Graeme Gibson, a beautiful, inspirational man, died in London recently. There is a nice appreciation of him in The Guardian, as well as many Canadian sources.
In June 2013 I interviewed Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood (both of whom I knew -- professionally, you might say, and mostly through the Writers' Union of Canada) as part of an oral history project on the founding of the Union. The following is an excerpt from that interview, previously published in a 2015 Writers' Union publication, Founding the Writers' Union: An Oral History.[1]
What we really were concerned about in the one
fundamental area was -- how best to say? -- managing the professionalism.
Managing how writers were being treated by publishers, by government, and
establishing a sense of authority for the profession.
Jim Lorimer, who was with the Canadian Publishers’ Association — as
compared to the branch plants bunch -- got onto this very quickly. He started
this rebellion, and a bunch of us decided we had to have a protest. [Jim made a
poster that] depicts the Egerton Ryerson statue outside of Ryerson University,
at that time called Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. I was teaching there at
that point, and Jim and I and others decided it would be a good idea if we had
a mournful celebration of what had happened to Ryerson Press around that
statue. So I got permission from the principal or the director of Ryerson — he
didn’t know what he was getting into. And what we did there is we had a big
American flag and a ladder, and we called the press in, and to our astonishment
they all turned up – cameras, all kinds of things. I climbed up the ladder and
draped the American flag around the statue of Egerton Ryerson, and we all sang
‘I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ The press covered it extensively. And we all rushed home and watched ourselves
on television.
We discovered we had influence. This motley mob of I guess 12 or 15 of
us there — a mixture of people — if we could get into the press…. That was
something we hadn’t known. It hadn’t occurred to us at all. That then started
the pot boiling.
The next step was that the Ontario government established a Royal
Commission on Writing and Publishing.[3]
Moore: Which was somewhat driven by the Ryerson sale.
Gibson: It was driven exclusively by it. I have all
the newspaper clippings from that summer and Ryerson University has them too,
and there was a hell of a lot of coverage. And the government moved. Over the
years that I’ve been involved in culture and politics, I’ve discovered that the
most supportive members that we have, have been from the Tories — I’m saying
Tories as opposed to our current disgusting mob —and not from the Liberals or
the New Democrats. They just were not anywhere as interested as the Tories. At
heart I am a Red Tory although I’ve never voted for it.
So the Ryerson Press events had the Commission set up, and it was a
brilliant triumvirate who led it. One was Dalton Camp,[4]
another was Marsh Jeanneret, who was U of T Press, and Richard Rohmer, who was
a general in the Canadian Air Force and wrote potboilers, nationalist,
anti-American potboilers, things called Balls.[5] And the
three of them were brilliant. They were committed and they were all quality
people. They went around and came back with a report, which I haven’t read for
35 or 40 years, but I suspect if I went back and read it or you read it, it is
still the best analysis of what needed to be done to protect writing and
publishing culture in Canada. Nothing happened as a result. Well, that’s not true. I think more money went to Canada Council.
Tom Symons, who was at Peterborough, the university there – good man, another
Red Tory -- brought out a book on the failure to teach Canadian literature in
the school system or the universities.[6]
Anyway, the Royal Commission got around to inviting the poets — there
was the League of Poets at that point — and all kinds of others, publishers.
But there was no organization with prose book writers. I think it was
probably Dalton Camp who said to Max Braithwaite[7]
that he had to get together with prose book writers, so they could talk to us
and we could talk to them. So we got together, we did it in Braithwaite’s
apartment, and we all swore that we were not going to argue and we were not
going to whine, that we were going to be mature artists.
When we get there, there’s not a big crowd.[8] It’s at
OISE and there in the back room was Hugh Garner — Cabbagetown. So there he is. We were all sitting up at the front
and there’s Hugh Garner sitting at the back. And I thought, ‘Oh Christ.’ But
of course we had to invite him up, and he came up and immediately began
trashing everybody, particularly women.
Atwood: He was the one who said to Alice Munro, ‘You
might be a good storywriter but I wouldn’t want to sleep with you.’ She said,
‘Nobody invited you.’
Gibson: Anyway, he goes on and on. It’s just a
disaster. So I said, ‘I’m not going to sit up here with Hugh Garner.’ And so a
bunch of us got up, went back, and sat back in the audience. And Bill French[9]
wrote a slightly mocking piece about the event.
And so we sort of trudged out. And we go into … the King Cole Room?
Atwood:
Something like The Pilot?
Gibson: No, it was under the Hotel.
Atwood: The
Park Plaza? That’s the King Cole Room. Where you could get the draught
beer.
Gibson: Yeah, for 5 cents a glass.
Atwood: It was
divided into Gentlemen only and Ladies and Escorts, and of course we were in
the Ladies and Escorts.
Gibson: And we started talking and we decided we had
to form an organization. And I sort of took it on.
Moore: Can I just stop you? Before we get to the organization, I think we
need to situate you both as writers about 1970? You’d both published books.
Atwood: In 1969 we were both nominated for the
Governor General’s Award. Neither of us won it. We met at the Milton Acorn
event, because Milton felt so bad when he didn’t win it.[10]
Gibson: On
Spadina, Grossman’s Tavern.
Atwood: I had just published The Edible Woman. Graeme had just published Five Legs. I had recently been exposed to the fact that people in
the United States had agents. “What’s that?” — because up until that time you
dealt with the publisher one-on-one, and you believed what they told you or not.
You had no way of cross-checking whether any of this was true. When they said
our standard advance for a first novelist was 10 cents.
There were no agents except for a couple of speaking agents. There was
nobody you could go to. In fact, when my U.S. publisher said to me, ‘You need
an agent,’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘Yes, you do.’ ‘No I don’t’. He said, ‘If you ever do need one, let me
know, because have I got the agent for you.’ That ended up happening, but
meanwhile it was clear that writers in Canada were sailing their boats on their
own. They had no source of information.
Moore: What about the small presses? The House of
Anansi, newpress and the other little presses? They were beginning to appear at
that time?
Atwood: They were appearing … I think Coach House ’66
and Anansi ’67. Couple of others around that time. Flying by the seat of the
pants. There were a few literary magazines, similarly flying. And there was
Robert Weaver’s Anthology,[11]
which was a major force — a radio program.
Gibson: A
saint!
Atwood: A lot
of people first got paid for their work through Anthology, the radio program.
Dennis Lee and I went to college together, and Dennis came to me with
what I thought was a mad idea. I’d published The Circle Game with Contact Press — 220 copies or something. It unexpectedly won the Governor General’s
Award. There were no copies left at that moment. I guess it was 420 copies. And
Dennis said, ‘We’re starting this publishing company called House of Anansi and
we want to reprint your book.’ And I said, ‘Oh. How many would you reprint? And
he said, ‘We thought 3,000.’ And I thought, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ He said,
‘What we’ll do is we’ll apply for grants for the writers and the writers will
then kick the money back into the publishing company; that’s how we’ll do it.’
I said, ‘Fine, whatever.’ And so they did do that, and I did do that, and they
did start it up, and then Graeme got involved in it. Meanwhile, I was off in
Edmonton and England, and Dennis wrote to me and said would I come onto the board.
‘What’s a board? Sure. For my old friend Dennis” — not knowing it was a house
of vice, intrigue, murder. Blood all over the floor. [laughter] So I eventually came back and Graeme
was already associated with it, so there was that crossover as well. But it was
a time of much ferment and a huge number of ideas bubbling and boiling around —
and to situate it again, Expo ’67 had just taken place, which was a high point
for Canada’s belief in itself, a sort of, Hey, we can do this on the world
stage. What do you know, we pulled it off! -- which was our feeling about just
about everything we were doing at that time.
Gibson: It was just an astonishing time.
Atwood: The poets were first to form a network. That was in the ‘60s, and why
was that? Because poetry was cheap and you could do it in your cellar and
contact other poets, and they ended up sort of visiting each other and sleeping
on your floor and that sort of thing. They formed the League of Canadian Poets
on somebody’s lawn, with F.R. Scott and the anthologist, A.J.M. Smith. That was
formed before the Writers’ Union, about five years before — a bit later ‘60s.
So yes, poets knew each other and going on the Greyhound bus with their Canada
Council $100 to give readings, which was a lot of money for a poet.
Moore: When you can buy beer for 5 cents.
Atwood: So the poets’ network was there but the
novelists’ network was not, and you met people more or less one on one. I knew
Margaret Laurence from England in 1969-70 and I knew Alice [Munro] from just
shortly before that time. There was some crossover with the poets and the prose
writers, and I knew people that way. But there was no place for people to get
together, and people were working on their own.
Moore: Just to follow up about the poets, Andreas
Schroeder told me that you recruited him to the Writers’ Union on a flight from
the League of Poets meeting in Edmonton coming back to Toronto.
Atwood: Probably.
Moore: And you were both somehow dissatisfied with
the League of Poets, and you thought you needed something else.
Atwood: Well, it was a nice talk-shop but it had no
clout.
Gibson: We were after politics.
Atwood: Things like overruns of our novels being sold
to jobbers, sold to remainder houses in Canada coming through from the States.
We wanted to meet with politicians and say, ‘Why are you allowing this to
happen?’ I remember that meeting quite clearly, because the minister said,
‘Don’t you want customers to have cheap books?’ It’s the same thing that’s
going on now with the online stuff.
Moore: How do you
go from talking in a pub to having an organization?
Gibson: Well, I went to Alma Lee, who was with Anansi
and I said we’re going to form a Union, and if you help me do it, I’ll make
sure you’re the executive director and so she came on. We had no money at that point. We got
together and talked at Marian’s and various other places, and I went in to see
that dear man at the Ontario Arts Council, Ron Evans, because some way along
the road it was clear that if we were going to do this, we would very quickly
have to engage people right across the country, even in the preliminary
discussions. We couldn’t do it just in Toronto. We knew we couldn’t do it with
Quebec. Quebec didn’t have an organization at that point either, but we knew
there would be no chance at all that they would join a Writers’ Union of
Canada.
Atwood: This was the high point of separatism.
Gibson: We knew Andy [Schroeder] and people on the
West Coast and Harold Horwood in the East Coast.
Atwood: We knew Pierre Berton.
Gibson: I said to Ron, ‘We need enough money to bring
together, let’s say, 25 or 30 writers. Many would be coming from central
Canada, but we also brought them in from Newfoundland and Victoria.’ And he
gave me the money.
Moore: That was just what, discretionary funds the
Art Council had? It couldn’t have been a program?
Gibson: He was the literary officer or — he was the
significant person.
Atwood: Things had not been bureaucratized then in the
way they are now. It was the same with the Canada Council. The same with the
early days of the CBC. There was a lot of improvisation and making stuff up and
creativity. Unfortunately, once people who see it as their job to be
professional bureaucrats and have taken arts administration courses get in
there, it’s a different story.
Gibson: But it was really loosey-goosey for the
writers as well. There was nothing there. And so all kinds of people who would
never at this stage … they came! You can’t imagine how complete the coverage
was when we asked for it. We only had two people say they wouldn’t join the
Union, and one of them was Morley Callaghan.[12]
Morley said to me, ‘I’d be more trouble for you in the Union than out of it’ —
which is true. [laughter] And the other one was the man who wrote all those
hundreds and hundreds of dreary books from Quebec, Hugh Hood.[13]
Hugh Hood wrote to me: ‘I’m not going to let anyone look over my shoulder when
I’m writing.’ Those were the only two.
Atwood: It’s thanks to Pierre Berton that the decision
was made to make it a Union, not a league or an association.
Gibson: But there was a lot of us on that too. Harold
Horwood …
Atwood: Harold Horwood, having been an MP [in Newfoundland], was
excellent on Robert’s Rules of Order and how we should actually conduct
ourselves.
Gibson: He would stand up in meetings. If there was a
discussion going on, he said: ‘Out of Order!
You’re out of order.’ And he was right every time. And [F.R.] Scott — he
helped with our constitution.
Moore: And was that right there in the beginning?
Gibson: Yeah. See, even we believed somehow the story
that writers would battle — their egos would battle. And when we started out,
even we tended to believe that. So we had all these things in place. Certainly
in the first five years, there were spirited arguments! But what we all
discovered that novelists — I think because novels are a social forum — we were
very practical.
Atwood: You also have to be practical to be a
self-employed writer. You have to be.
Gibson: But painters don`t necessarily do that or
poets don’t do it.
Atwood: When they get together, no.
Gibson: The Union has worked very well. We`ve had some
ghastly moments, but how could you not in forty years? So it just sort of
coalesced. We started at a meeting at Ryerson where I was still teaching there,
and Ryerson gave us a space for nothing.
Moore: That was in June of ‘72, the first
gathering? [Actually: November 1972]
Gibson: I think so. That’s right.
Moore: And was that bringing people in from out of
town?
Gibson: Oh, there were people from out of town. It was
a small group, and we had to have representation … and the other thing we did
is, we knew we had to have significant representation from every element in
prose, so that meant Robertson Davies[14]
joined right away, Pierre joined right away, Farley Mowat did.
Atwood: Margaret Laurence did, Marian [Engel].
Gibson: and
all kinds of younger ones as well. In retrospect, collectively, we did a really
great job of organizing. Once it began, it began to coalesce. It was really
interesting.
Moore: There’s an idea around that it was all
fiction, that non-fiction wasn’t allowed in the beginning. That isn’t the case,
because Pierre and Farley. Was there a debate about whether it should be?
Gibson: Oh yes, there was. And John Metcalf and some
others left.
Atwood: Not immediately.
Gibson: No, John was terrific. He was hugely helpful for the first couple of years. Back then, he
could be a hugely funny man. Sharp. Mean. But very funny. And he worked very
hard. I think he was among some of the very early – the part of the
organization that was letting people in or not. And he did a terrific job.
Atwood: But he wanted more like an elite, quality
club.
Gibson: He had no trouble at the beginning. But I
think he was unhappy with a lot of the nomination-running. It’s a pity he left
but… He’s been very difficult for a lot
of people around, but I had no trouble with him. The academy might have been a
nice thing for someone to have put together.
Moore: He in fact was one of the people who described
how important it was at those meetings like the one in June ’73 that he met all
the writers that he’d corresponded with.
Gibson: I think that was true for all of us. I don’t
recall in the first two or three years any acrimony.
Atwood: Not personally. People disagreed about things.
Gibson: It was the hammering out of what turned out to
be the Union and the fact that Scott gave us the constitution that was
impeccable and Harold was there to provide order — that it was well formed.
Moore: How did you draw Frank Scott in writing the
constitution for the Union?
Gibson: That was his profession. And so we decided we
were going to get the best person we could.
And because he was a poet. He came to both meetings and at the end of
the second one, he said, ‘Okay, now you have your constitution.’
Atwood: You should talk to Silver Donald Cameron,
Rudy Wiebe. A memorable moment was when
Rudy Wiebe went onto the dance floor and he didn’t actually dance but he swayed
to and fro. And he told me the following joke, ‘Why are Mennonites against
sexual intercourse before marriage?’ ‘Because it might lead to dancing.’
A lot of different people. It was
an enormously disparate group.
Gibson: Margaret Laurence called it a tribe. For all
the kind of sentimentality of that, it’s true.
It works. As a for-instance, when
any meeting ever takes place, someone’s going to say it’s a tribe.
Atwood: I’m going to tell you about two fundraising
ideas that people may not have told you about. One of them was the pornography
project. We were going to write porno and put it into a book like Naked Came the Stranger[15],
but in fact nobody was any good at it [laughter] except Marian Engel. Marian’s
piece turned into Bear. People either
wrote failed porno or unfortunately veered off into satire, which is what I
did. I wrote a piece “Across Canada by Pornograph.” It was a different kind of
pornography for each region.
Yeah, that was around ’74-75. I know because I was babysitting Marian’s
twins while she was off writing part of Bear.
That didn’t work out well, they were hyperactive. They kept me on the hop.
And the second one was the Eclectic Typewriter Review.
Gibson: Boy,
that was brilliant.
Atwood: Unfortunately, we never repeated it. It was
basically high school skit night.
Gibson: We took a theatre out the Danforth.
Atwood: People did things — stuff they were good at.
Some of the things they did were serious, like Andreas and Rudy sang Mennonite
hymns very beautifully and Hélène Holden[16]
sang a piece called “Jack the Knife” about Jack McClelland. Jack then wandered
in, in a cape with fangs. We weren’t
expecting the fangs!
One of my things that I did was the Farley Mowat Dancers, which was a
lot of short women with beards and wigs who looked an awful lot like Farley
Mowat. The other one was The Toronto Literary Mafia, in which I got Douglas
Marshall, William French and Robert Fulford — the three big reviewers for the
papers — to do a piece on The Toronto Literary mafia. I talked them into it by
saying the others had agreed. They were supposed to recite this little poem
about them, and then there was supposed to be a chorus in which I wanted them
to sing and do the cha-cha. They declined to sing, so I got an opera singer to
do it on stage. Then I tried to teach them the cha-cha. Bill French was a snap;
he was really good at it — very elegant. Doug Marshall could kind of do it.
Robert Fulford couldn’t do it at all. I said, ‘Just do your thing.’
Gibson: Shuffle, shuffle.
Atwood: ‘People will think you’re doing it on purpose,
and you’ll be a big hit.’ ‘No, they won’t!’ ‘Yes, they will!’ So they did it, and French and Douglas
Marshall wore trench coats, fedoras, black shirts and white ties, and Fulford,
who was in the middle, was the Godfulford and wore a homburg. So when the time
for the cha-cha came, the others went 1, 2, cha-cha-cha, 1, 2, cha-cha-cha, and
Fulford went … [she mimes]
Moore: He
leaned from side to side.
Atwood: … and it was as I said: people just loved it.
So that was my moment as a dancer.
[Laughter]
Moore: One of the things I wanted to ask you about
was Margaret Laurence becoming the first titular chair, which was entirely
appropriate because she was the most prominent Canadian novelist at the time. Was
it maybe kind of a political, strategic thing you did too? How did that come
about?
Gibson: We knew we could never get her to be the real
chair for the full season, and I think probably what we felt was that she was
sort of the granny figure and was sentimental and was well known. And it was
perfect! I’m not sure how much she did other than be there.
Atwood: She lent her name. She was very, very nervous
speaking in public. She had to sit down, she shook so much.
Gibson: Yeah, she would just shake.
Atwood: She did a bit of that, but just that much.
Marian Engel was very tough, very, very smart.
Gibson: And we were doing a lot of the work in her
house and on her back stoop, and so forth. Again, it seemed appropriate.
Atwood: She was very good strategically and very
thoughtful about positions.
Gibson: And very stubborn. She did a lot of wonderful
work with the librarians and so forth.
Atwood: Public lending right. That was a big battle.
Gibson: Andy [Schroeder] gave much of his life to that.
Atwood: He just became a total expert on it and a very
good spokesperson. So out of these various core groups emerged a lot of people
who were experts in their own field.
Gibson: Or became experts.
Atwood: That’s what I mean.
Moore [to Atwood]: There’s
a group of strong women at the Union. There’s Margaret Laurence, Marian Engel,
Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Fraser. Hugh Garner[17]
must have been completely out in left field. What was the ferment like there
between the macho men and the strong women?
Atwood: I don’t think there was any difficulty over
that. Hugh Garner was over there somewhere, from another age really.
Gibson: I’m not sure he ever joined, did he?
Atwood: No, I don’t think so. There was some difficulty later with women
who felt they weren’t being properly represented. But that was later.
Gibson: And in a different context too.
Atwood: The fact is, during that time of gender
ferment and nationalism ferment and writer ferment, writer trumped gender. If
you’re thinking of it as a card game, what you had in common as writers was the
ace and the gender problems were maybe the jack or the 10 — a little bit
further down the line. The writer thing was the Canadian thing, and then the
gender thing. People were willing to overcome the gender thing in order to work
on the Canadian thing and the writer thing, because those were the problems we
had as writers. Women writers had their own problems as writers, but quite frankly
in my years of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s dealing with publishers, who were
male at that time, I never encountered any of that kind of thing.
Gibson: I think Marian had the same experience.
Atwood: Our colleagues — for instance Dennis, wanting
me to be on the board of Anansi, didn’t want: ‘Be on the board as a token
woman,’ but ‘You will be on the board as a writer.’ So it was a lot more like
that. The women’s movement began in New York — second wave — about 1968 when I
was in Edmonton; there wasn’t any of it there at that time. And it really
didn’t get going in Canada until about the mid-‘70s. But before that time and
in the early ‘60s in the world of poets, there weren’t many women and there was
sexism among some of the male poets. I did not encounter it amongst the male
prose writers.
Gibson: I don’t think for example that Margaret as the
interim chair — the first two were women…
Atwood: It wasn’t because they were women.
Gibson: It was because of their role. I don’t think it
would have occurred to anyone that one was making a gender decision, a “clever”
gender decision.
Atwood: No, not at all; not then.
Gibson: Because things were set. The Union was
working, then one could pursue what needed to be pursued, which it did.
Atwood: I’m sure there was a lot of it behind the
scenes, and there was a certain amount of it amongst book reps. You’d hear
stories about men chasing them around the hotel room, but amongst the writers
themselves, nobody said, ‘Well, little lady, what are you doing in this organization?’
Nobody said that.
Moore [to Atwood, who is about to leave]: Thanks so
much for your time. I’ll carry on with
Graeme.
Moore: The idea that the Union was about politics,
that it wasn’t going to make you a better writer — that was really engrained; people
understood that from the beginning.
Gibson:
Absolutely. That’s one of the things that Metcalf had trouble with. We
didn’t care whether the writer was any good. And this is where I had real
resistance, up until the end of our meeting this year,[18]
real concern, about self-published writers. When we started out, there were all
these things about camaraderie and of dealing with publishers.
But the other thing that we spoke about and assumed to be essential is
that money was coming from government to writers and to publishers, and we felt
that there should be an eye on that, collectively. And so the Union from the
very beginning introduced itself to the Canada Council, to the Ontario Arts
Council, and they responded to us as professionals. We haven’t always won what
we’d like to win, but indeed we’ve had an eye on the whole thing. As with Andy
[Schroeder], with the public lending right, there was a role, keeping an eye on
that.
What we really were concerned about in the one fundamental area was --
how best to say? -- managing the professionalism. Managing how writers were
being treated by publishers, by government, and establishing a sense of
authority for the profession. A bad book published and coming out deserved our
attention, that it was being taking care of. It was a book, somebody had made
that decision …
Moore: Even bad writers deserved decent contracts.
Gibson: They
are still trying to make a living. All that kind of stuff. So there was a real
preoccupation with professionalism of it. I think that’s one of the reasons why
we had almost no trouble at all, because, one, you have the tribe coming
together and all that nice warm fuzzy stuff, and on the other side,
professionalism. And the combination was pretty devastatingly effective. We
somehow managed collectively to bring it together exceedingly well. And that’s
why 40 years later I was really impressed with the debate on self-publishing.
Moore: Let’s go back to the mechanics. You engaged
Alma Lee and with a little bit of funding from the Ontario Arts Council to
bring this together. I think Alma Lee told me she worked out of her house for a
while and then there was a little office just off Bloor Street somewhere.
Gibson: That’s right. She has a better sense of where
the money came from, but I know that when we did the resource guides, the
teachers’ unions helped out. There’s a list of who supported. Canada Council certainly helped and there was
… I’m not very good at money, but what I basically did was thrash about. I can
raise money. We got enough somehow.
Moore: Andreas was constantly amazed at how Alma Lee
… He could look at the financial statement and say, ‘We’re broke. We can’t pay
the rent.’ And she would say, “I’ll arrange something.’
Gibson: We were blessed with her. It’s hugely
representative of that time.
Moore: The political ferment, the Canadian national
movement …
Gibson: Absolutely. We were very, very nationalistic;
we were very close to being anti-American. We weren’t against Americans who
were in the Union, but held sentiments like ‘these bastards were taking away
our country from us’ and all this … It was a very energetic time.
[1] Interviewed in person at their home in Toronto, June 12, 2013, by Christopher
Moore. Gibson was present through, Atwood intermittently.
[2] The Ryerson Press was founded by the Methodist Church of Canada in
1919 and sold by the United Church of Canada to the American publisher
McGraw-Hill in 1970.
[3] Royal Commission on Book Publishing, 1970-1973.
[4] Dalton Camp (1920-2002 ), executive, author, and Conservative
political organizer.
[5] Rohmer (b.1924)’s military rank is in the reserves; he was also a
prominent corporate lawyer and Conservative party activist as well as a prolific
writer of political thrillers.
[6] To Know Ourselves (1975)
[7] Max Braithwaite (1919-1995), western Canadian writer, author of Why Shoot the Teacher and other works.
[8] Among those present at the presentation to the royal commission
presentation were Gibson, Atwood, June Callwood, Gwendolyn MacEwan, David Lewis
Stein, Ian Adams, Max Braithwaite, Fred Bodsworth.
[9] William French, literary critic for the Globe and Mail
[10] Milton Acorn (1923-86), poet, honoured by admirers as the ‘People’s
Poet,” after not winning the Governor-General’ Award
[11] Long-running literary program on CBC Radio.
[12] Morley Callaghan (1903-90), novelist.
[13] Hugh Hood (1928-2000), novelist, essayist, founder of Montreal
Story Tellers.
[14] Robertson Davies (1913-95), novelist, critic, playwright,
professor.
[15] An American cultural sensation of 1969, a deliberately badly
written erotic novel by a team of writers.
[16] Hélène Holden, Montreal writer, co-founder in 1974 of the Double Hook bookshop, TWUC
executive council member.
[17] Hugh Garner (1913-79), novelist, author of Cabbagetown and other works.
[18] Just before this conversation, the 2013 Annual General Meeting of
the union had voted unanimously, after long discussion, to set new criteria by
which self-published writers could become
union members. In 1973 and after, writers who paid to be published were
seen as a threat to the rights-oriented
projects of the union.
