History of the artist as a jerk

We enjoyed the Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown" over the holidays. You should go, though it may help to be of an age to have lived through a lot of the Dylan era. But the music is terrific throughout, and the acting too.

It also made pretty clear that young Dylan was a self-centered, arrogant, inconsiderate asshole most of the time -- as well as being some kind of genius. The creative life came first, all others were secondary.

I was also reading the long article in the New Yorker about Alice Munro and the sexual abuse of her daughter. I met Alice Munro a few times, always with groups of writers, and she always seemed a lovely person to be around. In Rachel Aviv's New Yorker story, Alice Munro comes out as kind of horrible, too. Indeed, the Robert Thacker biography of her, which I read about a decade ago, made quite clear that when she left Victoria and her husband Jim Munro in the early 1970s, she also left behind her three daughters -- and motherhood, pretty much.  She was going to write, and there wasn't room for children in that plan.

The New Yorker article makes clear, without specifically saying so, that when her new partner began abusing her youngest daughter, she pretty much held to her earlier decision: not my problem, I have to write.

Reading the article, I reflected that never have I read a story in which I have some personal acquaintance with so many of the people interviewed or discussed. I like and admire almost all of them. Few come out very well in this story  -- human failings, not artistic ones, mostly.    

History of the Writers' Union of Canada

Today, November 3, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Writers' Union of Canada. It may not be quite as lively as it used to be but remains a redoubtable force in Canadian culture.  I was not there at the founding, but I've been a member for a good part of that time, and at one point chaired the organization.

They sent us each an elegantly decorated cookie to celebrate the day. That's it sitting atop my little oral history of the Union's beginnings. I plan to eat it at some point today. 

The Union from the very start 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 we've had an eye on the whole thing.  

What we really were concerned about was -- how to say -- managing the professionalism. Managing how writers were being treated by publishers, by governments, and establishing a sense of authority for the profession.

         -- Graeme Gibson, from Founding the Writers' Union of Canada: An Oral History 

 

History of writers: data from Britain

One thinks of Britain's literary machine as being like its pop music industry: punching way above its weight in international success and celebrity, and maintaining a rich pool of mid-list authors in every genre. But The Guardian reports on statistics about the state of British authorship that sounds like the most dire laments about CanLit.

There are “serious questions about the sustainability of the writing profession in the UK” and “substantial inequalities between those who are being adequately rewarded for their writing, and those who are not,” new research has found.

Amy Thomas, the lead researcher in the team from CREATe, said that “consistently, we find that earnings from writing are decreasing and creative labour becoming devalued.”

“The 2022 report raises serious questions about the sustainability of the writing profession in the UK,” she said. “Whilst many of our respondents talked about their love of creating, and passion for writing, relying on their altruism has been used to justify an increasingly unliveable wage.”

It's striking that the detail in the report, based on survey data from 60,000 writers, relied on funding and on data from Britain's licensing collective the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society.

ALCS is a genuinely author-centred collective, one that enjoys the support of the vast majority of British creators, including academic writers, and has the resources for this kind of advocacy. Sadly, that's not the situation in Canada, where our publisher-dominated collective could not and would not produce this kind of research.