Canada

Introduction

In my previous introduction to our bibliographies of Canadian literary production, I predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to a rush of plague tales in late 2020. Ethan Lou’s Field Notes from a Pandemic (Letters and Auto/biography) describes Lou’s voyages from China through other hot spots at the beginning of the pandemic, and The Ethics of Pandemics (Non-Fiction) is a collection of timely reflections and proposals edited by Meredith Celene Schwartz. Additionally, Junie Désil’s eat salt / gaze at the ocean (Poetry) incorporates Haitian zombies that have been popularized elsewhere as symbols of mass illness. But that is all; I was mostly wrong. Nevertheless, my vision of the future led me to notice (as my collaborator Morgon Mills did) the high number of science fictions and other “genre fictions” in Canada last year — many of which cannot be included in this bibliography. The rationale is partly that of space, and partly that of the ongoing conversations and debates about literariness in the academy. One of Thomas King’s two 2020 novels, Indians on Vacation (Fiction), was always going to be on the list; Indians on Vacation has what King defined in a 1990 essay as an “interfusional” style that fuses oral and written modes of storytelling, including Anglo-European notions of postmodernism. The postness extends to postcolonial themes and inversions such as Indigenous people going to Europe instead of Europeans coming to North America. For these reasons and others, King’s Indians on Vacation will probably be widely studied (and enjoyed), if I may venture another prediction. In contrast, adding King’s Obsidian (Fiction) to the list was originally in doubt because it is a mystery, hence genre fiction. How could we choose only one King?

In fact, the increasing enthusiasm for genre fiction in literary and scholarly communities in Canada suggests that this journal and other institutions may need to continue to expand their lists and their course syllabi, respectively, recognizing what the American scholar Charlotte E. Howell identifies (in Critical Studies in Television, 2017) as a late-1980s turning point in “legitimating genre”. For more legitimation, see Larissa Lai’s “Familiarizing Grist Village: Why I Write Speculative Fiction” (Criticism: General Studies) and Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (Anthologies), edited by Joshua Whitehead. King’s Obsidian and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Fiction) are both examples of late-career novels by canonized authors whose status lends respectability to genre fiction (though The Testaments is more certainly “speculative fiction” rather than the arguably sci-fi category of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy). Both are also sequels, as is Gil Adamson’s second Western, Ridgerunner (Fiction), which focuses on the turn-of-the-20^th-century wilderness explorer who was a less central character in her widely acclaimed 2007 novel The Outlander. For similar reasons, Natalie Zina Walschots’ Hench (Fiction) and its universe of superheroes gets space here partly because of its positive reviews from arbiters of culture, such as The New York Times, and its various literary twists, such as the main character’s heroic use of big data to amass evidence of the grisly damage done by superheroes and their nemeses. In fact, in a true reality-check for genre, Peter Nowak’s The Rise of Real-Life Superheroes and the Fall of Everything Else (Non-Fiction) investigates people who don masks not only in a pandemic but to help others every day. Regardless, the fantasy novel The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk is included too; its championing on CBC’s Canada Reads competition demonstrates a convergence of critical and popular acclaim for the novel and its genre. Involving a secret sorceress who must find a grimoire to master her powers and escape her family’s devotion to patriarchy and the nuclear family, The Midnight Bargain certainly shows — if it was ever in doubt — that fantasy deals with serious social issues. As Amanda Leduc demonstrates in Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (Criticism: General Studies), genres — including superhero narratives — inscribe myths that can affect our realities. Partly because of this potential, genres other than social/societal realism should be included in literary criticism. (On realism, see also Eli Park Sorensen’s “Between Private and Public Spheres: The Politics of Realism in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey” in Criticism: Studies of Individual Writers.)

But Canadian authors sometimes strategically mark their genre fictions for academic approval: André Babyn’s Evie of the Deepthorn (Fiction) nests a fantasy novel within its own pages, a literary device that contextualizes the genre as any study might do. The first short story in Kaie Kellough’s Dominoes at the Crossroads (Fiction) contains an academic talk from the future (about Montreal after climate crisis), with sci-fi or speculative-fiction implications. Marking or marketing the texts for professors and students is not merely savvy; it also implies that writers of genre fiction are working against established prejudices in society that are (somewhat) suppressed in academia, or that are at least consciously addressed in the humanities and social sciences. Opening up to genre might be one more way of supporting different learning styles and curiosities, and thereby of opening up the academy, which in Canada can still be too exclusively a white, male, and cisgendered space.

With a title that reflects a bold and direct project of addressing the problems created mainly by white people in North America, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (Fiction) also develops a project of reconfiguring colonial art forms with Indigenous (specifically Anishinaabe) aesthetics. In response to a Canadian publishing industry that was overwhelmingly white until the 1980s, a new multi-lingual translation of Markoosie Patsauq’s Hunter with Harpoon (Translations) has appeared in a critical edition from McGill-Queen’s University Press, first published in 1970 by the same press and arguably the first novel by an Indigenous author in Canada. In another first, the Dene author Katłıà published her debut novel, Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Tı-Yat’a (Fiction), an uncanny fictionalization of visiting her grandmother’s birthplace on a northern island in the Northwest Territories. From a more eastern but still northern geography, the veteran journalist Duncan McCue (Anishinaabe) released his memoir of growing up in northern Quebec, The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir (Letters and Auto/biography). As McCue’s career in the national spotlight attests, Indigenous commentators and writers are ever more central and significant, and Canadian institutions are becoming responsive, however unevenly, to colonial history and Indigenous rights.

It is necessary to remember that any history concerning white people in Canada is a colonial history on the traditional territories of a wide variety of Indigenous peoples, but of course many other themes are foregrounded. In 2020, histories and memoirs related to music drew my eye to other books about music. Jonny Dovercourt’s Any Night of the Week: A DIY History of Toronto Music, 1957-2001 (Criticism: General Studies) offers a walkthrough of Toronto’s nightlife neighbourhoods and the bands that cut their teeth there, such as Broken Social Scene, the Rheostatics, and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. Meanwhile, the poet Robyn Sarah returned to piano lessons after 35 years in Music, Late and Soon (Letters and Auto/biography), drawing a circle around a life that had been focussed on music before being diverted into poetry. Perhaps more dramatically, Bob Wiseman finds that music can encircle or contextualize anything in Music Lessons (Non-Fiction), where short poetic essays and other texts conceptualize music as a universal language. In A Song from Faraway (Fiction), Deni Ellis Béchard links the story of a fiddler on the battlefields of the First World War to characters in the aftermath of the Gulf War (among others). In Why Birds Sing (Fiction), Nina Berkhout tells of an opera singer and the very public breakdown of her career, which parallels the declining health of a friend who has come to live with her family. (Another story of terminal illness in 2020 is in Letters and Auto/biography: Dakshana Bascaramurty’s This Is Not the End of Me: Lessons on Living from a Dying Man.) In Talking Drum (Fiction), Lisa Braxton follows a Senegalese drummer in the United States, among other racialized characters affected by a planned redevelopment and gentrification of their neighbourhood. Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World (Fiction, but one of the few reassurances that my prediction about our real-world pandemic was not entirely wrong) features a pregnant singer who stages a concert to raise money in a pandemic: the end of the world as we know it. In a final musical reflection on the end of something, Len Gasparini’s Götterdämmerung (Poetry) enlists Wagner to sing through the ecological endgame of the Anthropocene. As antidote or absurdity, there is much lighter fare in Mendelson Joe’s Joetry: Well-Selected Lyrix from Six Decades of Song (Poetry): “The sun she keeps a-sunning / The moon she keeps a-mooning / The Joes they keep a-Joeing.” (See Laiwan’s TENDER, in Poetry, for more of the complexity of a positive outlook.)

Music is less literal in other books from 2020. Some Blow Flutes (Drama) by Mary Vingoe is not about music except in the most figurative sense, drawing its title from an I Ching proverb: “Some weep, some blow upon flutes.” (See also, in Poetry, Cornelia Hoogland and Ted Goodden’s Cosmic Bowling: The I-Ching Poems.) Similarly, Meredith Quartermain’s Lullabies in the Real World (Poetry) is not especially about music except as demonstrated in the anaphora and other poetic techniques that make music out of mere words (and it is a time-travelling train ride into the West, not sci-fi but reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 Western movie Dead Man). Penny Chamberlain’s Songs from a Small Town (In a Minor Key) (Fiction) invokes music partly as a metaphor of the mass hysteria that inspired her novel.

On the topic of music and the masses, several noteworthy publications on media have been recently released in Canada. In a tale of two musicians, Vivek Shraya’s The Subtweet (Fiction) calls into question the media and culture industries because of the airtime, celebrity, and profit made available for some people over others. The CBC reports that Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman’s Text Messages: Or How I Found Myself Time Travelling (Poetry, multi-media) was written “entirely on a smartphone during air travel…. Narcy’s writing speaks of the existential crises experienced by diasporic children of war before and during imperialism in the age of the Internet”. With a related theme of technological world-building, Tetsuro Shigematsu’s Kuroko (Drama) presents the absolutely fascinating story of Maya, a solitary introvert whose obsession with virtual reality prompts her father to hire an actor to bring her out of the unreal Suicide Forest into the real world. Like Alsalman’s choice of a single medium of composition, Dani Spinosa’s OO: Typewriter Poems (Poetry) was written on three typewriters that allowed her to visualize the glosa more geometrically than with typical fonts.

Spinosa’s glosas are homages to poems and poets who are important to her, as is the “self-portrait” of Paul Cézanne in a standout introspection from Ken Babstock’s Swivelmount (Poetry). Although Babstock’s poem is also critical, academic criticism can also mix homage and critique, which is part of the impetus of the essays collected by Nicholas Bradley in An Echo in the Mountains: Al Purdy after a Century (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). Bradley and his contributors reappraise the career of one of Canada’s best known and best loved lyric poets. Even better known, however, and even better known as a songwriter, is the subject of Francis Mus’s The Demons of Leonard Cohen (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). Cohen’s genre-bending is a defining feature of his significance and even his popularity, as it is for the loved but lesser-known sound and concrete poet bpNichol, the subject of Frank Davey’s Everybody’s Martyrology (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). An even more diverse experimenter in genre, however, was Roy Kiyooka, the poet, painter, photographer, sculptor, filmmaker, and musician whose many expressions are central to Juliana Pivato’s edited collection, Pictura: Essays on the Works of Roy Kiyooka (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). In contrast with Kiyooka, Alice Munro worked resolutely in the one form of the short story (occasionally in novelistic guise), and J.R. (Tim) Struthers released a two-volume collection of essays mainly by others, Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). While all these writers are well-known in specific CanLit circles, Robert Lecker’s most recent monograph asks a different question: Who Was Doris Hedges? (Letters and Auto/biography) — a book that attempts, with sharply affectionate criticism, to uncover the forgotten life and career of Canada’s first literary agent.

Thinking again of firsts, I hesitate — after my first prediction in these pages — to suggest that pandemics might still go viral in Canadian literature. But next year they might. And heroes in masks will continue to pop up, in genre if not in real life.