westminster, B.C., opened in the year that I was born. Its architecture, a modest variation on the International Style, and its open floorplan with a mezzanine, reflected the way in which culture was being brought into the Canadian public sphere, and signalled the centrality of print culture within the shaping of a national imagination. Around the centenary of 1967, all of the books produced by Canadian authors, which had previously sat discreetly on the shelves, suddenly grew a red maple leaf on their spine: as their number increased, the library became autumnal with CanLit. I worked my way, from left to right, across the shelves of the library, reading whatever red-leafed book lay in my route, an education drawn from the combination of architectural space and the library’s cataloguing system. Sometimes I’d be pulled in by a particular author, and my brother and I would take out all of their books and swap them back and forth, coordinating our reading tempo. Sometimes the very strangeness of the language and of the world a book depicted kept me hooked. I still recall the cool prose and the fascinating alienating effect of John Metcalfe’s prose, and Alice Munro’s short stories—so tied down and domestic in comparison to our working-class lives! Even the rock-hard lives of George Ryga’s northern Alberta farmers and desk clerks felt more recognizable, even on the rainy coast. Occasionally, I would stumble on a book that made the local unfamiliar as well, such as George Bowering’s Flycatcher & Other Stories—this other world of Bowering’s Vancouver was a mere hour away.

Rather than being nostalgic, I now look back at that moment, concretized so nicely in the architecture, not as a period when the contradictions of the state were hidden within a welcoming cultural nationalism, but as a moment when one’s relationship to Canadian literature was mediated more by public institutions than by the forces we now rather casually generalize as the market. Decades of strong literary criticism and cultural studies have done a good job of overturning the exclusions and distortions of Canadian life and history that the ordered modernist shelves of my public library contained. Were there any First Nations authors who crossed my reading route? I certainly read about them, but was there anything by them? Did I get a sense of the nearness of Hogan’s Alley, the black community’s neighbourhood, even as it was being razed? Our collective criticism worked hard to make what was hidden visible, and to challenge the categories that produced such invisibility. So, while we can easily see the shifts in the way we consume literature today—online sales and near-monopoly bookstores are the most obvious—what is perhaps more difficult to perceive is the new set of mediations and possibilities within which Canadian authors produce their work. The subtle or even glaring structures that Canadian authors must negotiate in the conception and production of their work are very different than they were at the apex of the cultural nationalism project, and even very different than they were five years ago.

This collection of interviews with Canadian writers covers a vibrant range of aesthetic approaches and gives us a sense of the literary terrain and the complexities of being a writer in Canada today, and it also brings to light the astonishing set of forces that shape the literature even before it reaches a public. Through these extended conversations Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli not only provide us with a map of the current state of publishing and distribution in Canada, but they also reveal to us how the globalized geography of Canadian literature cuts across some of our steadfastly held notions of a national literature, as well as the ways in which this mediation of the cultural and the economic, globalization and the nation, affects the production of literature at the level of literary form, literary communities, and even authors’ lives. In fact, these interviews are remarkable in that they give readers and students of Canadian literature a glimpse at the way in which an evolving set of conditions and considerations shapes Canadian literature at the moment of its creation as well as through every aspect of its circulation and recognition.

The history of making culture in Canada is also the history of making and troubling the cultural imaginations of the nation itself, and, as these interviews step up to show us, at the present moment we stand at a nexus where our previous narratives about national cultures, multiculturalism, the role of the state, and the possibilities of culture have been simultaneously expanded and fragmented. The distance that a national, state-shaped notion of culture has travelled in Canada—from the 1949–1951 Royal Commission on Arts, Letters, and Sciences, through the euphoria of 1967 (and Expo 67 marking Canada in the world system), to the North American Free Trade Agreement, to our present neoliberal moment that sees the state turn against the idea of the nation and culture and in favour of creativity as a brand—has indeed been great. That library in New Westminster has been spared redevelopment, but the cultural landscape around it is fundamentally different.

The most obvious shift is that today Canadian literature is pulled up into the global market through an imperative that previously was not as intense or pervasive. This pull of globalization does not alter the fact that literature is still funded by nationally based agencies, is still read by audiences who may strongly identify themselves through their national affiliations and diasporic communities, and is still very place-based, drawing on the particularities of a region, a city, or even a neighbourhood. Novels that bring forward the history of places and communities and even the most experimental of the literature produced in Canada can be understood to varying degrees as place-based and tied into an aesthetic history that is deeply entwined with the unfolding of artistic possibilities within cities and particular constellations and communities of writers.

It is tempting to understand this tension of place, nation, community, and market as part of the globalization of culture in which the global and the local take shape in relation to the national. But within Canadian literature we also have to consider the history of urban-rural divides, as well as our colonial history and the colonizing tendencies of the nation in general, lest we relegate this tendency to the past. Literary sociologist Sarah Corse observed more than a decade ago that [T]he historical conditions of Canada’s founding have continued to subvert both the development of a national canon and the nationalist project more generally, and for Corse these conditions were the challenges embedded in the bi-national framework (37). If Canadian literary history tried to smooth out the complications of the cultural geography of Canada—seeing space and identities as processes that called for assimilation—today the geography of any cultural project that began at the national level, as Canada’s did, has now become entangled across many scales and places.

The significant challenges that the critique of official multiculturalism brought to a nationalist project have made the terrain for a literary imagination (both official imaginations and more unruly ones) today more complex. As Roy Miki describes it for our Canadian context, the demise of identity politics in the wake of globalization brought with it a silence that was not filled by a return to the good old days of the nation. The narrative of the nation has already moved elsewhere, i.e., had unravelled and as a consequence the links between place (as territory) and identity (as stable Canadianness) were also disarticulated in the process (91). Why it is not the good old days of a Canadian nationalism, as Miki ironically calls it, is because there has been another disarticulation, another unravelling—the relationship of state to the nation. So used are we to the joining of the nation-state that it is easy to miss the antagonism that sometimes exists as the state seemingly takes apart the project of the nation—both in the name of the nation and for the market. It was much easier to imagine previously that the state, with all of its commissions, councils, and programs, was building a particular type of nation, but today we more often see cultural and economic decisions made for the good of the market. The fate of the CBC may very well lie in this dynamic, in which the nation must be saved from a deficit by having its national cultural infrastructure pulled away, which would inevitably shift the CBC to a market model. So, if the nation has moved elsewhere, it has done so through some strong pushes from the state; and culture has followed. What we used to think of—and critique—as the role of the state in culture, and the construction of a public sphere where culture was to shape a national imagination, has now been refigured around a public–private partnership that is unmoored from many of our modernist assumptions of a particular multicultural and yet national culture, with culture having been aligned more closely with economic rationales.

These interviews focus on what we could call the political economy of producing Canadian literature because they extend the narrative of making culture into a moment when the relationship among the nation, its funding agencies, and the marketing of culture is both particularly fraught and curiously undetermined. But these interviews show us exactly how these sometimes mysterious and often immaterial forces and inflections shape every aspect of literary production in Canada—and how they shape the communities that writers build and the way in which writers make their livings. However, out of these new conditions, it is striking how many authors point to new potent possibilities. Erín Moure, in her engaging and often hilarious interview, identifies a vital flow of global thought by pointing out that Canadian translators bring us the world at the same time as she rightly points out that the structuring of the funding for and publishing of translations blocks a wide range of languages—for example, Galician—from making it into our literature and expanding it in that manner. But Moure also brings alternative modes of production and emergent networks of circulation to the foreground. She hopefully speculates that these networks and modes of production could loop back to inform and alter our publishing and granting policies. Daniel Heath Justice argues that there are specific stories expected of [Native] writers that tell a particular tragic story of about Native people, yet he also points out that smaller presses are publishing work that actively challenges a lot of expectations about what is Native. And Ashok Mathur finds that smaller presses can eschew a market-driven notion of quality yet still use circulation within the market to make certain types of work visible in the crowded literary landscape. Internally multiple, and spatially expanded, Canadian literature enters into the twenty-first century dynamically because of this relationship of production, critique, and circulation that these authors outline. What is truly optimistic—truly productive—in these interviews is the way in which the lived practice of writing, of producing a literature, outstrips its own determinants, first by recognizing them and second by writing beyond them. Producing Canadian Literature gives us a very dynamic sense both of what production is and of the way in which culture remains a site of contestation, antagonism, community, and possibility.

Acknowledgements

This book has taken quite a while to come to fruition, and during this time we have accrued a lot of debts that we are happy to acknowledge here.

Our warmest thanks, first and foremost, go to all the authors who agreed to be interviewed, and who were so generous with their time and thoughts on the issues we wanted to explore in this project; these authors include not only those featured here but also Warren Cariou, Karen Connelly, Hiromi Goto, and Roy Miki, whose interviews we were not able to include in the book for reasons of length. We plan for their interviews, along with the unabridged versions of those included in this book, to eventually appear on the TransCanada Institute’s website (www.transcanadas.ca).

Conducting interviews, transcribing them, editing them, and re-editing them—all of this involves huge amounts of time and different kinds of intensive labour. This project would not have materialized without the support we received by the able hands and ears of our transcribers and research assistants: Mark Andrade, Jorgen Baker, Chantelle Burgess, Elias Fahssi, Sarah Henzi, Asha Jeffers, Claudia Kambourelis, Nathan Kelly, Marcelle Kosman, Phoebe Lusk, Mollie McDuffe, Hannah McGregor, Lillian Nolan, Kristina Ottosen, Jamie Witham, and Rob Zacharias.

We also gratefully acknowledge the agencies that have made it possible for us to pursue this joint research project and the various stages of production that led to this book: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship that Kit held at TransCanada Institute, University of Guelph; the Killam Trusts Postdoctoral Fellowship that he held at Dalhousie University; an Internal Research Grant that he received from Mount Royal University; the Canada Council that brought some of the authors interviewed to the TransCanada Institute; and the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canada Research Chairs Program that have allowed Smaro to create the TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph to pursue this, among other, projects.

Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli

Calgary – Toronto, 2012

Introduction

Kit Dobson

What does it take to produce literature in Canada? The interviews collected in Producing Canadian Literature are designed to increase the depth and visibility of the ongoing conversations about what it means to write in Canada, and, specifically, how writers go about doing so. These dialogues will be of interest to readers of Canadian literature, to aspiring, emerging, or established writers, as well as to students and researchers of literature. It is not a typical book of interviews, in that it does not concern itself particularly with the books that writers read, or with the places from which they take their inspiration, or with the contents of their writing. Instead, it is concerned with the material world in which writers find themselves. Book publishing, in all of its facets, is a business; in fact, it is a series of interlinked businesses. Book writing, on the other hand, is generally conceived of as an art form. Business and art frequently make for uncomfortable bedfellows. Writers, who may have begun writing from a desire to communicate with an audience or to express themselves, have to negotiate a very complex marketplace in order to see their works get into the hands of readers. The interface between writers and the market, the site where those concerns of art and business intersect and negotiate with one another, was what Smaro Kamboureli and I set out to explore by conducting this series of interviews. We decided to take our questions directly to the authors. Their answers are varied, surprising, and, above all else, demonstrative of a great deal of savvy in how they deal with the materiality of the culture industries.

This book arrives at this moment for a few reasons. It is important to understand how and why authors choose to write the works that they do. Why, for instance, do so many poets in Canada write novels? Both Jane Urquhart and George Elliott Clarke, in the interviews that follow, acknowledge that market forces prompt writers to make particular creative decisions. Or why do Canadians write, publish, and read so much poetry about nature when 80 per cent of Canadians now live in cities? Christian Bök suggests here that this focus derives, in part, from a bias in how our funding structures operate, a bias that devalues experimental poetry. There may be a problem of logic in such a claim, since experimental writing can also be about nature—but the challenge to how and where poetry in Canada is situated still stands. Whether or not you agree with the assertions that individual writers make in this book, what emerges is the extent to which the Canadian culture industries influence the creative practice of writers. It does not seem like an overstatement to claim that one cannot understand how and why authors write in this country without attempting to understand how they interact with market forces and the culture industries.

Other reasons follow from these general concerns. In universities, students taking degrees in the field of English (and other cognate fields) can pursue their studies simply by analysing the contents of the works they read. Interpreting the poetry of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Plath—or Earle Birney, Margaret Atwood, and P.K. Page—can be an end in itself. Yet such analyses can rest on assumptions that writers interact directly with readers through the words that they set down on the page. More materially focused sub-disciplines like book history or print culture are bucking this trend, and creative-writing programs may be more pragmatic. Nevertheless, many students complete degrees in the study of books without having the opportunity to study how those books arrive in their hands. As a result, they miss out on understanding a complex part of how authors live their lives: interacting with a market that often changes the very substance of the works themselves. What we read and how a book may come into being can, indeed, be in conflict.

These market forces are not stable; they are constantly changing. In response to technological and other developments in the market, the writers who currently earn the most in the world—James Patterson, Danielle Steele, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and others—are learning to diversify their modes of delivery. In 2011 the bookseller Amazon announced that, for the first time, sales of electronic books for their Kindle device began to outpace the sale of print books. New devices, like the Kindle, the iPad, and various e-readers, are changing the ways in which readers consume books. Blooks—that is, books derived from blogs—and vooks—the combination of videos and books—are entering our vocabularies. The market is becoming more complicated at a time when it is already difficult to navigate. The implications of these trends are yet to be fully understood. Will readers, accustomed to the shorter formats used on websites and social media networks, continue to invest their time in lengthier books or complex poetic forms? Will pressures from the market influence writers in new ways? How should we evaluate these changes? Should we embrace them? Question them? Reject them? A great deal of change lies ahead.

Sales trends, moreover, continue to shift. The literary tradition does not exist in a vacuum, and how or what a writer writes is not simply a reflection of her or his penchant for one form or another. Stephen Henighan notes in his interview here that collections of short stories in Canada, which were once popular, then devalued, have come back into some vogue. Poetry sales continue to be small at best, pushing authors to look, as Erín Moure does here, toward transforming our understanding of a book and the possibilities that it contains. The idea of the literary bestseller—a weirdly Canadian category if ever there was one—continues to permeate the industry as everyone involved, from creators to producers, seeks to find a way to combine artistic worth and mass consumption. In the terms offered by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, books exist at a point at which economic capital and cultural capital can intersect: books are valuable in a monetary sense, but also in a cultural sense. When a single book can prove culturally valuable as well as saleable, everyone profits. Such books are, it seems, the most sought after in the Canadian context. Sales may not be the only marker of the importance of a book, but, where business and art collide, sales are, however uncomfortably, a central part of the conversation.

Readers, notably, vote with their spending dollars. Many writers report that, from their perspective, the market is becoming ever more stratified, with a few choice authors—Lee Maracle cites Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, and sometimes Joseph Boyden as Canadian examples that parallel the more international ones—garnering the bulk of the attention. Other writers, meanwhile, may languish. Larissa Lai and Ashok Mathur both suggest in their interviews that these divides can and should be linked to issues of race, class, sex, and gender. Canada’s uneasy relationship with its Indigenous population emerges in this milieu—Maracle argues that Canada tends to notice only one or two top Indigenous writers at a time—while attempts to foster literary diversity through government-sponsored programs create tension in the minds of writers. Programs attempt to anticipate and respond to readers’ and writers’ desires, but these are difficult to forecast. Readerships are fickle. Readers also vote in terms of medium (do they bother to read books? Studies suggest that they do, but film, television, and the Web all compete), genres (non-fiction sells very well in Canada, for instance), and in terms of platform (print, Web, e-reader). While these choices influence how authors create their works, they come at the end of a lengthy process that attempts to guess what they want to purchase, triangulating the reader, marketplace, and author in a web of entangled networks. This process also anticipates what funding agencies value, what agents and publishers are willing to invest in, what award committees find worthy, and what retailers want. Some writers will disavow that they attempt to anticipate the expectations of any of these bodies. Rudy Wiebe, interviewed by Herb Wyile, gives a version of the usual response: I’ve learned in a long life of trying to write fiction that you always go with the things that interest you; whether they’re odd or popular doesn’t matter; go with it (67). Nevertheless, the writers interviewed here, such as Aritha van Herk and Daniel Heath Justice, acknowledge that the writing and publishing processes place many demands, either implicitly or explicitly, upon writers. Writers, in turn, acknowledge and work with these demands.

The writers whom Smaro and I have interviewed for this book demonstrate a keen awareness of these and other trends. We approached this project as a book of interviews for a couple of reasons. The first is that books of interviews in Canada rarely engage writers in conversations about what it means for them to create artistic works in a market that is necessarily concerned with its economic bottom line. There are many books of interviews with writers published in Canada, and writers are also frequently interviewed in Canadian and international periodical and news publications. As Peter O’Brien states in his 1987 book of interviews, So to Speak, interviews have become more important as a source of literary documentation as letter writing and similar practices decline (7). Indeed, many interviews offer an important record of the making of literature. They let us know, among other things, how and why writers write, demonstrate the length and depth of aesthetic conversations taking place in this country, show how literary trends have changed over time, and demystify the bounded text, opening it up so that readers might better interact with it. But while such interviews may occasionally touch on issues of the material production of books, they are primarily concerned with the intellectual process and experiences that go into creating a writing life. Alan Twigg, for instance, in his book of interviews, Strong Voices, published in 1988, notes that his book started out as discussions about literature and writing, but ultimately became discussions about examining and enriching life (n.p.). While these are very valuable contributions, our project has been designed to supplement these concerns with more material ones, to take stock of the day-to-day conditions that shape a writer’s life and writing. So, while most readers are interested in what books are about, the emphasis in our project, from the start, has been how books come to be. And this is precisely what in our view makes this book different. While we did not disavow all interest in what the books of the authors we interviewed were about, our interviewing process focused on the material conditions that shape the making and circulation of a book. From how they might sustain themselves while writing their books to promoting a new title, from having their books edited to seeing them become objects whose lives they can no longer control when they become part of the cultural marketplace, to the broad concerns that are addressed in this book, we wish to understand how writers perceive the material worlds with which they engage so as to better witness ongoing shifts in the realm of literature in Canada.

The second reason for approaching this project as a series of interviews is that it is difficult to get a comprehensive look at the market for literature in Canada, making it more useful to consider the effects of the market on a range of individual