Saskatchewan’s premiere self publisher excoriates the prairie publishing establishment
On July 25th, 1998, I gave a presentation at the Moose Jaw Festival of Words. In that speech, I was harshly critical of the established Saskatchewan and Canadian writing scenes; my appearance at the Festival was preceded by two interviews on CBC Radio, during which I again took square aim at CanLit and its addle-pated poobahs.
That I was able to deliver these hammer blows in the birthplace of Saskatchewan publishing came as an added bonus. A fifteen year veteran of the writing wars, I was sick and tired of the bullshit and mutual back-scratching that went on, the hobbyists and amateurs I’d watched being elevated to the status of writing demi-gods, the complete lack of innovation and intelligence their works displayed.
Reaction to my remarks was swift and hysterical. At one point during my speech, a representative of Coteau Books (prairie publisher) barked an obscenity from the back of the room. In the days that followed, writer friends warned me that my “Rant cum Manifesto” had stirred up a lot of ugliness — of course, it didn’t help matters that I’d sent copies of said rant to many of the demons named in the text.
But what exactly did I say that got people so mad?
Well, I started off innocently enough by giving a thumbnail sketch of our mad little publishing concern, Black Dog Press. I am quite candid about the daunting costs of self-publishing — first of all, financial: the first book we published, back in 1991 (Sex and Other Acts of the Imagination) cost us $3000, the newest one (The Reality Machine, 1997) nearly twice that.
Then there are the physical and emotional tolls. While I emphasized in the speech that “self-publishing (is) a real and viable alternative to the present, moribund state of book publishing in this country”, I contrasted that to the enormous amount of work it imposes on the author-publisher:
“We spent months finding a good printer, arranging financing, preparing the final, camera-ready copy…and looking over and approving proofs and on and on. We accumulated a mailing list of independent booksellers in Canada, the U.S. and Britain and printed promo fliers to send to all of ’em. We also identified individuals and publications who should receive review copies and, while we were at it, composed reams of press releases and ingratiating cover letters, made phone calls, made follow-up phone calls, did interviews, kissed a few babies — in short, did all the things necessary to become elected President of the United States (except kill people). And then we spent months selling and distributing the book…”
A friend of mine concluded after reading the full text of the speech that I was saying that self-publishing is, eventually, a dead end. I don’t totally disagree with that interpretation…but I also point to the fact that if I hadn’t gone the route I had, if I had accepted the verdicts of those publishers, I wouldn’t have six published books to my name, a weird cult following that stretches from Poland to Japan, etc. etc. Of course I would much rather have someone else publish my books and leave me to devote myself to writing. But under the present publishing regime in my home province — and this country — such thoughts are errant dreams.
From my position I see a system that seems bent on preserving a writing style more suited to the 1950’s than the 21st Century: inoffensive, undistinguished, pseudo- realistic crap. I see a system that completely ignores the growing diversity of writing in this province, that refuses to widen the gene pool, that insists on breeding ferociously, incestuously. In so doing, it produces a species of writers who are the equivalent of semi-intelligent morons, capable of a nice turn of phrase or two but totally lacking the higher brain functions necessary to create fully realized characters that escape the limits of the page and achieve, at least for a time, a life of their own.
Increasingly, artists are finding it more and more difficult to make themselves heard. Computers and the internet and the 500 channel universe and phone sex are eating our brains and what’s left over can barely formulate a coherent sentence, let alone read a 250-page novel. As long as our writers have to continue to operate under strictures imposed by CanLit, they will be unable to generate much excitement in the reading public and will creep ever closer towards obsolescence.
I lay the blame for the sorry state of prose writing in Saskatchewan at the feet of the Saskatchewan Arts Board (responsible for dispensing grants and arts funding) and Saskatchewan’s two major publishers, Coteau Books and Thistledown Press.
In my speech I excoriated the Sask. Arts Board for allowing one person (the Literary Awards Officer) to literally hand-pick the juries that determine who gets grants in any given year. I point out that if, instead, juries were drawn at random from a pool of qualified writers, it would prevent any possibility of conflict of interest such as instances of personal favoritism (or enmity) on the part of the Literary Awards Officer: “With this one, simple reform I think we can eliminate the impression that many of us…have had for years; that the system is more than just a tiny bit in-bred, the same names showing up with depressing regularity as recipients of major grants while displaying a remarkable paucity in terms of actual talent.”
I then committed an act of heresy by suggesting (horrors!) that subsidies to publishers remove them from any responsibility they have to their reading public and should therefore be cut: “Right now a mere handful of people in this province decide what books are published. Now, not too many of these people will ever find themselves on a Mensa mailing list and fewer still, I contend, would know a good book from a grilled cheese sandwich. The vast majority of the books they publish are not of a sufficiently high standard to rationalize years and years of public money poured into the industry . It is time to pull the plug, tell these people to indulge their vapid tastes at their own expense…and quit charging the tab to the rest of us.”
The latter portion of my speech is a call to arms of sorts. I ask that readers and writers “pluck our culture from the hands of a few, self-appointed guardians of CanLit, who insist they know what we should be reading even though for years we’ve made it clear that we’re not interested in the titles they try to foist on us.” What began as a rant concluded as a plea for an inclusive vision for writing in this country. I quoted from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Populist Manifesto” (WHO ARE WE NOW? New Directions Paperback, Copyright, 1976): Poets, come out of your closets Open your windows, open your doors You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds.
Yes. Do it. Open the door to diversity and quality and make the changes necessary so that the full spectrum of talent in our communities, the widest possible range of writing in this country is represented. Because there are many, many different voices, clamouring to be heard, and you get the feeling that the barbarians at the gates of CanLit aren’t going to be denied much longer.
Cliff Burns lives in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. His most recent self published book is The Reality Machine (see review in this issue).