
Staying with the Trouble
Two old friends on either side of the 49th parallel consider Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug, 2018), edited by Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker.
Brecken Hancock: This book speaks to us together, as we met while doing our PhDs at the University of New Brunswick and now are situated on opposite sides of the manufactured gulf between writers and academics. You finished your PhD and are now tenure track in one of the largest English departments in America, and I dropped out to take a job with the federal government and published a book of poems. You and I have talked about the issues that Refuse illuminates many times over the years, and it seems especially appropriate for us to “try to stay with the trouble and think about it, together” as the book’s introduction urges us to do.
Sarah Neville: Right. Though I did all my schooling in Canada, I’m coming to this book very consciously from what feels like an outsider position as a member of the Canadian diaspora that accounts for 9% of Canadian citizens. I could not find academic employment in Canada, so now I live and work among Americans, where nearly every day I pass as American but am marked by subtle political or linguistic differences. I am not a Canadianist, nor do I pretend to be (I’m a Shakespeare scholar and textual editor by training), but one of the only times I get to teach literature post-1900 is when I teach research methods to undergraduates, and there I often reach for Canadian literature because it is simultaneously foreign and familiar to my students. My investment in CanLit, in other words, is as someone who recognizes it as an uncanny commodity for people who have zero nationalistic response to it, people who, refreshingly, don’t know who Margaret Atwood is. UBCAccountable and its aftermath, as well as the other rupture points that set the stage for Refuse, occurred outside of my immediate vicinity, meaning that I didn’t engage with them the same way as I would have if I were still living in Fredericton or Toronto.
For me, CanLit is a now largely an instrument of instruction—I can hang all kinds of literary theory and methodologies upon it, appraising the field at my critical distance. But you’re still enmeshed in the community.
BH: Yes, I definitely come to this book from the perspective of a writer in Canada, with years of navigating its various publishing, granting, and awards systems. I have edited two books of poetry over the last couple of years for Book*hug, the press that published Refuse, and my first book of poems was published by Coach House Books. Both of these presses have made self-reflexive changes over the last year to resituate themselves within CanLit—and I feel they are both committed to representative and respectful processes. But, honestly, even working with great people hasn’t shielded me from the fallout of the CanLit dumpster fire. These past two years have been fucking painful. I found UBCAccountable and the fallout from it agonizing and I’ve been off Facebook and Twitter for about a year now to try to preserve some mental health. I’ve lost friends. I’ve also done a lot of looking in the mirror to try to identify where I’ve been complicit and how I can change. I’ve thought a lot about how best to listen—and I was relieved to see writers in Refuse grappling with listening. Fazeela Jiwa talks about “that wonderful and difficult process that Lillian Allen describes as ‘learning to listen to what you don’t know you don’t know,’” and Erika Thorkelson defines listening as “full body presence,” a softening and letting go of fear.
For all these reasons, I identified strongly with the emotional climate of this book. It seems to be reaching toward a way to discuss something we haven’t had language for before—it’s a resistance to institutionalized power but it’s also looking for ways to create new space, new authority, new power.
SN: So it sounds like we’re working at opposite sides of what the editors (Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker) identify as “CanLit as cultural industry” and “CanLit as a field of academic study.”
BH: Yes, exactly. Though both of us have identified with the other kind of work at one time or another, this is where we are at right now.
Maybe the book form itself functions as a monument—a cacophony of voices memorializing a rupture and a defined moment of resistance.
SN: So maybe your perspective can better help me to understand how to approach this book generically, because I’ve been struggling to determine the broader context in which it sees itself. It is primarily indexed by Library and Archives Canada as a work of “Canadian literature (English)—History and criticism.” It’s also indexed as “Race discrimination in literature,” “Imperialism in literature,” “Social classes in literature,” “Sex discrimination in literature,” and “Literature and society—Canada—history.” The book features short essays, poems, and dialogues, all works that front the bodies and identities of their writers in ways that evoke memoir. The editors explain in the introduction that the book is a kind of archive, a place to store writing that was done in response to recent events. Is this printed volume, published “through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council” meant to “hold space” to ensure the survival of these kind of occasion-based critiques like tweets, blog posts, and comments, media that are most easily lost within the slow churn of the CanLit Industrial Complex?
BH: Maybe the book form itself functions as a monument—a cacophony of voices memorializing a rupture and a defined moment of resistance. In this way I think it is a vehicle that holds space/a place, both for important ephemeral contributions to activism in the wake of UBCAccountable and for the moment of rupture itself. The ISBN creates an official record and legitimizes this conversation so that it cannot be ignored by those with a library card. Overwhelmingly, UBCAccountable signatories made sure to secure space for their perspectives in mainstream media outlets like the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Maclean’s, and the CBC. In contrast, as the editors of Refuse point out in their introduction, for those on the other side of the issue, “many of the most significant interventions took place on social media or were written in ephemeral online venues.” It’s not only that those online interventions fairly quickly disappear from the record, but that many Canadians outside academic and writing communities (or those of us off social media) might not have had access to them in the first place. So by publishing this collection as a book with a prominent small press like Book*hug, the editors ensure that more people have an opportunity to engage with the perspectives within. And I think there’s a better possibility that these voices will have longevity in how we remember and account for this moment in Canadian literature and culture. Books tend to have an authority beyond even what mainstream newspapers and magazines enjoy.
SN: True, but that also means that the burden of knowledge creation is considered higher for books than for a more ephemeral piece in a newspaper or magazine, and I’ll admit that is one of the places where I felt a loss in reading Refuse. The introduction states that the editors, all scholars, would “provide what scholars can do—context, background, and a long-range perspective about the problems in CanLit”—but I’m not sure that they always delivered on that promise as thoughtfully as they might have. As a historian, I think I was looking for a bit more transhistorical and transnational depth in the coverage situating what the editors call these “rupture events” like the UBCAccountable letter and the “Appropriation Prize” that could situate the CanLit dumpster fire within and alongside other dumpster fire events in 2016.
BH: Can you expand on that? I’m interested in where you see transhistorical and transnational context that can be teased out. As a transplanted Canadian living and teaching in the US, I think you are particularly well placed to see some of those linkages.
SN: Until I read Refuse, I hadn’t really thought about the date on the UBCAccountable letter: November 14, 2016. Less than a week earlier, Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States (this is one of the reasons I wasn’t really paying attention to Canadian news in November of 2016). Five months earlier, the United Kingdom voted to pull out of the European Union. In less than half a year, in other words, two of the major forces upon which the CanLit identity is based exploded in white panic and nationalism.
Until I read Refuse, I hadn’t really thought about the date on the UBCAccountable letter: November 14, 2016. Less than a week earlier, Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States …
BH: Yes, there were a lot of anxieties about the 2016 election, even in Canada. I work in an office and I embarrassingly found that I couldn’t keep tears out of my eyes sitting at my desk the day after.
SN: My American-inflected perspective means that I keep coming back to wondering how much of the controversies discussed in Refuse are uniquely Canadian issues so much as they are the result of global anxieties about borders/nationhood at a time of increased migration, when many folks are trying to concretize what has otherwise been permeable. In hindsight, Northrop Frye’s “garrison mentality” seems like it was primed to make a comeback—this official Canadian language of walls. Speaking of walls, Trump is mentioned only twice in Refuse, by my count, though he’s not quite spoken of in ways that articulate how the CanLit Industrial Complex is framed as inherently anti-American, thereby making Trump a particularly ripe orange fuel for this particular fire.
BH: I found it interesting to note after some quick research that the phrase “dumpster fire” itself is an Americanism, one first used in 2008 election coverage but which the Oxford dictionaries blog says peaked in 2015 shortly after Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency. Even some of the metaphors we’re using to describe the state of the CanLit canon are borrowed from our American neighbours.
SN: And this is the sort of realization that being outside of the country provides. My American partner teases me that Canadians are the worst because we’re just so damn smug all the time. And it’s true—or true for those white Canadians who generally think of themselves as superior liberal bastions of freedom of conscience, better able to navigate the needs of a sophisticated and multicultural world. I recognize myself as one of these people. That attitude leads to a willingness to perform one’s political affiliations and cultural status as if that in and of itself is meaningful. Is it any surprise, then, that at the same time that blue America despairingly signed onto the PantsuitNation Facebook group, a handful of Canadian writers whose names mean something to publishers received an invitation to sign onto an open letter detailing the way that a colleague’s personal freedoms were ravaged by an industrial machine? Because Galloway wasn’t just any colleague, but one affiliated with an institution that had been embroiled in months of bad press: in August 2015, University of British Columbia president Arvind Gupta, the first person of colour to hold that role, left his position after only thirteen months on the job after a series of private disagreements with the UBC Board of Governors. A few weeks later, the chair of the Board of Governors was credibly accused of pressuring a tenured faculty member to remove a blog post she wrote commenting on Gupta’s resignation—a clear case of threatened academic freedom.
So in other words, UBC in November of 2016 was especially poised for a display of smug white Canadian solidarity, a chance for the Canadian glitterati to be seemingly on the right side of history: after all, who doesn’t value due process? I’m in no way excusing the signatories of the UBCAccountable letter, but I think that bandwagon jumping is a part of the way that Canadian cultural industry replicates itself—and one of the easiest ways to unite people is against a common enemy.
BH: Academics are well situated to see CanLit from the outside and I think you’ve been right to call it out—that overdetermined sense of importance. But, in the larger cultural context, there’s also something niche and, in that regard, marginal, about academic text/speak and its capacity to distance the writer from the subject being written about. I think this book is trying to address that disconnect by having academics write memoir into it. This is a good way perhaps to bring academic thought to a more general readership. In Refuse, I enjoyed seeing academics construct the self and the context of the self to discuss the personal rupture of the UBCAccountable moment. In this way, the book does succeed in being outside the things it is talking about—by being a collection of mostly ephemeral text it resists presenting an official truth to instead launch a salvo of voices resisting differently, but toward the same purpose.
SN: Yes, there’s something refreshing about an approach that forces scholars to drop their poise of authority and just be, well, humans with individual experiences instead of esteemed, established, titled authorities. At the same time, though, I know there’s a context here, too: scholars feeling betrayed that the esteemed authorial objects of their studies were actually bad people is part of the history of authorship itself—even Petrarch wrote an open letter to Cicero taking him to task for being a hypocritical, petty jerk. As many of the pieces in Refuse point out, the insularity, back-scratching, racism, and sexism that UBCAccountable revealed was by no means new, having been previously called out via the Writing Across Race conference in 1994. Refuse caused me to think more about the way in which part of the CanLit problem isn’t celebrity per se, but the way that our separation of CanLit into producers and consumers lead us to treat writing as if it were some kind of sacred trust that enables us to put “real” writers on a pedestal, while everyone else who writes is some kind of mere labourer. Isn’t there some big prize with the word “trust” in the title?
What I love about this book is its implicit insistence that we can quit pretending we created our canon on the basis of merit.
BH: I have to admit I googled this because I couldn’t remember the full title—it’s the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction prize, presented for the best work of fiction in a given year. The prize is funded/awarded as a partnership between Rogers and the Writers Trust of Canada, which was founded in the ’70s by prominent Canadian writers (perhaps not surprisingly, that founding group included Margaret Atwood).
SN: That’s weird, right? Even the language of Canadian literary prizes seems to deliberately amplify a writer’s value so that being a writer is overdetermined.
BH: Well, Canadians love writers and books! We fetishize them, really. And in Canada this fetishism is complicated by the smallness of the scene—we often end up meeting, and having professional and personal relationships with, the most famous writers that seemed out of reach when we were coming up. And so there’s another element of trust—the kind that’s built in relationships. When I read your reference to sacred trust, above, I first parsed “trust” to mean this kind—where you believe in someone’s reliability. The fallout of UBCAccountable—one of the most painful aspects for many—has been the disappointment in our heroes and the betrayal some of us have felt. One thing that was powerful for me throughout Refuse was the number of writers confronting their own complicity in upholding destructive power structures. I especially related to Lorraine York’s “How Do We Get Out of Here?: An Atwood Scholar, Signing Off” and her interrogation of “feelings of betrayal by a figure in our intellectual lives who we may have found inspiring.” In my own life, this has felt like a gestalt shift.
We came up in institutions where sexual relationships between prof/student and mentor/mentee were so normalized that I sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with me (or my work) if a professor hit on my friends but showed no interest in me. I love how Sonnet L’Abbé addresses this dynamic, and calls it out in her poems. She writes, “Men like you, all over the world, understand that I must strive to know my shames and praises from your tongues” and “He wonders how to make me love him—love, the most effective mollifier.” I, unfortunately, have been mollified by love, many times, and have also struggled to disaggregate my own opinions about my work from my mentors’, or, frankly, my exes’. That’s the thing—in such a small community, adoration isn’t just pointed toward texts we love or famous writers we admire, it’s also often wrapped up in our feelings for our real-life mentors, editors, romantic partners. Does any of this make sense to you in terms of your past experience in the academy or your present-day position/re-positioning as a feminist within a patriarchal and often abusive institution?
SN: Oh, absolutely. I’ve had my share of abusive mentors within the academy, which, like creative writing, is a field that doesn’t quite separate between the boundaries of work and private life. America has many of its own UBCAccountable cases, most famously that of New York University’s Avital Ronnell, who has just returned from a forced year of unpaid leave after a finding that she credibly harassed and took advantage of her power over one of her graduate students. The Joseph Boyden/Margaret Atwood role in the Ronnell affair was played by Judith Butler, who abused her title of president-elect of the Modern Language Association (the world's largest organization for scholars of language and literature) to defend her friend in an open-letter to which she urged others to sign; and to Butler’s surprise, she received considerable pushback as a result. What this suggests to me, though, is that it is systems predicated on meritocracy, rather than CanLit, that is the raging dumpster fire, and that traditional forms of mentorship are implicated in the process.
BH: I think you’re onto something here. Can you expand on what you mean?
SN: Our systems of mentorship leave us both initially vulnerable to abuse and, if we survive, eventually positioned to abuse others. But even if we don’t abuse others, the way that mentorship can too easily turn into glad-handing or wheel-greasing implicates it in the larger racist, ableist, heteronormative, biased gatekeeping paradigms that lead to the same kinds of stories being told over and over. Lorraine York’s essay in the volume touches on the way that Margaret Atwood became Margaret Atwood(tm) as a result of her ascendant star post-Surfacing and Survival in 1972, and the volume’s intro reminds us that the reason we got a character like Atwood in the first place was that she was stepping into space that had been cleared for young, fresh-faced (white) Canadian authors by tastemaker Northrop Frye and by the agenda of the Massey Commission Report. I’ve also been thinking about the way that some of the best pieces in this volume are authored by younger folk who’ve never known a time before Margaret Atwood was etched onto the shelves like Indigo permafrost. But she, too, came with a context, and through that context she can be explained and thereby diminished. I teach my American students that we created the idea of Shakespeare “the Bard” to serve a very specific hegemonic purpose—and that Canadians did the same with our narrow “this is what counts” canon of CanLit as part of the nation’s centennial celebrations. What I love about this book is its implicit insistence that we can quit pretending we created our canon on the basis of merit.
… I think we have to start small—start with the people we know and act with integrity and strive to earn the trust of those coming up after us.
BH: I know canon exists and that national prescriptions about identity exist, and of course, practically speaking, my writing is bound within regional and national publishing, granting, and awards systems that make it explicit that I’m Ontarian and Canadian—but I find it’s impossible to mulch the institution of “CanLit” into my conscious conception of myself or translate it into everyday life as a writer. Recently, as part of VerseFest’s Capital Poetry Exchange, I read in Washington D.C. at the Library of Congress with Aisha Sasha John and Erín Moure. We kept getting asked to situate ourselves within CanLit—to claim a place within national identity. Not one of us was comfortable doing this, although all three of us have experienced success with both publishers and awards. (OK, I realize it was called the Capital Poetry Exchange.) But honestly, this focus on borders and the nation state caught me off guard. It’s not that I don’t identify with a community—I have real-life friendships and best-friendships with people in Ottawa (where I live—the capital!), in Ontario, and across the rest of Canada. But even so it doesn’t feel like a national identity. Living and being a writer in Canada, for me, means existing within an idiosyncratic, chaotic, overlapping map of communities/identities/canons/texts. And coming back to the idea of relationships and trust again, if we’re going to resist hegemonic modes of thinking and abusive power structures in CanLit, I think we have to start small—start with the people we know and act with integrity and strive to earn the trust of those coming up after us. Phoebe Wang’s essay was so excellent in its care for those less experienced writers who are emerging and who need us.
SN: I liked a lot how pedagogy is one of the implicit themes of this book: Tanis MacDonald has “resting teach face”; Dorothy Ellen Palmer admits that in trying to teach the signatories of the pain caused by their actions she “wrote some twenty-thousand words”; Marie Carrière defends teaching her mostly white settler students to acknowledge territory. I absolutely agree that Phoebe Wang's piece on “mentoring as a means of survival” was an important standout. Wang’s articulation of the way that “mentoring forges a lineage outside of kinship ties” explains the importance of this kind of care work while also showing how for mentors this labour is invisible, fraught, and sometimes painful. And to connect back with what I said above, mentoring is dangerous because it can also serve as industrial gatekeeping or opportunities for abuse.
BH: Yes, I just want to agree with everything you’ve said here and connect this with another aspect of teaching/mentoring. What about the practicalities of presenting texts in the classroom? Given its focus on the Canadian landscape, does this book have any impact on your own pedagogy or shift the way you teach texts to your American students?
SN: Absolutely. It has given me a fresh approach to how I choose what books I teach by contemporary writers. In our small way, each producer of a university syllabus is a tastemaker, someone who can boost the sales of a given title by a few dozen books every year, or even every term. These sort of numbers are meaningless to the author of Cat’s Eye—but meaningful for a book published by Nightwood, Palimpsest, or Goose Lane. And students benefit too: even though my class didn’t run last term because I didn’t gain the requisite number of students, at least one Latinx student on our predominantly white campus found a copy of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is A World that I’d ordered into the bookstore. She loved it, came and found me, wondered what she could read next. This is the sort of real-world change that academics can make that helps to encourage “more books published by more people on the peripheries of and outside of circles of power,” as Kristen Darch says.
BH: What you’re saying reminds me of how much I loved the poem “refuse: a trans girl writer’s story” by Kai Cheng Thom. This poem fiercely talks back even to the project that contains it:
to be honest i did it for the $75 that Toronto rent ain’t cheap and job security for trans girls is shaky in the best of times.
Thom brilliantly and fearlessly calls out the ways “skinny Chinese fags” don’t factor in “CanLit”—a “settler colonial project.” Or how it’s impossible to care about national literary canon when police leave a trans girl’s body to rot in a Toronto ravine. Living within threats of violence—both immediate and institutionalized—and poverty means that Thom’s “writing grew / like dandelions in a trash heap.” She does so much with the image of refuse in this poem (“did you know / that an internet slang word / for trans girl is ‘trash girl’?”, or “I want to celebrate / that which has been thrown away”), that it helped me to see the title of the entire collection in a new way. We’ve talked about how the book fronts a divide between academics and writers, but many of the pieces are written by insiders to the university system—whether through literary study or creative writing programs. Thom’s poem stands out and requires an attentive listening for those of us who’ve been privileged enough to have access to universities in the first place:
they tell me that the university creative writing departments in Canada are rife with male professors who abuse their power to sexually harass and assault innocent young women …………. … i’ll take your word for it though I must admit that i have never been to a university creative writing department i have never been that kind of innocent young women places like that were never made for bodies like mine
This poem points outside the confines of Refuse towards things that even this project doesn’t contain or include. The editors acknowledge the limitations of their curation in their introduction:
Because we are three white cis women working within universities at different stages of our careers, we inevitably reproduce in this volume the power dynamics that have played out across CanLit, where white women in positions of power select which voices will be heard and which will not…. [O]ur very act of editing is a part of the larger systemic issues we are working to address.
And you and I inevitably do that here too, as two white cis women talking to each other about this book. It’s important to consider when to speak up toward effecting change and when our voices only create more white noise. What I do know is that we need to listen to, signal boost, and financially support more voices like Thom’s.
Whom we chose to quote, whom we chose to include, is never a neutral decision.
SN: Agreed; as a scholar who specializes in editorial theory I often write about how the foundational editorial function of saying “this, but not that” is necessarily a political and social activity, predicated on certain norms and expectations. (I am thinking now of how 19th-century editors of Julius Caesar would change the gender of some of Shakespeare’s pronouns, arguing that no one could ever think of Rome’s Tiber river as female—and some 20th-century editors simply follow suit on the grounds of “tradition”.) Whom we chose to quote, whom we chose to include, is never a neutral decision.
I think I scrawled “YES!” in the margins of Thom’s poem about four times. Ingrid Paulson’s book design itself seems built for marginalia, that place where readers become writers. Paulson’s design throughout the volume is sort of amazing because it is so beautifully emblematic of the ambivalent response I’ve had with Refuse as I’ve returned to it again and again. This design of shredded pages that seem to be, but alas, are not readable, giving a fleeting initial impression of comprehensibility that really only allows for the comprehension of fragments, individual letters, snippets, a possibility of a word that gives a mistaken impression of meaning. I started by wanting the comfort of knowing, a better sense how to articulate my national literature beyond just refusal, beyond just being a dumpster fire, because, as Keith Maillard says, “writers make up the reality in which we live.” I’ve since reconciled myself to thinking that perhaps this is just the point, that we gain more by asking about the literature and the writers that we do not see, those whom we don't know that we are missing.