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aislinn hunter, Alice Major, book tours., canadian publishing scene, canadian women poetry poets, Carolyn Smart, Catalysts, DIonne Brand, Dorothy Livesay, Evelyn Lau, future of the book, personal essays memoirs, Shawna Lemay, Susan McMaster, Susan Musgrave, Theresa Kishkan., university reading lists, wolsak & wynn
While there’s a plethora of books published by Canadian women every year, the genre of essay/memoir is still quite low on the list. Canadian women poets publish even fewer such texts, with a couple of examples being Dorothy Livesay’s three memoirs, including Journey with my Selves (1991), Carolyn Smart’s memoir, At the End of the Day from 1993, Susan McMaster’s The Gargoyle’s Left Ear (2007), Shawna Lemay’s meditations on art and writing called Calm Things (2009), Evelyn Lau’s Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989) and Inside Out (01), Aislinn Hunter’s more theoretically-based A Peepshow with Views of the Interior (2009), Dionne Brand’s political essays known as Bread out of Stone (1998), You’re in Canada Now (2006), personal essays by Susan Musgrave, and this year’s Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science by Alice Major, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees by Theresa Kishkan, and my own Catalysts: Confrontations with the Muse. While at least one memoir, Lau’s Runaway, proved to be popular due in part to Lau’s youth (16 at the time) and to its occasionally sensationalized content, and others like Major’s and Kishkan’s are winning awards, perhaps because their personal aspects are exquisitely woven into more abstract concerns, most of these books appear and vanish with scarcely a stir, and especially those texts that feature women poets theorizing lyrically about their artistic process.
There simply aren’t many presses publishing such books for starters, and those who do often have lower budgets for promotion and distribution. Once published though, one would think that texts like these would get picked up regularly by university courses and serve as sources of mentorship for younger or newer writers, but this doesn’t occur as commonly as it needs to. Partially this is because there are still few courses in Creative Non-Fiction or the Personal Essay in universities; professors are also inclined to place their own books or those of their associates on reading lists instead. Or is the limited number of books of essays and memoirs published by Canadian women poets indicative of a deeper resistance to the voices of women from the literary margins sharing their poetics, practices, personal lives?
Avid for such books myself, even after writing and publishing for many years, I have to wonder at how underwhelming the whole experience of producing a volume of essays/memoirs has been thus far. It took over 12 years to compose and compile these pieces. I have toured the book to a range of venues across Canada. And nowhere, though people have attended and commented positively after the event, have I felt anything resembling a collective desire to purchase the book, to own it and thus to read the work at depth. Audiences may be waiting until it comes out in libraries; or their lack of interest in buying may just be part of this general trend towards book-lessness, but it’s curious to me. I feel anomalous, a bit stunned. My collections of poetry have sold better on past tours, been bought more eagerly. What is this unease or ambivalence or aloofness?
I do feel matters changing irrevocably in the Canadian literary scene and wonder how this will alter the number of books produced, the length of tours, the shift to e-readers like Kindle, grants, royalties, a sense of writerly community and the urge for a reciprocal energy that every artist yearnstowards, behind every creation the ache to communicate in some, undeniable, and essential way.
Kim Goldberg said:
This is a very interesting observation, Catherine, about the seeming disinterest in memoir written by women, and especially memoir written by women poets. Perhaps most people/readers haven’t really formed a relationship (or defined their relationship) with the memoir genre, as they have with poetry. So people are uncertain of what to “do” with memoir in their own aesthetic landscape, and so hesitate to buy it…?
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seingraham said:
This seems odd in the extreme to me – as hard a sale as poetry can be, it would seem if readers have developed an affinity for one’s work, the memoir would be a natural follow … Perhaps some members that make up segments of a poet’s readership base feel memoir writing belongs in the purview of – how to put this delicately – more seasoned? Longer lived? (Thi
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crowgirl11 said:
It does strike me as somewhat odd. Though I think all my books are so different there are few readers who actually have an affinity for “my work” per se and more for just individual collections. I mean I have been writing a long time and publishing trade books since 1998, so i think I’m relatively “seasoned”. Many of these pieces are travelogues or reviews or criticism rather than simply memoir. No not sure how to account for it really other than, as Kim suggests, people are more uneasy with this genre and also, are definitely buying fewer books across the board.
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seingraham said:
Agh – the comment went before I wished it gone and right in the middle of a rather rude segment – I was about to say, the idea of someone releasing a memoir being to young to do so hadn’t occurred to me but when I mentioned it to a friend, another poet, that was their thought – “what could she possibly have to write about?” I just about bit my tongue off trying not to tell her the little I know … but that seemed incredibly lame to me. In any case, for you information, should you want to file it away. Or not. All in all – a sad state of affairs.
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seingraham said:
of course it should read “too young” and “for your information” – the editor in me is mad at the typist …
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crowgirl11 said:
well I think your friend is wrong on that count! I have far too much to write about regarding my life in relation to both personal and literary experiences. Jam-packed it all in there! I mean Evelyn Lau’s memoir as i mention above was published when she was 16 and I am way beyond that age! 🙂
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seingraham said:
As I say Catherine I think my friend’s reasoning is lame in the extreme and ended up telling her to buy the book, read it and then we’ll talk … she knows I’ll be incommunicado for a couple of months so she’s saying she will … we’ll see. Glad to see the positive reviews continue to roll in – well-deserved.
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