“The Inability to Say ‘Zed’”: An Introduction to Bridging the Literary Border: Winter 2014 Svpplement

A border is never done. It can move, it is arbitrary, but it has definite consequences. I’ve been asked why I have curated a supplement on the US-Canadian border. I could go on and on. I have personally crossed that literary and cultural border, such that it is. I have crossed the bureaucratic border, and known the slim madness of being passed between stable neighbors. Or is it neighbours? Microsoft Word says the first is spelled correctly; my Text Edit disagrees.

A minor limbo, I know. Nothing like crossing a real border, like fleeing in fear for your life or seeking a future unattainable back home. I could try to frame the clear distinctions between the US and Canada—political atmospheres, historical divergences, literary lineages—but I would be forced, almost every time, to ask: is that a real divergence or a minor deviation from a larger North American, or Western, norm? So like Dennis Lee in “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space” [From Body Music, House of Anansi, 1998], I find myself reaching not for concrete differences between the countries, but for a sense of the interplay between them, or of the subtle movements between familiarity and difference. And where better to find that but in literature, in language use—or better, in words? Which brings me to the end of our shared alphabet. I don’t know why Canadians say zed, and for now I don’t care. I care that they do, and that they sometimes look at me strangely when I don’t. I will never say zed. This will never inhibit my ability to communicate with a Canadian. It will mark me as an American. And what does that matter to a Canadian, or to me? It depends. That’s why I decided to pursue this supplement: I wanted to investigate what depends and what doesn’t depend on the border, and whether or not it matters. I am happy to announce that having successfully solicited work from eight poets, ten essayists, and having interviewed a novelist-scholar, a poet-critic and a poet-memoirist-editor on the topic, I am nowhere closer to understanding the literary significance of the US-Canada border. I began thinking that that significance would be slippery, and I now know a little bit more about what greases that handle. That said, I am not at all unhappy with our contributors. Indeed, they proved fantastic—generous, insightful, curious, and thorough. They approached the issue from different angles, values, and with a range of focuses, but even had they been coordinating, they could never have painted a definitive picture, because the border does not lend itself to such certainty. And that is not to mention what this supplement, and Part II to come, have left out. We present work on [“Three Passages West” by Phoebe Wang] and from the west [poems by Sean Ward, Brandyn Johnson], the east [“Cross Border Kinship” by Thomas Hodd] and along the Ontario border [poems by Lisa Pasold, Stewart Cole, Cal Freeman, Michael Lauchlan]. It draws on pop-culture [poetry by Denise Duhamel], the fault lines of community [“From Scene to Community” by Stewart Cole], Border Novels [“Many Rivers to Cross” by Andrew Blackman, “The Softest Trap Imaginable” by Andreas Vatiliotou], book pricing [“Culture Shock, Sticker Shock” by Nate Jung] and more. It’s focused on one side of the border, then the other, then on the movements in between.  But even a massive anthology on this subject would leave something out, and we had no pretense of a complete or comprehensive offering. Instead, this was meant as an exploration, and it has yielded impressive results. In fact, the response from the authors we solicited was so great that we’ve had to split the supplement between two issues, while slotting other material for The Town Crier. Like the border itself, the supplement is never quite finished—there’s always more to be said.