The secret dreams of historians UPDATED

There's a podcast called Tides of History, hosted by an American, Patrick Wyman, that I hear sometimes. It follows the host's interests, but tends to come back to the ancient past, mixing historical and archaeological evidence. Multi-hour examinations of the Polynesian Expansion or of the Bronze Age Collapse, for instance. Its shows tend to be pretty deep dives, featuring longish interviews with scholars you have never heard of.

The other day I was surprised to see an announcement of a freestanding episode in the series with the teaser line:

Every historian I know has a secret dream of writing historical fiction, but few ever do it. Dan Jones, a longtime friend of Tides of History and an outstanding historian, has actually done it: Essex Dogs, his fantastic debut novel about a group of soldiers during the Hundred Years' War, is out now. I talk to Dan about writing historical fiction and what it can...

They do? (Have that secret dream, I mean.) Can't say I do. And if I were to write a novel (I won't), I imagine it would be contemporary and not historical. 

 (Have not listened to the podcast or read the novel mentioned. May do yet.)

Update, March 2:  Helen Webberley responds from Australia:

I would like to offer the opposite position. I was writing a historical blog post (on Canada as it happens), drawing on primary sources as is appropriate for proper historians. But the events were so improbable, I actually thought I had written historical fiction.

Update, March 9:  Russ Chamberlayne:

Your March 1 (sorry, March 01) post on historians writing historical novels seemed to doubt that many do. Could there be more of them that write creative non-fiction instead?

Creative non-fiction has been a literary genre for so long that many practitioners will be aware of the grant money. But for those who aren't, here's the web site of the $40,000 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, from the New-York-based Whiting Foundation. It's for those already in possession of a contract (or will be by the April 25 grant application deadline) with a Canadian, U.K. or U.S. publisher. Other grant possibilities (contract or no) are listed at the bottom of the page.

"Creative non-fiction refers to all non-fiction and mixed genre writing shaped by literary sensibilities, devices, and strategies."  -- Betsy Warland, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing. I'd be okay with historians doing more of that, sure.  

Prize Watch: Could the Balsillie Prize revive Canadian nonfiction? (tl;dr: Probably Not)

Recently Canadian publishers Ken White (of Sutherland House) and Dan Wells (of Biblioasis) have lamented the monopolization of the nonfiction marketplace by memoir. Wells (who also runs a bookstore) mourns the death of "research-based nonfiction" and links it to foreign control of Canadian publishing.

“As a bookseller,” he says, “I can tell you that of the 5,000 Penguin Random House titles that I sort through for Canada in a six-month period, maybe there’s one work of Canadian history or researched non-fiction.

“If I wanted to, I could fill eight to ten shelves every six-month publishing season just with the major American history and politics titles brought into Canada by the multinationals. But in the course of a year, I have a hard time keeping my Canadian history shelf fresh.

For his part, Ken McGoogan, the arctic and exploration historian, argues that the solution to the crisis is to split nonfiction book prizes into memoir and research-based categories. White also grumbles about the dominance of memoir in recent nonfiction book prize awards.

It's true: memoir is having a moment (though White and McGoogan are in error in reporting that all the nominees for the Writers' Trust Weston Prize are memoirs -- of the five, one is a travel book, another an essay). But memoir's moment has been earned. Memoir writers have been doing innovative things in literary craft and also in their willingness to tell bold and risky new stories. These are fresh idioms; recent "research-based nonfiction" is hard pressed to show equivalents. (Yes, I can think of exceptions.) And memoir's rise, though it has been a terrific thing for nonfiction literature, will crest as the appetite for revealing personal stories begins to be sated among readers and for prize juries. Other nonfiction genres will have their chances to reassert themselves.

In any case, prize money is no way to create an environment for well-written trade market nonfiction in history, science, politics, current affairs, and the rest. Prizes are like lighthouses: they cast a bright light, but you can't study by their intermittent flash. It's grant and foundation funding that will make big, serious, deeply-researched nonfiction feasible -- and as long as those funds are restricted in Canada almost entirely to university-based scholars, the niche for trade market writers to research and write about Canada will remain very small. (University-based scholars do produce vast amount of research-based nonfiction, but the proportion that is attractive to non-specialists is vanishingly small.)

In light of all this, consider the jurors and nominees for the new Balsillie Prize, a new award for "comprehensive and thoroughly researched nonfiction books by Canadian public policy specialists." It's funded by tech billionaire Jim Balsillie and administered by the Writers' Trust. It pays $60,000 to the winner. The first short list has just been announced.

The Writers' Trust, presenter of the new prize, is the pre-eminent non-governmental supporter of literary writing in Canada through its prizes and other programs. But it's hard to see literary standards being determinative in its first awarding of the Balsillie Prize. There's barely a glance at literary merit in the criteria for the new award. The jurors -- Samantha Nutt, Taki Sarantakis, and Scott Young -- are all estimable public policy experts, but none, I think, has a reputation as a writer. (Nutt has written a book, but books are unmentioned in their biographies.)

The nominees for the 2021 Balsillie Prize are

Dan Breznitz for Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World from Oxford University Press.

Gregor Craigie, for On Borrowed Time: North America's Next Big Quake from Goose Lane Editions

André Picard for Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada's Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic from Random House.

Jody Wilson-Raybould for 'Indian' in the Cabinet: Speaking Truth to Power from Harper Collins.

I wish them all well. But it seems that so far the Balsillie Prize honours the public policy concerns of its funder more than the literary-nationalist aspirations of the Writers' Trust and the writers and publishers who worry about the state of nonfiction. Does the Balsillie do something different from the Writers' Trust's Shaughnessy Cohen Prize in Political Policy, which has always taken a very broad view of "political"? There is also the Donner Prize for Public Policy books.

Does this new award really address the Writers' Trust commitment to literary excellence? Or answer the call of White, Wells, and McGoogan for prizes that will support the careers of dedicated nonfiction writers? (A researcher, two journalists, and a politician are the writer nominees for the Balsilllie). And of Canadian-owned publishers like Wells and White (one Canadian-owned house among the publisher nominees)?

To answer the pleas of White, Wells, and McGoogan, the solution is not a war against memoir, nor a plea for more sub-categories of nonfiction prizes. What is needed is an ecosystem of foundation grants for professonal nonfiction writers in Canada -- something richly evident in other countries (read the acknowledgments of big trademarket nonfiction books from the United States or Britain), but mostly unknown here.

History of Fiction Bigotry

I admire Margaret Atwood enormously. She's rarely wrong. But I was disappointed by a line in her recent G&M review of The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty. The review is both a vivid bit of memoir and an introduction to what sounds like a valuable book on the 'fifties origins of second wave feminism. The disappointing part is the first six words of this paragraph:

The book reads like a novel, and an intense one at that: the characters include Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, both of whom would become key writers of their era, both of whom would die by suicide; Maxine Kumin, who would go on to win a Pulitzer; Robert Lowell, who taught Plath and Sexton, and was already hailed as the founder of “confessional” poetry; Tillie Olsen, whose Institute stay would result in her best-known book, Silences, about the forces that kept women from creating; and Betty Friedan, soon to publish The Feminine Mystique, which would galvanize hordes of discontented women who’d tried and failed to be Stepford Wives.

Even without having read the book, I'm pretty sure it does not read like a novel. It's a serious archives-based history of The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, which became a home for these women and others. As such, it's most unlikely that it is built on fictional techniques such as interior monologue, imagined dialogue, or invented scenes. That is, it does not read like a novel at all.  Characterization, scene-setting, drama, tension -- these things do not make a book "like a novel." 

What Atwood means by "reads like a novel," I think, is that it is well written and interesting to read. What she seems to assume, in other words, is that good writing is fiction and fiction is good writing. If good writing is found elsewhere, it is "like a novel," a sort of failed novel.

In other words, those six words are an example of fiction bigotry, the belief that only fiction is good writing, and all literary techniques (even those that began in nonfiction writing) are essentially fictional. Any writing that seems "good" must aspire to be fiction.  

Once you are alerted to this, you see it everywhere. "Reads like a novel" is one of the signs to look for. Another is the affirmation that nonfiction is facts, but fiction is "truth." Since I keep meaning to start a list, maybe this example is Number One. Nothing like starting at the very top.  

Conference news: Nonfiction writers in Vancouver

The annual conference of the Creative Nonfiction Writers Collective, the country's leading organization devoted to the craft of nonfiction prose, will be held on the UBC Campus in Vancouver June 14-16.

Writers attending include Darrel J. McLeod, author of Masaskatch, winner of the nonfiction GG last fall; recent memorists Elizabeth Hay (All Things Consoled) and David Chariandy (I've Been Meaning to Tell You), and essayist extraordinaire Helen Humphreys, who will give the keynote.  Plus Alicia Elliott, Charlie Demers, Alanna Mitchell (SeaSick), Cheline Knight, Monique Gray Smith, Lindsay Wong, and others.  Master classes, manuscript evaluations, nonfiction as theatre, and more.  Plus me in various supporting roles, as I'm one of the organizers.

Details and registration (some sessions open to the public)  at the CNFC website.

Is "and" bad writing?

Maybe.  Kevin Drum looks at how use of the simple conjunction skyrockets as bureaucrats and policy wonks try to jam many different things together.

CBC to historians: Drop Dead

CBC Radio's Canada Reads contest has always been Canada Reads (Fiction). You could nominate recommend anything you liked to read, but if it was not a novel, they would not allow it in.

This year Canada Reads is looking at literary non-fiction -- but they are being as controlling as ever. Only non-fiction that, in their view, doesn't really read like non-fiction is likely to be allowed:

We want stories. Books that are page-turners with captivating narratives, memorable characters and vivid prose. Books so riveting you forget they are non-fiction. Books that introduce readers to a brand new world and bring them wholly into it. While we love the work that Canadian essayists, academics, chefs, decorators and self-help gurus do, those books aren't quite right. We want the final five to have stories that captivate the country. [emphasis added]

Elsewhere on the site they cite Margaret McMillan as a model, but last we looked she was a bona fide academic.  An essayist too, maybe.  Not quite the CBC's cup of tea, one might think.

Beneath the tone-deaf illiteracy -- don't they know anything about the non-fiction genre? --  is the complacent arrogance of  functionaries down inside the national radio monopoly.  Why cannot Canadians read what they want to read -- and say so out loud, even on the radio?

Go ahead. Nominate recommend some history for Canada Reads. See what they do with it.  Send me a copy of your choices (cmed@sympatico.ca) and I'll note them here.

Kostash at Carte Blanche

This little magazine from Quebec's feisty anglos has an interview with a hero(oine? does one still say) of mine, Myrna Kostash, on the genre of nonfiction (without the hyphen, she suggests).

Prize Watch

Late update: Tim Cook's Shock Troops the winnah!

Been meaning to note Russell Wangersky, winner last week of the British Columbia Prize in non-fiction for his fire-fighting memoir Bringing Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself.

The other big Canadian non-fiction prize, the Charles Taylor, goes later today. Shock Troops, the second book of Tim Cook's big World War One history, Elizabeth Abbott's Sugar, and Angel of Vengeance by Ana Siljak. An all-history list.

There's been some press coverage lately of how the Taylor seems to have swooped from very lit'ry memoirs to hard-edge history. I'm not sure the Taylor has really found its form yet. In the early years fiction writers dominated the jurors, and the winners were all novelists. Now there seems to be a shift to the "information book." Not to let the prize-givers off the hook entirely, but partly it's the incoherence of the genre. The juries don't know what the gold standard is, and they make it up as they go along.

There was no overlap at all between the BC list and the Taylor list. Still, good luck to the nominees and their worthy books.

Why "Creative Non-Fiction" should stop whining

What he said: Russell Smith, "In Defence of the Novel, and the Test of Time," in the Globe & Mail, November 15, 2007 (except it's behind a paywall).

McGoogan: non-fiction don't get no respect

Ken McGoogan's polemic about non-fiction in Saturday's Globe here. "Have I gone mad?" he asks. Well, yes, you have, Ken, when you propose three Governor-General's Prizes for various kinds of non-fiction. There are already 14 GGs a year -- do we really have 14 masterpieces to support them. But otherwise it's a lively essay.