Roughing it in the Bush (1852)

It was always around, always referred to. Yes, yes, yes -- a Canadian classic -- I'm reading Duras now; please leave me alone. Then one day, there it is: a rough looking New Canadian Library edition from the 1970s, with an abstract what? below the author's name and title. How does that cover image relate to what's inside? Maybe if I read a few bars ... and suddenly I'm humming its tune.

I always thought Susanna Moodie was a runaway washerwoman who came to Canada from the U.K. with her trapper husband. Far from it. As Anakana might say, She was a right snoot, and we get a bit of that in the first chapters as the boat out of Scotland comes down the St Lawrence Seaway -- after how many weeks at sea? stopping at Grosse Isle to wash bodies, clothes and linens.

Just listen to her:

"I was not a little amused by the extravagant expectations entertained by some of our steerage passengers. The sight of the Canadian shores had changed them into persons of great consequence. The poorest and the worst dressed, the least deserving and the most repulsive in mind and morals exhibited most disgusting traits of self-importance. Vanity and presumption seemed to possess them altogether. They talked loudly of the rank and wealth of their connections at home, and lamented the great sacrifices they had made in order to join their brothers and cousins who had foolishly settled in this beggarly wooden country." (31)

from Margaret Atwood's Morning in the Burned House: New Poems (1995)

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round. 

Literary Festivals

Canada's literary festivals have always privileged books over writing. Recently published books. While these festivals receive public monies, they have become reliant on the marketing budgets of big house publishers to put on their shows. That's why they look the way they do, with inclusion determined as much by the publishing houses who supply them with their writers authors as the festival directors who invite these authors to read, sit on panels and sign books.

When Alicia Elliott tweets that a nearby festival (Hamilton's gritLIT Festival) is using the title of her published essay ("Is Canlit a Raging Dumpster Fire?" September, 2017) to banner a panel on Canada's literary culture ("industry" is Elliott's word), a panel that includes neither her nor anyone from the communities affected by this culture, she is right to complain.

I wonder if this situation would have been different had Elliott published a book within the festival year cycle? My guess is that the festival organizers would not have thought twice about inviting her. The case of a knee-jerk bureaucratic structure -- the shape of things -- determining the content? (See Hannah Arendt on the topic of bureaucracies.) Here is an apology from the gritLIT Festival's artistic director:

Like the Music and Film industries, the Publishing industry is relatively late to extinction. But it is dying, and with it will come the death of festivals driven by recently published trade books, particularly now that the big houses are spending less on author appearances and more on the means by which Elliott's complaint has reached us -- that Tolkienian ring known as social media.