Authora Non-Grata: The Local (F)Lit Scene

There was a filthy, forbidden word in the English department from which I graduated almost a decade ago. This word was seldom uttered in the hallowed halls, only spoken by the uninitiated; rubes; naifs. That word was "publication."

It was the strangest thing. Accomplished professors who were published authors taught literature and creative writing classes -- one poet had more than 1,400 poems published -- and the few times a student had the nerve, the naivete, the sheer idiocy, to inquire about the process of getting one's work published, a pall fell across the seminar room as though a wet fart had been cranked against a hardwood chair. A look of embarrassed bewilderment invariably passed across the instructor's face (an expression uniform to them all), as though the student had asked for public guidance regarding masturbation or revealed a frightening red boil on the underside of his penis. A few muttered words from the instructor to the effect of, "Well, there will be time for that later," and then the writing seminar continued with a palpable air of its rarified hymen having been broken; and the culprit's gaze shunned by the eyes of everyone else.

It seemed the department was devoted to cultivating an entire generation of closet writers whose work was meant only to go from word processors into desk drawers.

More than a few times, I made such a pariah of myself. My question was dodged and ignored every time. I could never understand this, especially when a friend came home to visit from a far-flung, larger, more prestigious university, where he said there was an entire office in the English department devoted to finding publication homes for everything students wrote: when a student wrote an essay or poem or short story, they simply dropped a copy off to the folks in this office, and the folks in the office then busied themselves with submitting the work on behalf of the student until the work was published. It seemed this other, far-flung university had the strange notion that seeing its students' work in print was somehow a feather in its cap; viewed as something positive. I knew that my English department didn't have the resources to run such an office, but the complete intellectual black-out on the subject always struck me as weird and wrong.

In the mid-1990s, my university was so depleted of resources that it could no longer fund a proper "Writer-in-Residence." At one time, my university was known for having such people as Morley Callaghan, W.O. Mitchell, Peter Robinson in the English department as writers-in-residence; accomplished authors available to meet with students.

As my time in the department drew to a close, the department settled for a "resident-writing-professional," a tired local newspaper writer whose reputation for hokum and hollow nostalgia in his work was matched only by his unreliability. I made numerous appointments to meet with this person, and he stood me up every time. It appeared his only function on campus was to occupy that demoted job title and cash the university's cheques.

I once attended a lunch-time lecture he gave on the art of publishing. Finally, I thought, someone's going to speak about the dirty word. My excitement was for naught. This sad, has-been-who-has-never-been stood before a small audience of eager students and rationalized his career of bastardizing his "poetry" in WonderBra advertisements and other such worthy venues. The man was clearly ashamed of his work and his use of it, and vigorously justified himself before us. No one had uttered a challenging word about his career. No one knew anything about it. But the man's shame was like a surface boil. He needed to confess, and confess he did -- wasting a solid hour of our time... never touching upon the dirty word.

One thing those writing seminars taught me is to never mistake a drinking buddy for a friend. A few years after finishing my education, a drinking buddy opened a bookstore and even had a hand in organizing a "festival of the book" in my city. I heard about this around the time my first book was published. The timing could not have been better. A five-minute slot during the book fest, at whatever point they could squeeze me in would have been a wonderful debut for my book. And so it was like an anvil landing on my head when my drinking buddy haughtily informed me I was not invited to read at the book festival. Hurt, I still bought four tickets to the event to show support, though I didn't attend.

The next year, I was again shunned by the book festival. And the year after that.

This weekend the book festival is once again in session (under an altered name, which makes me wonder if its dogged financial troubles haven't necessitated this), and once more I am authora non-grata.

If I didn't care about not being invited, I wouldn't be making this blog post. It's a situation fraught with conflict for me, being shunned by a group I've never sought to be a member of; ignored by people whose opinions and work mean nothing to me; uninvited by people who are not invited into my life and work. So, why would I want to be a part of the book festival? Because it supposedly belongs to the city, not our little tea party literati elite. In 2006, my 5th book will be published -- a full-length novel. And if the rarified folks who run the book festival were true to their word, true to their trite mandate, I would be invited. What grates on me is that this festival, which could be such a positive event in my city, is in fact one more little soiree for our self-appointed elite to masturbate one another.

The moral of the story for me is "Never mistake a drinking buddy for a friend," and never ask anything of professors who view their students as competition.