I thank Barrie Nichol for being such a pack rat, Eleanor Nichol for ensuring that so much of what he created and gathered has been so well preserved, and for assisting me in the early part of my research, and his sister Deanna for offering me her still vivid early memories. His Therafields colleagues Grant Goodbrand, Philip McKenna, and Sharon McIsaac, his brother Don, and his fellow Four Horsemen collaborators Paul Dutton and Steve McCaffery generously helped me solve various narrative mysteries. Sharon Barbour, Lori Emerson, and Stan Bevington were also at the ready to help me mull through Barrie’s more complicated moments. David Rosenberg was repeatedly ready with encouragement, advice, and eagerness to read chapter drafts. Of great assistance as well were some of Barrie’s earliest friends, Andy Phillips, Arnold Shives, and Dezso Huba, all of whom offered details that could otherwise have been lost to oral history. I also have to thank Arnold Shives and bill bissett for being such loyal correspondents with Barrie at various times during the 1960s. Barrie had difficulty writing letters in those years, and without their friendship and engagement with Barrie’s ideas and projects much of his early thoughts about writing would also have been lost. I thank Sharon Barbour, bill bissett, David Robinson, Stephen Scobie, D.r. Wagner, and the late Nicholas Zurbrugg (via Tony Zurbrugg acting for his estate) for permitting me to quote from their letters to Barrie, and Loren Lind for permitting me to quote from his important unpublished 1965 interview with him. Thanks also to Arnold Shives, Paul Dutton, and Gerry Shikatani for permitting me to quote their unpublished recollections of Barrie, and again to Eleanor Nichol for helping me browse through the scrapbooks, photos, Therafields publications, and other memorabilia still in her basement. And a big thanks to Maria Hindmarch for listening to all my research anecdotes during my visit to Vancouver and being such a thoughtful host and excitable Canucks fan.
I must also thank the Ontario Arts Council for the Writers’ Reserve grant that helped me travel to gather the material for the book, and Tony Power, Eric Swanick, and Keith Gilbert of Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections for their kind assistance. I was a daily visitor to their department for more than a month, during which they often found items for me that I might not have known were there. I also thank York University’s Clara Thomas Archives for generous access to bill bissett’s papers. I should probably apologize as well to the hundreds of Barrie’s friends I didn’t manage to contact. This book could only be so long, and is undoubtedly preliminary to others whose authors will devote more years to them. I urge you all to record your memories of Barrie, and offer any letters you may have received from him to a public collection before they also fall “beyond the reach of talking.” Finally a huge thank-you to longtime bpNichol reader Jack David of ECW Press for undertaking to publish this story.
My main regret is that Eleanor (“Ellie”) Nichol, on reading partway through an early version of this book in manuscript, felt unable to support its publication by granting permission for me to quote or include photographs of previously unpublished Nichol material, including most of the material in his numerous notebooks and extensive correspondence. Although she was initially enthusiastic about the project, she had also assumed that a “literary biography” would make many fewer references to his private life and suggest fewer links between it and his writing. Her unhappiness may have also caused others who had been important to Barrie, such as Rob Hindley-Smith, to be unavailable for interview.
Frank Davey
May 2012