Coach House Press, 1965-96 OPEN LETTER
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Coach House Press, 1965-96 OPEN LETTER Ninth Series, No. 8, Spring 1997 The publication of Open Letter is assisted by grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council. Contents Editorial 5 Crossing the Border: A Coach House Memoir. DAVID ROSENBERG 9 Some Notes about a Long Relationship with the Coach House. DOUGLAS BARBOUR 16 The Old Coach House Days. DENNIS REID 23 The Coach House Press: The First Decade. An Emotional Memoir. VICTOR COLEMAN 26 Readers’ Regrets. JULIE BEDDOES 36 The Beginnings of an End to Coach House Press. FRANK DAVEY 40 Coach House Poetry. STAN DRAGLAND 78 Amusements. KARL SIEGLER 92 NICHOLODEON: epitaph.. DARREN WERSCHLER-HENRY 99 Contributors 115 6 Open Letter 9.8 appears to reflect what Karl Siegler elsewhere in this issue describes as a Editorial shift from “culture based” to “business based” funding. As if to cor- roborate this, the Canada Council letter informing us of the two grants noted that the jury “considered your audience too small and limited for the mandate of the Council’s program” (although the program is advertised as open to all periodicals of more than 500 circulation). Clearly there is a preference being signalled here, again using Siegler’s terms, for “sales-driven” periodicals over “editorially-driven” ones. Grateful as we are to receive the marketing grant, which we plan to use to help establish Readers may have noticed some slight changes in the format, paper an Open Letter web site that will offer summaries of the articles in current quality, and editorial content of recent issues of Open Letter. All of these issues, we remain sceptical about the appropriateness of sales-based ensue in some way from the reductions in government funding to the arts funding to an arts council. Moreover, any marketing campaign which in Canada that began with the 1995 federal budget and from the federal Open Letter has attempted in the past twenty years—through advertise- shift throughout the 1980s and 90s away from regarding an operation like ments and direct mail—has resulted in subscriptions that have cost the Open Letter as culture and toward regarding it as cultural industry. journal or the arts council that funded the campaign in excess of $100 The current subsidy difficulties for Open Letter concern mostly its each. There is a point of shrinking returns in the circulation growth of any support by The Canada Council, the arms-length federal arts agency that arts periodical, a point at which efficiency requires one not to try to grow, has provided through its Aid to Periodicals program extremely helpful and to spend discretionary money not on marketing but on making the financial assistance since 1971. The federal government’s virtual freezing periodical more attractive to current readers. of the Canada Council’s overall funding in recent years, combined with In an attempt to remain within whatever the Canada Council conceives the steady increase in periodicals seeking assistance, has caused the its granting mandate to be, Open Letter has been reducing the number of Council both to reduce the level of funding the program provides and to scholarly articles that it accepts and giving preference to those written by attempt to reduce the number of periodicals that qualify for assistance. artists and by scholars who are also practising artists. This change Open Letter has been affected by both of these changes. undoubtedly constrains a journal that has attempted over years to be, as The editors have been informed that the Council considers Open Letter it has often described itself in its funding applications, “a space in which a “scholarly journal” that falls outside its mandate to assist arts activities, writers, visual artists, and literary scholars could articulate and discuss and that assistance is unlikely to be granted for much longer. As well, with one another theories of art production, criticism, and the cultural role Open Letter’s operating grant has been gradually reduced from a high of of literature.” However, it also reflects the ways in which institutional $8700 in 1993 to $3450 in 1996. This reduction has been largely a policy inevitably shapes what is possible to write or publish, or even what consequence of a new granting formula which takes into account only one can conceive of writing or publishing. This is not to complain that production expenses and payments to contributors, and ignores distribu- Canada Council policy changes constitute an interference in Open Letter’s tion and overhead costs. For Open Letter this formula rewards the journal editorial policies (although they effectively do)—no Canadian journal has for keeping high the most flexible parts of its expenditures—payments to an automatic entitlement to a Council grant, and any journal could choose contributors and production costs— and punishes it for not being able to not to publish rather than become the kind of periodical the Council reduce fixed or rising costs like postage or envelopes. The result is a preferred to support. However, individual scholars who might have situation in which any attempt to reduce costs is likely to lead to a further written a particular article which they knew Open Letter might wish to grant reduction. publish—whether on Hiromi Goto, the politics of canonicity, Karen Mac To add irony to injury, the Canada Council awarded Open Letter a Cormack, or Victor Coleman—may well not write that article now that special “marketing grant” in 1996 that was nearly double the operating they know that Open Letter could be jeopardizing its own future by grant—$5,000. This grant, and its size relative to the operating grant, Editorial 7 8 Open Letter 9.8 publishing it. press’s editors and managers mostly because of the sales and grant And Canada Council funding of Open Letter may cease in any case, revenue it might generate. The situation is not quite this bleak at the leaving it reliant entirely on the Ontario Arts Council for assistance. Here moment for Open Letter. The option is still open to remain small, to cut is evidence of another institutional change in Canada—the steady back to cheaper formats in order to keep publishing the commentary the devolution of funding power from the national to the provincial level. editors wish to publish, and to forego the larger grants that the Canada From 1971 to 73 the Canada Council was the only source of assistance to Council and its juries are explicitly linking to a larger readership and a Open Letter. Beginning with a small grant in 1974, Ontario Arts Council more narrowly ‘arts’ content. If there are lessons to be gained from this assistance grew from less than 40% of the Canada Council grant to 193% issue of Open Letter, one is certainly that even in as arts-supportive a of it in 1996. context as Canada in the 1970-90 period, there are prices attached to state Open Letter is currently examining all possible ways of continuing to patronage. The price for Coach House turned out to be something other publish in this new situation. Even the reduced Canada Council grant does than the obvious. It was not the direct interference of legislators who from not allow the journal to be produced, printed, and sold in the ways in time to time may attack individual projects, or even the indirectly which it has been until now—if it were, it would have an annual deficit damaging actions of legislators who, from time to time, irrationally reduce nearly equal to the production cost of a single issue. Among the possibili- cultural funding in parallel with more considered reductions to funding in ties we are investigating are the adopting of a different printing process, other areas of government. It was the over-extension of debt that the introduction of institutional subscription rates, the doubling of the governments encouraged by offering abruptly cancellable loan guarantee prices of back issues to effectively increase the value of a subscription, programs and extra marketing grants as rewards for temporarily inflated and the launching of an Open Letter limited edition chapbook series to sales. It was the diversion of attention from editorial concerns to subsidize the journal. In the event of an ending of Canada Council marketing concerns, and the tempting of publishers to abandon their core assistance, we may have to return to photocopying or mimeograph. But readerships and seek titles more marketable both nationally and interna- we do plan to continue. tionally. Grantee beware. These developments at Open Letter connect somewhat ironically with FD the concerns of the present issue: the going-out-of-business in late 1996 of Coach House Press, ostensibly in the face of financial shortfalls caused both by government assistance policies in the previous decade (for an analysis of these see Karl Siegler’s article “Amusements”) and by 1995 cuts to federal grants and the Province of Ontario’s loan guarantee program. In both cases relatively stable and manageable publishing operations are jeopardized by pressure to expand beyond the scale of the available Canadian readership. The publishers are subtly advised to change what they publish in order to increase its market appeal, or to internationalize what they publish in order to increase sales abroad. While granting agencies like the Canada Council may dream that one-time “marketing” grants can gradually make publishers less reliant on annual operating grants, publishers are encouraged to expand beyond their expertise and beyond their imagined audiences. When Coach House Press began facing these pressures in 1987, bpNichol declared that for him it would be preferable that the press go out of business rather than begin publishing writing that was interesting to the 10 Open Letter 9.8 Syracuse University, I was rummaging in the funky Village Bookshop on Crossing the Border: Gerrard Street, where I found the first two issues of IS.