Alternative Canlit

It’s sad that people only define Canadian literature by a few names:  Margaret Atwood, the Queen bee; maybe Alice Munro, the queen bee of short stories; and, if we are really lucky, possibly Douglas Coupland.  Either that or people only see it as the Canadian books they were scarred with in high school, a.k.a. Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf and Timothy Findley’s The Wars – really? Those were the best books our schools could come up with?

From the beginning, Canadians are taught that the great masters of literature are American, British or Russian; in school, we read the classics: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and a couple Canadian novels are thrown in their for the necessary “Canadian content.”  But, at least when I was in school, these Canadian novels bordered on torturous – I just don’t care if some guy chooses to live in the Arctic among wolves, I can’t relate to that when I live in Toronto, a place where you do not have to pee around your property to declare it yours – and the Canadian novels were few and far between, leaving many to believe that Canlit “sucks” as a current high school student and a colleague of mine from the bookstore said.  She is badly misinformed, through no fault of her own but of our school system.

We have been infiltrated by American publishers who have the financial means to do so because they are a much older and more established industry than Canada’s own stuggling publishing industry.  Both America and Britain, being far older countries, had the means to cultivate their cultural industries by closing their borders to other countries, in order to give their cultural industries a chance to thrive with no competition from the outside world, and as a result they built a thriving cultural empire thick with tradition and reputable artists.  Canada – being less than 200 years old, a former British colony and a product of its love/hate relationship with the states – has never had that chance.  Whenever we have, or had, the audacity to mention “closing the border,” it is thrown back into our faces as a form of violating freedom of choice, violating the very premise of capitalism, and being a very nationalistic idea.  So many Canadian books/writers, however fantastic, die a quiet little death because they can’t afford to compete, unless they are Margaret Atwood or, more recently, Yann Martel.  But they are out there still, they just only reach a small audience, a.k.a. me.

As I delve deeper into the Canadian publishing industry I’ve discovered an entire underground Canadian literary scene – it doesn’t mean to be underground, it’s just hardly given the chance to come up for air – and it is a wonderful world; A world that actually takes Canadian events, Canadian voices, historical moments/figures and turns them into fictional marvels.  So I present an alternative to the traditional Canlit – my tiny rebellion against our school boards – novels that can relate to a younger generation and hopefully inspire them to respect and admire their own literature:

Zoe Whittall doesn’t write of a future distopian world, but of this world.  In Bottle Rocket Hearts she explores the separatist act and its impact.  In Holding Still for as Long as Possible, she talks about the twenty-somethings of today, who grew up in a world with a war on terror, SARS, anti-anxiety meds, text messaging and social networking which blurs public and private lives.  I find she is a voice for my generation, for people who may not be able to relate to Atwood as easily anymore.  She emulates the strength Atwood brings to her novel but in a more relatable way.  You can see yourself in Whittall’s novels, where you fit in or where you were when these events happened.  I really enjoy that element of the novel; she’s a voice for a younger generation of Canadians.

Douglas Coupland to Darren Greer.  Greer doesn’t quite have the pop cultural appeal that Coupland has but still brings that unique voice.  Still Life with June has one of my favourite characters to read, ever.  He was hilarious, I laughed out loud, but he dealt with heavy issues, including drug abuse, suicide and mental health.  He was able to examine and tackle difficult and serious topics with humour, similar to Coupland and some of his novels.

There are alternative Canadian short story writers to Alice Munro.  I recently picked this book up and am so excited to read it because it sounds hilarious.  Edited by Zsuzsi Gartner, she compiled twenty-three stories by different Canadian writers – including Jessica Grant, Douglas Coupland, Pasha Malla and Yann Martel - that delve into the future and parallel universes answering questions such as, “What if someone decoded the DNA of Jesus Christ? What if Prince were the last man on Earth? … What if private golf clubs were the new nation-states? And what if your BlackBerry could be programmed to predict the future?”  How could I resist?

People tend to only see Canlit as serious and very literary, which it is, but it is also ironic, filled with dark humour and poignant stories.  I’m not saying that I’m not a fan of Atwood, Coupland and Munro, because I am, I just think its sad that they were my only source of Canlit while growing up.  I didn’t really know of other Canadian authors until I reached university and I started looking, and until now when I started working in the industry.  It took me about twenty years!  I grew up listening to and reading other people’s cultures.  It’s just upsetting and disappointing that there are so many Canadian writers whose careers fizzle and die because Dan Brown, Nora Roberts, Charles Dickens filled our bookstores, our schools and our consumer’s shelves first.  I just hope that one day it will take people less time to truly appreciate their country’s voices.

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