Dionne Brand - Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada

Introduction, author biographies, and selection copyright 2018 Tessa McWatt, Rabindranath Maharaj, and Dionne Brand.

Individual essays 2018 the contributors

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Library and Archives Cana da Cata loguing in Publication

Luminous ink : writers on writing in Canada / Tessa McWatt, Rabindranath Maharaj, and Dionne Brand, editors.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

isbn 978-1-77086-519-8 (softcover). isbn 978-1-77086-520-4 (html)

. Canadian literature st century History and criticism.

. National characteristics, Canadian, in literature. 3. Canada In literature.

. Authors, Canadian st century. i . McWatt, Tessa, 1959 , editor

ii . Maharaj, Rabindranath, 1955 , editor iii . Brand, Dionne, 1953 , editor

ps8077.1.l86 2018 c810.9006 c2018-900022-8

c2018-900023-6

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Luminous Ink ix

Tessa McWatt, Rabindranath Maharaj, and Dionne Brand

The Salmon Eaters

Eden Robinson

Snow Squalls in May

Lisa Moore

Where Is Home and How Do I Get There?

Greg Hollingshead

A Chair and a Bird

Madeleine Thien

Its Like Feathers Passing Over Me

Richard Van Camp

As Man

David Chariandy

Writing in Montreal

Marie Hlne Poitras

(Translated by Susanne de Lotbinire-Harwood)

Why?

Sheila Fischman

First Landguage

Hiromi Goto

An Ambiguous Voice

Stephen Henighan

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Corpse

Heather ONeill

Lorem Ipsum

Nicole Brossard

(Translated by Susanne de Lotbinire-Harwood)

Night Thoughts: Some Notes from the Margins

M G Vassanji

The Return

Judith Thompson

Writing in Quebec

Rawi Hage

Survival: The Origin Story

Margaret Atwood

Why I Write

Lee Maracle

Living History

George Elliott Clarke

Six Scenarios for the End of Civilization as We Knew It

Nino Ricci

Mind the Gap

Pascale Quiviger

Who Will Wave Back? Notes Toward Why I Write

Rita Wong

Wandering Home: On the Doorstep of a Canadian Atheist in Mid-winter

Camilla Gibb

Of Dislocation and Creation

Lawrence Hill

Known Stranger

Michael Helm

A Port Accent

Michael Ondaatje

False Consciousness

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

About the Authors

About the Editors

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

LUMINOUS INK

Tessa McWatt, Rabindranath Maharaj,

and Dionne Brand

Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind.

Margaret Atwood, Survival

TO BE A WRITER LIVING in, writing from, or about, Canada, now, is to live at a vexed and precarious junction of the past, present, and future. It is to sense and to track what was, what is, and what, perhaps, will be. This junction is a place of many revelations, the coordinates of which are not always clearly defined. Life phenomena are what writers track; and geographies. Geography consists of maps with borders, depths, gradations, topographies and people, phenomena, spatial analyses, tides, and the study of change and motion. At the best of times, in the best instances, writers can be the sonar and remote sensors of temporal geography.

At the heart of this anthology are a series of questions about the work of words. What does it mean to be a writer now in this country? What can the literature being written today the stories, the novels, the poetry, the drama, the creative non-fiction tell us about Canadas social arrangements, about its political and aesthetic shapes and its preoccupations? In the twenty-first century is a national literature possible, let alone desirable?

In 2015, as faculty members at the Banff Centre Writers Studio, the editors of this anthology gathered over meals and mountain walks and considered the configuration of what has come to be called CanLit. In a Japanese restaurant where a sushi train offered, with each turn, some new and tempting dish, we talked over the changes that had taken place in the writing community since Margaret Atwood published Survival in 1972 that seminal work that marked a call for a national literature and ushered in the idea of CanLit. We talked about place and politics and aesthetics; about our different positions on and location in nation, and to the nationmaking projects of Canadas government and cultural institutions. We talked about absences in the official record of CanLit and, in that light, we summoned Wilson Harris and what he called the unfinished genesis of the imagination in his essay Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization? We talked about universality as Jacqueline Rose proposes it in States of Fantasy : One way to come at the concept of universality she writes, might be to note, on each separate occasion, the history which provokes it. We considered the definition of universality that had gathered around the project of CanLit as representative only of and in Euro-Canadian experience. What makes a writer a Canadian writer? What makes the writing Canadian? Is it place? Is it preoccupation with and/or reference to the land; is it modality of voice or of experience? Is it something more elusive, a sensibility that shifts with the tides but yet holds some faint echo of the land; a register that is inconspicuous and hidden perhaps deliberately but which works its way into stories, conversations, insights? What are the qualities, ideas, issues, and landscapes one engages when writing from this physical space? Where dispossession of aboriginal land subtends all references, what is landscape? What is land as metaphor? Depending on where the writer is located in the body, in the land, in history what literary questions does the writer encounter? In the changing demographic of the population and the growing urgency of writing about race, class, colonialism, sex and gender, and the ways they matter, how are writers responding to these crucial concerns?