THE PEOPLE’S POETRY
some unthinking god
is made of towering flowers; his eye
in the tall blue tulip sky,
a profound petal there; I arrest its blooming.
I want the flowers beheaded,
the garden sink,
the rain deny its claim to princedom there
—GWENDOLYN MACEWEN, “CERTAIN FLOWERS”
IN THE EARLY 1960s, a part-bar, part-coffee shop, part-venue space opened on St. Nicholas Street, a few blocks up from Yonge and Wellesley in Toronto. Soon after it opened, poet Milton Acorn, then in his late thirties, began to hold court there. The Bohemian Embassy held poetry readings on Thursday nights, when Acorn would read, generally overstaying his welcome on the stage. Afterwards, he would find himself surrounded by younger poets. Margaret Atwood, then a student at the University of Toronto, read at the Embassy; a little later, a teenage Gwendolyn MacEwen found the spot, the community—and Acorn.
Acorn was bombastic, drank a lot, often had a fat cigar sticking out from the side of his mouth. MacEwen was slight and half his age but had a compelling voice of her own. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she wasn’t at university. She was self-taught; she’d had a tumultuous—occasionally violent, marked by alcoholism and mental illness—home life. Many of the books that chronicle Acorn and MacEwen’s relationship come close to saying that Acorn was something of a father figure for the younger poets gathered at the Embassy—dispensing poetic advice, maybe acting more like a big brother. Acorn started off as MacEwen’s “poetic mentor,” but their relationship soon morphed, and they began to date. Eventually, they married. This was something Acorn wanted and MacEwen initially did not; he’d proposed in December 1960, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-seven, and she’d said no, writing, “Milt, my love is not the same as yours … I feel no need to find myself physically, sensually, emotionally in another person … I’m still getting acquainted with life, with myself.” However, she agreed to his proposal a little later; he was in Prince Edward Island for the winter, and she was missing him while he was away.
Acorn and MacEwen’s friends speculated about why they had gotten together at all. Chris Gudgeon’s biography of Milton Acorn, Out of This World, says people referred to them as Beauty and the Beast. It was easy to see why Acorn was drawn to MacEwen—she was young, beautiful, talented, and insecure. MacEwen, Gudgeon writes, “fed Milt’s lopsided vision of himself as a heroic poet-knight, battling the dragons of injustice, and leaving the fair maidens swooning.” (Another Acorn biographer, Richard Lemm, is more explicit: “He had a constant companion who would listen to his political discourses. A sexually experienced man, he could teach and savour his less experienced lover.”) Although it was less clear what had drawn MacEwen to Acorn, one friend from the Embassy pointed out that when they met, in contrast to later on, Acorn seemed confident, strong, clean-shaven, eccentric but put-together. Acorn and MacEwen had friends who guessed that part of the reason she was attracted to him was career-related—she was “ambitious” and saw him as “established,” a way to further her writing and publishing goals; Al Purdy thought “Gwen was with Milton because Milton was ‘getting attention.’”
Rosemary Sullivan, MacEwen’s biographer, writes that it’s important to be careful about the way we think about MacEwen and Acorn’s relationship in retrospect. There was a power imbalance, and the relationship seemed doomed from the start, and Acorn was persistent, but there’s no evidence that he was abusive, either physically or emotionally. At least, not until the relationship crumbled. MacEwen took a solo trip to Israel a few months after her wedding; when she returned, the distance and solitude had given her a new perspective on Toronto, and her relationship. As Sullivan puts it in Shadow Maker, “Almost as soon as she had married, Gwendolyn recognized that she had made a terrible mistake.” MacEwen wanted a marriage of equals, and Acorn wanted a wife. Acorn was “deeply conservative” at heart, homophobic, anti-abortion (he wrote at least one terrible poem about it), and he wanted to see “supper on the table every night.”
MacEwen and Acorn had an open marriage; he’d taken advantage of this when she was away, and she began a side relationship with a painter when she returned from Israel. Acorn gave her an ultimatum—him or the painter—and, not even a year into their marriage, she chose to leave. It was a choice that Acorn could not brook. He fell apart. He drank, showing up on friends’ doorsteps in the middle of the night, distraught and drunk. He wrote MacEwen angry, bitter letters. (“One letter from that time begins with ‘You Dirty Bitch’ and ends up asking, ‘WHERE IN THE WORLD DID YOU LEARN TO BE SUCH A LOUSE?’” writes Gudgeon; another, quoted in Shadow Maker, sent after MacEwen told Acorn of her intentions to divorce him, “accus[es] her of being ‘the Great North American Castrator.’”) MacEwen wrote back, at least at the beginning, explaining herself, trying to make him understand. Reading the snippets of his letters that are included in their biographies, it appears as though Acorn’s life had gone to pieces, and he’d set the blame squarely on the shoulders of his much younger ex, who simply wanted space, freedom, and an amicable divorce. When Acorn refused to give her one—it was the era before no-fault divorces—MacEwen was forced to travel across the country, to Vancouver, to gather evidence of his marital infidelity in order to petition the courts. Purdy, who’d been Acorn’s best man at the wedding, reluctantly acted as a witness to Acorn’s adultery so that MacEwen could finally break free of the marriage.
In 1969, years later, MacEwen and Acorn were both announced finalists, alongside George Bowering, for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry or Drama. Acorn was still a mess—outstaying his welcome at friends’ houses, drinking, not bathing, suicidal, hospitalized for depression, still half hoping MacEwen might come back and blaming her for everything that was wrong in his life. When MacEwen found out her book The Shadow-Maker was shortlisted alongside Acorn’s I’ve Tasted My Blood, Nick Mount writes in his book Arrival: The Story of CanLit, “She was afraid enough of him to write to the judges that if there was any chance of her having to share the award with Acorn, she would rather withdraw her book from consideration.” But she and Bowering won, sharing the award, and Acorn didn’t.
CanLit did not graciously accept MacEwen and Bowering’s win. Instead, poets Irving Layton and Eli Mandel co-authored an open letter protesting Acorn’s loss. The letter was in part a call for money, to be raised and “presented to Milton Acorn as the Canadian Poet’s Award.” Another public plea for Acorn, this time an editorial by poets Seymour Mayne and Kenneth Hertz in a now-defunct Montreal literary magazine, reads, “Either because of literary politics or a gross ignorance of Canadian poetry on the part of the Canada Council jury, Milton Acorn has been denied the Governor General’s Award that he truly has earned.” Acorn’s supporters generally focused their ire at Bowering. One of the three jurors who’d chosen MacEwen’s and Bowering’s books over Acorn’s was Warren Tallman, an American who’d been hired to teach English at the University of British Columbia; the thinking went that Bowering’s style, which was influenced by US poets, was emblematic of a type of cultural imperialism that needed to be studiously avoided if CanLit was to be its own proper national cultural project.
Five days after MacEwen and Bowering were feted at their awards ceremony in Ottawa, a broad swath of CanLit figures, including Layton, Purdy, and Atwood, showed up at Grossman’s Tavern on Spadina Avenue in Toronto to witness Acorn receiving a cheque for $1,000 and a medallion naming him the People’s Poet. When I think of this night—Acorn got so drunk he lost his prize cheque twice, his friends let him read for forty minutes, he was roundly celebrated—I immediately picture MacEwen and wonder how she felt, if she was at home in her small apartment that night, if there was anyone with her. And I wonder if anyone at Grossman’s thought about MacEwen. Did they wonder, celebrating Acorn, if they were enacting a deeper injustice by attempting to address a perceived one?
IN NOVEMBER 2015, I was at work when I received a message from a friend. The friend, like me, was a graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She told me that Steven Galloway, my former professor and friend, had been suspended from UBC pending an investigation into what the university referred to as “serious allegations.” Those allegations, I later learned, included sexual assault. (An investigation by a retired Supreme Court Justice, Mary Ellen Boyd, concluded that the allegations of assault were unsubstantiated.) When my friend told me Galloway had been suspended, I felt dizzy. I hid in the washroom, crying and gathering my thoughts, and then briefly talked to my supervisor and went home for the night. Fuck, I kept thinking. Fuck fuck fuck. I didn’t know the woman who’d made the initial accusation very well. I had been much closer to Galloway. I house-sat for him, walked his dog. He’d volunteered—not because I was doing it for class credit, not because he was my thesis advisor—to read my novel-in-progress. I’d gone sailing with him and other students. Drank at the Legion with him on Thursdays. But: I felt dizzy and ill because the first thing that had come to mind, when I learned of the allegations, was the time Galloway slapped my friend across the face at the Legion right after she’d graduated.
I’d buried that moment. I was surprised when it resurfaced. I hadn’t wanted to watch it directly; I was sitting across the table, to the right, and instead of turning my head, I let it happen just inside my line of vision. So my memory brought the sound of the slap, and the silence that followed it. I’d known it was coming—he’d indicated it was coming, though I wasn’t sure what had passed between them that led to that point. I thought it was going to be a pantomime, something gentle, a joke; instead, it felt like it carried the force of real animosity. The silence after the slap lasted too long, and then my friend laughed it off. She has a boisterous, energetic cackle, the kind that focuses the energy of a room. She laughed it off, and we kept drinking. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
In June 2016, Galloway was fired after the investigations into his conduct had concluded; although UBC cited “a record of misconduct that resulted in an irreparable breach of the trust placed in faculty members,” the exact reasons for why they let him go (with no severance) were never made public. In the wake of his firing, he received mostly favourable media coverage and was generally depicted as a victim. (Eventually, it turned out that what many of us suspected—that the slap had been the only substantiated allegation, as it had happened in public, in front of many witnesses—wasn’t accurate; the only substantiated allegation was that Galloway had had an affair with a student. I remember thinking, How do you unsubstantiate a slap?)
The project of CanLit felt like it underwent a visible implosion. Galloway’s supporters developed alternative theories for his suspension on Facebook. Karen Connelly, an author and Galloway supporter, advanced the gender-swapped “idea for a macabre, best-selling novel” in which two “male” professors in a university department, jealous and power-hungry, had stitched up their “female” boss in order to take “her” place as chair of the department. “Forget the novel,” wrote Hal Wake, then the artistic director of the Vancouver Writers Festival, “go straight to TV.”
In November 2016, dozens of Canadian writers signed an open letter, called UBC Accountable, supporting Galloway and—though the university had conducted a full investigation before he was fired, and Galloway was, at the time, going through a grievance process supported by the faculty union—calling for “due process and fair treatment for all, which the University appears to have denied Professor Galloway.” The letter’s signatories included such Canadian luminaries as Margaret Atwood, David Cronenberg, Madeleine Thien, John Vaillant, David Bezmozgis, Yann Martel, and even some UBC creative writing profs. At times, it seemed like the entirety of CanLit—and then, as the story gained traction, a good portion of the putrid swamp of online men’s rights activists—stood behind Galloway, across a lonely aisle from a handful of complainants who had relatively little power, and were mostly being supported by writers and academics who were far more likely than the letter’s signatories to be women, to be non-binary, to be trans, to be of colour, to be queer.
But it wasn’t just Galloway and the open letter that tore a rift through the centre of CanLit in that period. There was also the Appropriation Prize debacle of 2017, in which the editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine proposed, in an editorial introducing an Indigenous voices issue, that there should be an “Appropriation prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.” Although the editor received swift criticism—and apologized, and resigned from his position—several of the nation’s most prominent editors, including the then editors-in-chief of the Walrus and the National Post, and the editor-in-chief of Maclean’s, publicly signed on to establish the prize.
In 2018, two more professors—Jon Paul Fiorentino and David McGimpsey, who taught at Concordia University in Montreal—were suspended pending sexual misconduct allegations. Toronto independent publisher Coach House Books placed its poetry program on hiatus after one of its poetry board members and editors, Jeramy Dodds, appeared on a list of “shitty media men.”
And then came the defamation suits. Dodds filed a $13.5 million suit against the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star for reporting on allegations against him, and against four unidentified women for making them. Galloway’s labour arbitration with UBC resulted in his receipt of $167,000 in damages “for statements the school made during the process that violated his privacy rights and harmed his reputation”; he subsequently filed a defamation suit against the main complainant in his case, as well as twenty-four other people, for “recklessly repeating” the main complainant’s accusations—in some cases on Twitter, in some cases in private to others, in one case as part of an art exhibition. On the subject of “due process,” it is worth noting that none of the complainants initially received copies of their sections of Mary Ellen Boyd’s report, which detailed her findings about their complaints, and that Galloway had to give his consent to the university to release them. It’s further worth noting that at the time he filed suit, the main complainant—whose report had been redacted—had not yet received an unredacted copy of her own report, with which she could better defend herself in court.
Somewhere in the midst of this series of controversies and lawsuit filings, as I was working as an editor at the Montreal–based general interest magazine Maisonneuve, an advance review copy of Nick Mount’s Arrival: The Story of CanLit landed on my desk. As I read, I recognized several parallels between what I’d been witnessing in contemporary CanLit and what had occurred in the sixties and seventies, the period covered in Arrival—a period when CanLit, also via open letter, convinced itself it was fighting American imperialism in Canadian poetics by celebrating Milton Acorn, seemingly forgetting, or giving not one shit about, what they were communicating to his beleaguered and frankly more talented ex-wife, who was first wronged by Acorn and then later treated as collateral damage. Both the UBC Accountable letter and the push to establish the People’s Poetry Prize betrayed the same institutional urge within CanLit to protect the powerful, at the same time as the proponents of the fight believed they were doing the opposite.
I felt naive—I’d studied Canadian literature and its many debacles during my English degree, and I never should have been as optimistic about the trajectory of CanLit as I’d been before 2016. I’d thought it had been getting better in the half a century that had passed since much of what was chronicled in Arrival, but what unfolded after Galloway was suspended from his teaching post at UBC made it seem like not much had changed.
THE PARALLELS FELT UNDENIABLE: an open letter that never should have been written, and the elevation of the perspective and feelings of a badly behaving man over the people he’d treated poorly, to the detriment of the people he’d treated poorly.
And white people claiming Indigenous ancestry. Milton Acorn had been convinced that he had “native blood.” “[T]he Indian in me is now authenticated … It makes me (maybe) one-eighth; but as I’ve told you, an analysis of physical features makes a much higher content probable. I was born with brown eyes! Not a ‘blue-eyed baby’ but a brown-eyed papoose,” he wrote to Al Purdy, who wrote back, “You seem to continually mention your Indian ancestry, Milt, beginning to seem a little like Grey Owl, a full-blooded Englishman who claimed to be Indian. My point being that whatever virtues Indians have—and they have plenty—you must have your own.” (Acorn’s biographers generally come to the conclusion that this ancestry was part of Acorn’s self-mythology; despite what he wrote to Purdy, his family tree doesn’t indicate any Indigenous ancestors at all.)
Partway through the unfurling of the Galloway sympathy brigade, it was revealed that Galloway had First Nations ancestry; the novelist who shared this information, though, was Joseph Boyden, and the information was positioned to be used as a protective cudgel against Galloway’s complainants, somehow. (One of Galloway’s friends wrote at the time, in a tweet that has now been deleted: “it’s been edifying watching Canadians condemn us for standing up for the simple rights of an indigenous man.”) Joseph Boyden’s own claims to Indigenous heritage were subsequently interrogated and found to be specious.
It is telling that CanLit is a colonial project—that it was founded and funded as a means to shore up Canadian culture against incursions from US literature—and that these writers, who previously moved through the world comfortably as white men, appealed to Indigeneity as a shield, or a fantastical way to bolster interest in their biographies and ancestries and work, to fuel creative production. This move isn’t new—Confederation Poet Duncan Campbell Scott, an Indian agent who enacted policies that worked towards the genocide of Indigenous Peoples with his left hand, wrote celebrated elegiac poetry about the coming end of the Indigenous way of life in Canada with his right hand.
Moreover, Canada is small: some of the same people who were active in the People’s Poet Award celebration were vocal when Galloway was suspended. Margaret Atwood, for one. Atwood, who compared UBC’s investigation process to the Salem witch trials, even as, south of the border, the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale was winning her a new generation of fans among a certain segment of feminists.
The parallels—less between Acorn and Galloway than between the CanLit response to them—felt clear to me, but then another harassment-in-academia scandal happened, this time at NYU, and the machinery of power lurched into action again, hauntingly similar to the way it had with Galloway. Avital Ronell, a feminist philosopher and star comparative literature professor, was accused of harassment, sexual assault, and stalking by a former master’s student. Almost immediately, a litany of famous scholars—including Judith Butler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Slavoj Žižek—wrote an open letter defending Ronell. “We have all seen her relationship with students, and some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her,” they wrote. “We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare.”
Some of these signatories, who had made their careers analyzing how power worked, couldn’t see it from the inside. Like the signatories of the Galloway open letter, they positioned Ronell as the wronged party. “She deserves a fair hearing, one that expresses respect, dignity, and human solicitude in addition to our enduring admiration,” wrote Ronell’s defenders. But this was a fanciful reformation of the situations that had led to Galloway’s and Ronell’s suspensions in the first place—they’d both been accused of wielding their power as professors over some of their students in order to harass and assault them. In the case of UBC, as the signatories of Galloway’s open letter decried his unfair treatment and talked about the Boyd Report on Twitter, implying that they’d seen it, these same (now-graduated) student complainants hadn’t yet received their own sections of the report, and were mostly learning about updates on their complaints via social media and newspapers rather than directly through the university.
More broadly, outside the university, outside the group of people who were directly affected by what had happened at UBC, young and emerging writers were receiving object lessons in what would happen if they tried to address situations in which they’d been abused, harassed, or assaulted by a more established, socially connected, powerful writer. But it’s also important to say that it wasn’t the late sixties anymore; while Galloway’s supporters, by virtue of their advanced careers and social positions, had more access to platforms like the Globe and Mail, less established writers had social media, particularly Twitter.
Some people—the type of liberal who used to say, maybe as recently as a decade ago, that they liked to “give voice to the voiceless” in their writing, and the type of conservative who feels aggrieved when someone younger and smarter dunks on their received wisdom—called the voices who emerged through social media a “mob.” When I imagine what it would have been like without a platform for those voices, it becomes clear that these voices, speaking back to power, were not a mob at all; what the folks who called them that are really taking issue with are the few hardscrabble checks that have emerged to interfere with the workings of the levers of power.
IN 2017, I WENT ON A MONTH-LONG RESIDENCY at the Al Purdy A-frame house in Ameliasburgh, Ontario. The A-frame is somewhat legendary; Purdy and his wife, Eurithe, and her father and brothers, built it from scratch, scrounging free and cheap materials, and then they opened their home to generations of Canadian writers. Generally—reflective of the state of CanLit at the time—white male writers.
Today, a group of dedicated volunteers keeps the house alive and the residency thriving. It offers a stipend, travel costs, and four solitary weeks to focus on one’s manuscript. When I was at the A-frame, I was visibly queer, visibly pregnant. Even if someone mistook me for a woman, they would never mistake me for the kind of woman that the men of sixties and seventies CanLit would have given a second look. Yet there I was, filling the house with queer pregnant energy, writing and editing poems, reading another, unpublished book—the notebook documenting previous poets-in-residence’s recommendations and experiences. I wasn’t the only pregnant writer to do a residency at the A-frame, and when another poet came with their young kid, the volunteers bought a toddler bed. The list of poets-in-residence was full of women, of introspective men, several of them queer. The list provided a very different energy from what I’d gleaned it was like in Al Purdy’s time.
The A-frame felt chockablock full of the energy from all the writers who’d been there previously. More familiar with their poetry than their escapades, I read a copy of The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology and pictured Purdy arguing with his male poet guests around the kitchen table, surrounded by empties—beer and the wine Purdy made himself with foraged wild grapes—while Eurithe, who didn’t really drink, sought peace in the kitchen or bedroom.
Most of the contributors to the anthology are men. George Bowering has a short piece about visiting with his then-partner, Angela. “When Angela in her short skirt climbed to look at the loft we would sleep in eventually, Al the perfect host held the ladder and watched to make sure that she didn’t slip,” writes Bowering. “When she went to use the outhouse, he manfully flung the door open so I could get a picture for, uh, posterity.” It was 1967, two years before the entirety of CanLit, including Purdy, decided that Acorn was more deserving of a Governor General’s Award than Bowering, or McEwen.
I thought a lot about Margaret Atwood, a friend of Purdy’s, a contributor to the A-Frame Anthology, a connective thread between both the People’s Poet and Galloway open letter incidents. I’d concluded that she believed herself to be exceptional—both in terms of talent and gender position. She’d navigated the sexism of CanLit, managing to more than hold her own; perhaps she felt that her contemporaries, and everyone who came after, should have figured out how to do the same. Atwood also seemed to reproduce in her writing, at the same frequency as her white male peers, many of the tropes of CanLit as colonial project.
I was thinking about all this when I read the letters in Yours, Al, that Purdy exchanged with Atwood, Acorn, and Earle Birney. And when I read The Red Shoes, Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Atwood’s early years. In Atwood’s letters to Purdy and to Layton, her prose strikes an assertive and funny note, with insights that probably flattered their recipients at the same time as they set the tone—Atwood was in charge—for their relationships. Purdy and Layton’s letters feel infinitely more tossed-off, written from a place of assumed rather than earned confidence. Atwood studiously avoided dating any of these men. Purdy wrote a mean-spirited and generally unfunny poem about her, called “Concerning Ms. Atwood,” that basically decries her as a self-involved, egotistical social climber—one who meets God and then must write God’s name down in “her little notebook” so as to not forget it. (Again, it feels like not much, vis-à-vis the misogyny reserved for self-confident women writers, has changed: the tone of this poem reminded me of Zachariah Wells’s “Citric Bitch’s Thinking Is Shit,” written in 2009 about poet and critic Sina Queyras, which ends with an exhortation to kiss the author’s dick.)
In Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Atwood, Acorn comes up a handful of times, nearly always in reference to MacEwen’s relationship with him. In contrast, the book details a close friendship between the two women, one where they discussed everything from myth and creativity to their work to the men around them. In a letter included in Yours, Al, Atwood champions MacEwen’s writing to Purdy; she wrote essays about it; later, she edited a collection of MacEwen’s poetry. Why, then, did she fete Acorn at a celebration designed to assuage his ego because he’d lost an award to his younger, more talented ex-wife?
When Atwood likened UBC’s treatment of Galloway to a witch hunt, it was ironic to the complainants and observers, who were used to seeing complainants—and perhaps women, more broadly—portrayed as witches. More ironic still is the fact that one of Atwood’s most famous poems—“Half-hanged Mary”—is based on her ancestor Mary Reeve Webster, who according to Rosemary Sullivan, was “tried as a witch a decade before the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692–93.” Did half-hanged Mary flit into Atwood’s mind as she invoked the witch trials to position Galloway as the victim of a bunch of mostly women he’d in fact had the power over? Phrased another way: Why bother invoking witches at all when CanLit’s own history has so many similar situations that could have been invoked either directly or by metaphor?
On the one hand, Atwood thrived in CanLit at a time when the men around her were addressing her in letters with lines like, “I think you’re a beautiful woman … You weren’t always, I don’t think, but you’ve become one over the years. Why shouldn’t older male writers dream of getting you into bed, and younger ones want to show you their poems?” On the other, she’s been complicit in reproducing the sexism, racism, and colonialism that has underpinned the project of CanLit, making it stifling, unwelcoming, limited, limiting. This is why, I think, she became a secondary lightning rod as the events of Galloway’s suspension and eventual firing unfolded, dishing it out as well as she took it: she represents the compromises a white woman can make in order to succeed in CanLit, and to uphold it so as to preserve her success. That positioning has found no quarter among writers who’d rather dismantle CanLit altogether, and those who have never, perhaps, quite been in the position to employ these kinds of strategies and compromises to achieve success. Phrased as a callback to 1969: If Milton Acorn was the People’s Poet, then what was the People’s Poetry? Who were the People?
WHAT DO WE OWE THE PEOPLE WHO CAME BEFORE US, and what do they owe us? The complexities of life and care and relationship are what are supposed to inform our work, and perhaps they do—it’s been suggested to me that Miriam Toews’s Women Talking, a fictionalized account of Mennonite women meeting to discuss how to deal with a systemic series of rapes in their community, is in part a novel-length response of sorts to the fact that she initially signed the Galloway letter. But I also feel itchy about accepting reformations or apologies or feminist analyses through literary texts. If one’s initial support for Galloway—or, sorry, “due process”—occurred publicly, and explicitly, then one’s modulation of opinion or position should occur publicly and explicitly, too.
But then, it can be difficult to be outspoken, confrontational, in a community as small as CanLit. For example, over a year after I read my former professor Andreas Schroeder’s UBC Accountable statement—a statement that asked for “justice” but cited the complainants’ allegations as “unconvincing,” “trivial,” or “irrelevant”—I found myself standing next to him at the main stage of a literary festival. Remembering his class, which resulted in my first successful feature pitch, I was initially pleased to see him—but the silence of saying nothing about his UBCA signature or statement immediately began to gnaw at me.
Regardless of what, exactly, happens with the project of CanLit—a colonial project, a project that reflected the sexism and racism of the era in which it was born, and the following eras in which it was mythologized—the reality is that everyone who has been affected negatively by that letter will be asked to share stages, green rooms, festival space, editors, agents, and publishers with the writers who signed it. Several years out from the initial cacophony of voices in our national papers and on social media, the writers who signed the UBC Accountable letter mostly seem like they’d prefer to never speak about it again. So, in green rooms and festival spaces, on stages and at readings, polite silence falls like fresh snow.
But I do not want to pretend as though the letter—which was actively harmful to both the complainants and to a broader swath of early-career writers and writing students witnessing the ways in which power supports power at the expense of the expendable—does not exist, or is no longer worth talking about. When I ask myself what I owe and who I owe it to, the answer is clear. I owe my colleagues, whose complaints have been dismissed as “unconvincing,” “trivial,” and “irrelevant,” visible and audible support (as well as whatever financial aid I can offer as they are sued). I owe polite silence nothing.