CanDid Lit
Reviews and Conversations on Canadian Literature, New and Not-So
Reviewing is a thankless task. It’s nice to get them when you do. Literary mags have a tendency toward the extremely unhelpful craven blanket policy of “no bad reviews.” Reviews tend to operate as 500-word para-blurbs, with nice little nothing moments with the requisite creative-writing flourish that encourages a sweet pull-quote for a publisher’s website. Pretty rarely these days, they’re hatchet jobs meant to punish someone in bad faith; not many of the latter hit the mark, but it is satisfying when they do. Half the time I pitch a review but turns out someone else is already being paid to write it for that venue, and they do a worse job (with pay on the line) than I did privately, and they kiss too much ass.
It’s not 100 percent cursed, doomed, or hopeless. But the thoroughfare is pretty clogged with indistinguishable shoulder-pat reviews of books that often don’t need that support in full-force, are already being read. It’s a real gift to find a review that brings you closer to the work instead of simply putting another layer of varnish between it and you. The thoroughfare is also unduly fixated on literary works, which is fine (+ a not insignificant chunk of what I read and will review), but leaves out poets that a different sort of crowd actually reads (say, Sara Sutterlin, or, The Last Male Poet), who probably don’t benefit themselves from being pulled into the mire of CanLit, but are helpful for troubling the terrible dumpster-fire category for my own ends.
Why Canadian Literature?
Because no one reads books. And of the few that do, no one reads Canadian books (why would they, when so many of them are bad, are boring, are rotting away in the mandatory palliative care of arts grants and no-bad-reviews culture). We ask pretty little of our writers. We aren’t allowed to criticize major players, because major players reaffirm the apparatus at-hand1 (yes, this includes Dionne Brand and some of the other 100k+ salaried, utterly detached and self-pleased academic practitioners out there). And sure, many bit players do play the game and get petty attention, and I’m sure we can slag them along the way as well.
Theoretically, in a world where there isn’t a real market, we should be free to write about things that really matter, to experiment formally, to make something on its own terms. But that’s not the case here at all. A former bookseller told me last month that the Canadian poetry sales at their shop, in a metropolitan market, were between 0 and 3 books a month, more at a launch if someone was popular. Pretty disheartening. It’s not all Amazon’s fault. Nor is it all anomie and depression. It’s that we don’t even know how to talk about poetry, and many of us physically cannot read it and understand why it exists in the first place. I think part of that is we cannot reliably look to its criticism as-is for how to read it.
Some publishers do do2 great work. And Dionne Brand is not quite morally bankrupt the way Atwood is, and Atwood is, we hope, less evil than Alice Munro turned out to be. But all these people have probably paid off their mortgages on the houses that they did not need to rent while living off of noodles. I refrain from listing men who are bad literary citizens here because that problem is self-evident, I reckon, and they’ll get theirs in the reviewing itself.
What it’ll look like?
I’m aiming for a ratio of 5:1 not-novels to novels. Novels are doing fine. Are they getting shit on as often as they deserve? No. But they sell themselves3 and maybe no extra attention will be good for them4 (it’ll be good for me, at least).
Not-novels looks like poetry, graphic novels, essays, and short-fiction. If you have a book you love, love to hate, whatever, and it’s less than 3 years old and the author is “Canadian” (citizenship is not the metric, treat that relationship as loosely as you’d like to), feel free to pitch me it. If you’re a publisher and you want a review for your Canadian title, pitch me it.
Most of the current queue prepared here is filled with books that are under-reviewed, or reviewed slanted, positively or negatively, and I think are worth talking about a little more. The oldest is from 2021, I think, and am doubtful I’ll reach back further than that for the time being. Recency is not my primary concern, but say, Northrop Frye, has had his day, as has most of Michael Ondaatje. The queue will also, to the best of my ability, ignore central-Canadian writing that is already extremely well-funded by granting bodies, and disproportionately represented in the publishing and reviewing sphere. Montreal gets a bit of a pass, but Toronto can choke on its own ass.
Probably a post or two a month is all I can muster (and that may not all be reviews, as those entail a few reads, and a delicate hand so as to minimize the hate-mail). I’m sick, and I have a job and a life.
All this is provisional and subject to change at my whim. I will post free posts when I can. I will probably release old posts after a certain window. Or maybe I’ll paywall older reviews to privilege new ones. Is anyone’s work worth five dollars a month? Maybe for a podcast you like, to get those extra episodes they hide away, maybe then five dollars is actually worth it. The fee is mostly to buy me an occasional fancy coffee, maybe some of my medications if I quit my job and lose my benefits (a real real possibility right now).
I also don’t want to take aim at easy targets. Some of the writing is more sardonic, playful or persona-driven. Some of it is ~m a d~. It’s anonymous-ish (I am readily recognized by anyone who’s ever met me), if only to make myself as small as possible in service of the criticism. I’m a little craven, sure. But I also publish criticism somewhat regularly in the main, and am, like every other idiot publishing criticism, usually the one writing the dumb thing that ought to be taken down a peg by a reviewer. Feel free to comment and to tell me to take a ride on the sewer slide!5
If you want to read and cannot afford to, let me know and I’ll share it with you for free. Derek Beaulieu is always saying things to this effect: “Be your own pirate.”67
The more ill I get, physically and mentally, the more I would like to find another way to earn some of my living. If you have the means to pitch in I’d appreciate it. If you have a book you want reviewed for a mag for much better pay, I’m probably down to do that too. Just reach out. I love ARCs.
I’ll also probably post older pieces here as well, published elsewhere or buried in the dead domains of dead journals.
Additionally, some ~creative writing~ is likely to happen, essaying mostly, though still touching on Canadian writers in some capacity. Probably a lot of shit-talking prize culture too, and university.
Posts should be up first Monday each month, though some spontaneous works might go up whenever, and some bonus goodies might be third mondays of the week to space it out. We’ll see how it unfurls.
"Of course, sometimes things that are rewarded are actually good. But usually something is rewarded because it fits the needs of the apparatus that controls the reward system. They’re marketing themselves with who they reward or what they reward.” Sarah Schulman, Dispatches.
From the same interview: “We have no idea what’s being written. All we know is what’s being published. And what’s being published is, for any marginalized group, never representative of what’s being written. Even me. I’m like this bourgeois white woman in my sixties now—I have a professorship and all that stuff—and there’s no one like me in American publishing who is acquiring, even now. That gap is the thing. It’s true for plays, for movies, for television, for all kinds of art—except poetry. That gap is where the literature lives between what the people are creating and what the system is allowing the public to have.”
hehehehe, doodoo
This is true no matter how many times HarperCollins takes clip-art, a Chairman’s Choice Yellow, and puts together an absolutely embarrassing cover for a Chinese author (or author of Chinese descent) and calls it a day; look at these two from the same year. And sure, only one of these is Canadian, but you get the point.
In Grad School exactly section of one poetry book was assigned in theory class (it was, I will begrudgingly admit, a great course), and literally no other poetry appeared in any of the array of courses you had to take to get your credits and move on to your thesis. In a MA for English Literature. I don’t need to tell you how many novels we needed to read. And we wonder why no one reads poetry these days? Even the losers who think reading books is a personality enough to enter the MLM of the academy don’t read poetry for it now. Jeezly fukn christ.
The youth call this “unalive yourself,” I hear.
I mean the man works for an oil-funded bourgeois (my god I’m seeing now substack does not have a built-in spellcheck, I am in fukn trouble) luxury art retreat, and was a post-secondary prof before that, and is fetishistically obsessed with the tools of advertising but not really critiquing them and doesn’t have a clear stance on a lot of things he probably should have, and published himself an egregious amount during his time working with fillingStation we can do the math together if you’d like and—I imagine you get a little of the point of this substack from this, too.
Back in the day, Victor Coleman and that Coach House clique would post full permissions in their books to reproduce, plagiarize, steal, destroy and sully their works however you wanted to. They would admit they were acid freaks and that they didn’t care and they were happy to squander Canada Council grants. They were much closer to the reality of the world, and the word, than the increasingly hermetic, conservative and disheartening time we live in now. I don’t want to live in a world full of acid freaks, necessarily, but rather a world where careering writers are not allowed to thrive unless their work is good, for their own sakes. Good might mean true, honest, needed, whatever. But it wouldn’t mean assimilates, it wouldn’t mean abstracts beyond experience, and it wouldn’t mean NOFUN.