WRITE THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS’ UNION OF VOLUME 40 NUMBER 2 CANADA FALL 2012 BACK TO SCHOOL Creating the Critic: Lemon Hound’s Sina Queyras on Critical Space for Women Writers 16 How to Succeed at a School Visit 19 An Educational Experiment Pays off for Poetry and Publishing 24 twenty four hours. six lives. Finalist for the 36th annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award! Autobiography of Childhood a novel by Sina Queyras Five siblings, all haunted by the death of a brother in their youth. One winter day, when another of them will die. ‘Autobiography of Childhood is a sharp, post-millennial family novel with a purpose, a kinetic, shared trauma that investigates the parts and the whole ... The novel is a striking comment on tragedy and its place in the human jigsaw puzzle.’ – Globe and Mail Available in print and ebook editions. Coach House Books | chbooks.com WRITE Support the new Write! Take advantage of amazing advertising opportunities! Members: Get 25% off all ads. Reach 2000+ proven readers. Ask us about our small press discounts. For more information, or to book an ad today, email [email protected]. write From the Chair By Merilyn Simonds I write this from my little study overlooking a stubble cornfield that the raccoons raid each night, rolling cobs gleefully in the buttery dew of our lawn. They’ve adapted to their landscape, letting the farmer harvest for them, becoming gleaners rather than fishers in the now-sluggish The old model used to be growth, growth, growth. Now the stream. I’m not sure I can find a metaphor buzzword in the cultural industry is change: be adaptable, stay flexible. Not a polar bear; a raccoon. in this, except that our writers’ landscape is Still, the fact remains: the landscape has been razed. Five years changing too, at a speed faster than the whirr of ago, for instance, there were 21 specialists collecting cultural statistics for Statistics Canada. Now there are none. Zero. Cultural a supersonic combine. statistics are simply not being gathered. We won’t know how In mid-September, Kelly Duffin and I travelled to Ottawa to many people work in the arts, what our economic contribution is, meet with officials at the Department of Heritage, the Canada or how many Canadians value culture. Council, Public Lending Rights, and Library and Archives Canada. Similarly, the budget of the Canadian Conference of the Arts has The issues we discussed were all over the map, but underlying been cut to the point that its continued existence is in doubt. The every conversation were questions prompted by the new world we CCA did an annual analysis of the federal budget from a cultural find ourselves in: What is a book? What does it mean to publish? standpoint, providing valuable insights into government policy. This summer, TWUC’s intern Laura Thorne produced a study Not only will it be harder to prove our worth as creators, it will be on how the words “book” and “published” are currently being harder to understand the damage that is being done to us. used in the Canadian literary community. She canvassed festivals, In the end, though, policy changes are more worrying than publishers, grantors, prize-givers, writers, and more. This is not tight purse strings. Purse strings can be loosened, but if programs just an exercise in semantics. How we define ourselves as a Union and services are destroyed, if an organization such as Library and rests on our understanding of “book” and “publish.” Eric Enno Archives Canada changes its philosophy regarding what parts of Tamm, an advocate re-elected to National Council in June, is our literary culture are considered worth preserving, if the passage carrying on an active discussion to forge new membership criteria of a new copyright modernization act successfully erodes the ideal that acknowledges the new ways that writers are “publishing” of collective licensing and compensation for use of creative work, “books.” then the future will look much different — and much bleaker At the same time, Canada Council is re-examining its grants — than the past. to individual artists to take into account new realities. They’ve On the positive side, the cultural workers we met within the added an “Exploratory Writing” category and are looking at ways Department of Heritage, Canada Council, and Public Lending of acknowledging that writers now need support not only to Right were uniformly impressive in their dedication to literature create but also to accomplish the myriad professional tasks that and their sensitivity to writers’ issues. The Canada Council is publishers once did for us. working on a National Forum, possibly for 2013, that will bring At the Public Lending Rights Commission, the message was the together all those with a stake in the Canadian literary landscape: same: review and reassess to see if, in light of the digital universe, educators, librarians, funders, publishers, writers, readers. The the way things were set up 26 years ago remains the best way to prospect of all of us converging in one spot and sharing our do things. concerns offers some hope that together we might find ways to The story was repeated again at Library and Archives Canada, survive an environment that is increasingly harsh for professional where the technological difficulties and sheer deluge of archival creators. material triggered by the digital information age has caused a As you know from TWUC bulletins and my monthly Letters, we wholesale reassessment of their mandate as well as a byzantine are continuing to object strongly to changes at LAC and to assaults round of restructurings. on our right to compensation for use of copyright material. This Review. Reassess. It is the zeitgeist of the century. is what I will be talking about with members across the country At TWUC, too, we are reviewing our organizational structure during my 40th anniversary “Gathering of the Tribe” Chair’s tour. K to make ourselves more flexible, more responsive to events, more Dates and cities are listed on the website. More are yet to come. UN engaged with all our members. The goal is to become agile, even Watch your inbox for an invitation when I come to your region, IS F at the grand old age of 40, so that we can respond adroitly to the and please join me for an evening. Bring your writer friends. We’ll ARL : M coming changes, jump out of the way of that oncoming combine, talk about what’s concerning us and what we can do together to O T while hanging onto our corncobs, our babies, all that we love and effect change, and maybe, like that horde of raccoons romping O PH believe in. through the darkness, share a few cobs of corn. FALL 2012 national council Nominating Chair Susan Crean and Merilyn Simonds Myrna Kostach First Vice-Chair Race Issues Dorris Heffron Wali Alam Shaheen Contents fall 2012 Second Vice-Chair Rights and Freedoms Genni Gunn Ron Brown 3 Chair’s Report Treasurer Status of Women Writers Silver Donald Cameron Betty Jane Wylie 5 Executive Directions BC/Yukon Representative membership committee 6 News Michael Elcock Jillian Dagg (Chair) Alberta/NWT/Nunavut Norma Charles Writer’S Blot Representative Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer 8 Writers Prompt Glenn Dixon John Parr Ann Walsh Manitoba/Saskatchewan 9 Industry Q+A Representative twuc national office Anita Daher Dispatches Executive Director Ontario Representative Kelly Duffin, ext. 221 10 A Strange Truth: The Author Reviews Her Own Book Steve Pitt [email protected] BY M.A.C. FarranT Quebec Representative Associate Director Joyce Laird Scharf Siobhan O’Connor, ext. 222 11 Of Babies and Balance Sheets Atlantic Representative [email protected] BY EMILY SCHulTZ Lee D. Thompson Office Administrator 12 From Jackboots to Pandas: the High Cost of Self-Promotion Advocates Valerie Laws, ext. 224 [email protected] BY marIA meINDL Douglas Arthur Brown Eric Enno Tamm Membership and Fund Katherine Gordon Development Coordinator Features Nancy MacLeod, ext. 226 committee chairs [email protected] 14 A Porous Boundary: Learning to Write in Print and Radio Contracts BY ElaIne Kalman NaveS Maggie Siggins Projects Coordinator Kristen Gentleman, ext. 223 Curriculum and Libraries 16 Creating the Critic: Lemon Hound’s Sina Queyras on [email protected] Ted Barris Blogging, Reviewing, and Creating Critical Space for Women Pacific Coordinator Electronic Rights/Copyright Raquel Alvaro Bill Freeman Special Section: back to school [email protected] International Affairs Webmaster 19 Writers In the Schools: How to Make a Difference Gale Zoë Garnett Elaine Wong BY paTRICIA WESTerHof Grievance [email protected] 22 Finding Her School: A Writer’s Quest for Healing Leads Her Barbara Killinger Back to the Streets She Grew Up On Editor Hal Niedzviecki [email protected] BY emILY poHL-WearY Deadline for Winter issue November 20, 2012 Editorial Liasons Anita Daher, Wayne Grady, Kelly Ann Reiss 24 In Windsor, an Educational Experiment Pays Off for Copy Editor Alison Lang Poetry and Publishing BY SonIA SulaIman Write Magazine Advertising Tara Gordon Flint [email protected] Design soapboxdesign.com Fiction Cover Illustration Matthew Daley Views expressed in Write do not necessarily reflect those of The Writers’ Union 26 Remember As You Go of Canada. Services advertised are not necessarily endorsed by the Union. All BY Paulo DA coSTA submissions are welcome. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year PoetrY invested $154 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout Canada. 27 Symbolism BY CRYSTal HurDle We acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,681 individual artists in 216 business & reports communities across Ontario for a total of $52.8 million.