A rough patch: all those January plans and nothing adding up. No money coming in, no big thoughts, not even small ones that are all that interesting, and a newspaper editor who’s sat on your good piece for six weeks and counting. Not even yours truly would run it now. My major obsessions these last couple of weeks? The Olympics, of course, there’s a distraction from having to see the bank manager about extending the line of credit and a leaking bathroom that has cost me twelve hundred dollars for four plumber visits and isn’t fixed yet. More folk asking me about the next book. A nice two sheets of plans but bad days, plenty of them.

About those Olympics: Alistair MacLeod, in his wonderful story “The Closing Down of Summer,” writes a paean to the coal miner as silent athlete, the mountaineer who works under, not over, the ground but who pursues his excellence to no applause. It is an elegy to physical work as it used to be performed, and MacLeod’s miner laments, with a certain irony, the sort of work that the subsequent generation does. The sons and daughters have become “successful” in a material manner in which the miners who made it so are not. Work of the physical kind has become, for the newer generation, a pastime—something that is done at the gym. They are doctors and lawyers and dentists moving “their fat pudgy fingers over the limited possibilities to be found in other people’s mouths.”

Or they are writers such as this one, realizing in a bad moment that that they have been sitting not for days but years at a desk and that, in my case, the father who was the example died at seventy because his atrophied body simply packed it in; that it has not so suddenly come to that point where exercise as something that might have occurred in the ordinary working day has not been a fact of this writer’s life for a couple of decades. Time to look around for something more to feel shitty about, which is not hard—not on oneself, anyway, but tough on the loved ones around you. Think, for instance, of François Hamelin skating his way to lithe and speedy victory on the short track and Marianne St-Gelais, his silver medalist partner, wildly applauding his success from the stands. “Now how come you don’t cheer like that when I finish an article?” I say to the wife—a joke of course, though maybe a fantasy, too, from time to time, and funny enough. But shit, did I really have to blow up and make a fool of my stupid selfish self when I told the kid in the morning that not quickly washing a dish that she had only used for a slice of toast, instead of putting it in the dishwasher, was pathetic? Man, I have to learn to keep this misery to myself.

Lumpen I may feel at times like these, in more ways than one, and so it was that I did eat humble pie and take my wife’s instruction and go out and get a little exercise. Let the cold morning air do what I’ve been depending far too much on shorter and shorter espressos to do. Certainly, exercise helps. It gets the blood rushing and improves the mood, if not the thoughts.

And as I head to the gym myself, one of MacLeod’s city Canadians whose privileges have estranged him from physical work, it strikes me that there is at least one way in which writing is actually quite like an athletic endeavour after all—though I think less of the mountaineer than of the baseball or hockey player in a slump. Hitting badly. Not scoring goals. Only nobody’s going to bench me but myself, and there’s no one else on the bench to come forward. So what can you do but keep playing and shoot through it. Exercise, sure, but keep writing. Find the groove again. Endure the bad days. Believe there are more good ones around the corner.

What you can’t do is quit.

Well, just how did I manage this? I’m on the West Coast of Mexico, at the moment, staring out over the Pacific lapping at sands just a hundred yards away, here on assignment for a Toronto magazine. I’m writing a profile of a fella hard at work, just finishing a novel, and know enough about the writing life to take him at his word when he says he’s not to be disturbed until three. You would expect as much, really, given that I grew up in a novelist’s house and have had a head start on what it actually takes in the unfolding of a day, week, month and year for a writer to be able to write.

I’m talking about time—or what I prefer to think of as ‘time around time’. That’s the cushion a writer really needs in order to be able to produce.

Any of you who writes or perhaps wants to and has spoken to a writer will likely have had a conversation in which words along the line of “I would be writing my novel, if only I had the time.” This is a notion Margaret Atwood famously mocked when, a doctor having said as much, she replied, “And I’d have been a brain surgeon if only I’d had the time.”

At its most basic, time is, of course, of the essence. Nothing at all gets written if a writer does not actually put pen to paper and do the work. It is in the nature of the job that life itself has manifold means of getting in the way. Hence the English critic and novelist Cyril Connolly’s remark: “There is no more sombre enemy of art than the pram in the hallway.” This is a very amusing statement and it has been much quoted but should be taken with a grain of salt as Connolly, a member of London’s upper-classes, also declared, after his marriage, that “the problem is, I am still homosexual, emotionally” and probably had in him a degree of English aristocratic contempt for children, best dispatched out of the house and to boarding school at, say, the age of six months. Still, there is truth in Connolly’s little aphorism: as I say, life gets in the way—as, closer to home, Alice Munro knows all too well, having been, for this reason, especially sympathetic to women wanting to write and having to cope with being mothers at the same time—though I don’t actually see Connolly having pushed that pram around a lot.

Even in my own family’s case—my father Mordecai having been of that generation we all envy, where one job was enough to keep most households afloat—there was a division of labour that saved the author upstairs from the prams in the hallway (five, over time) and did not exactly fill the children with pride. It used to drive my elder brother Daniel, in particular, quite batty when my father would brag that he’d never changed a nappy in his life. Good on him, I suppose, and right up his alley of humour. But it left his kids, the boys especially, with a virtually un-winnable task of proving to their wonderful partners that they did not need a social revolution to split the chores, do the shopping, cook and then wash the dishes and change the diapers, etc. (In fact, my father was not oblivious to this, just unable to do anything about it. In Joshua Then and Now, the scene about wife Pauline’s meltdown over bags of groceries and whatever has happened to her life was played out in my own house a few times.)

But, in truth, all that life getting in the way is actually the point of it. I’m sure that miserably sequestering oneself away as a writer is a very viable option for many, but then you have to ask yourself if you really want to be that person. Don’t you want to go down to the market on a Saturday morning, hang out with the kids and then the teenagers when you’re not exhausted, and have family time in the evenings or on a Sunday when your partner is not working and the young ones are not at school? Isn’t that the point of making a living as a writer? (Frankly, I even see writers’ retreats as dyspeptic kinds of places heaping the blame on the people you leave behind.)

Yes, I’d say, which means that understanding and then managing the conditions that allow you the cushion of time around time and then the creative possibility of that precious kernel of clear time itself is all the more important. How do you do this? Well, I’m approaching fifty and I’m still learning or, more honestly said, still having trouble aligning what I know about how I work with the way I work when I do, but mostly it all comes down to the howlingly banal.

Drink less, if you want to get up in the morning and the morning is when you write. Don’t waste precious time answering e-mails or surfing the web for headlines or a bit of permissible peeping first thing in the morning—after the kids have gone to school and the wife has left for work and the animals have been fed and the cat let out and the dogs walked and the humidifiers filled and the kitchen cleaned and the Mom dealt with—if first thing in the morning is when you do your best work.

Don’t schedule your appointments for then and don’t, if you do have one away from home (and home is where you work), decide that you’re actually making an economy of time by shopping at No Frills or wherever because it’s right there, because then that clock in the corner will have chimed twelve and you’ll know that it’s only reasonable, now to feed yourself—maybe down at the Chinese on Broadview because you can do it for six bucks, though you haven’t actually earned any money yet this week, besides you can take the dogs who are looking up at you plaintively and with disappointment because they can’t quite come to terms with just how boring a master you are and next thing you know you’ll be on the couch having a nap—doing some research, whatever you choose to call it—and the day will be mounting towards its four o’clock fury and then the kids and the wife will be back home and you’ll be hollering at the kid for not walking the dogs as if that short task and not all the other stuff you did is why you’ve managed to reach the end of another day with not much to show for it.

Get to your desk at four or at nine, sitting or standing but do it, and know that not just the Wednesday but the Tuesday and the Thursday play into it. (Write longer days than you’re used to, and I’ll wager that often you’ll blow the day afterwards because you really are spent and the mind, like the body, needs replenishing.)

Consistency is what the writer needs, consistency is what he must build, and he needs the time around time to do it if he has any chance of becoming that fella who really is quite boring—the one your disappointed dogs are looking at. After a while the intelligent writer knows that, barring the occasional Hunter Thompson and other cowboys, writers are boring. They have to be, if there is to be any actual excitement on the page. And what that really means is understanding that anything, even Mexico, that takes you away from your desk is going to rip into that time around time and make the time itself laggard and tarnished and bad. Sure, I get to be here (though with the wife and the kids would have been better) but the likelihood is that the days traveling here and back, the jet-lag and the poor performance afterwards and then the few days it will take to get back into the seemingly dull but absolutely essential and precious routine of the same thing happening, day in and day out for (wouldn’t it be glorious) a few weeks is the real cost of these glorious surroundings.

So I’d better make the best of it, work as I do uninterrupted—keep that time around time, and one day perhaps I’ll even have the courage to say, “No. Sorry. Can’t go to Mexico, there’s a book I’m writing and I don’t have the time.”

This last couple of weeks I’ve been writing at the dining room table, partly to keep the spread in view, but also because damn city life gets in the way, most recently with plumbing that isn’t working and the smell of urethane as a couple of painters work on the stairs. Any stronger and this could be the alley behind a gas station. So it goes.

One project will never truly get underway until I’m in the right place for it, which is Nova Scotia. I can write in a train station at rush hour and at the family table before dinner with a dozen kids around, but this overdue book, for some reason, demands I be in the place I’m writing about, an opportunity I am trying to put into play later this month. A travel assignment is twisting me up more than it should. A couple of straightforward journalism pieces (that never are) beckon. A lecture due this spring – a first written assault on an idea that no publisher wanted but just won’t go away (a good sign) – deadlines are colonizing my desk at the moment.

If you’ve been following these postings then you’ll know I’ve been trying to – what’s the word Mr. Harper’s put in vogue? – recalibrate. Note, however, that in mine as in the case of most writers, that involves making an assessment for the New Year, estimating what I am capable of, trying to improve my productivity and working practices – rather than, say, skiing in Val d’Isère or somewhere, as apparently one hard-working Tory MP paying attention to his constituency is doing, or preparing for the Olympics as our PM will be doing soon enough. I’ve talked about how (1) how writers tend to gauge their success, and (2) how too much emphasis on the barometer of financial returns of whatever it is we do to get by can usurp vital time and energy and get in the way of what, if we think back to why we started, is the primary aim – all those lofty and difficult projects and ideas that prompted us to become a writer in the first place.

As far as income is concerned, it took me a while to come to the admittedly banal realization that writers are not like oil riggers or cops or plumbers or painters (you will understand if, what with the air sharp in here and it being too cold to open the windows much, tradesmen are on my mind). There is no benefit in overtime for us. No time-and-a-half after eight, double after ten and triple on bank holidays, or whatever it was I got paid in seismic, way back when. Even at their most efficient, writers face a ceiling on their revenue, because after so many hours in the day we just get stupid and write badly. Understanding the limitation this simple fact puts upon decent work will affect how a writer chooses projects and how well they are done.

If, for instance, you are a little bit presbyterian and so are hard put to say ‘no’ to anything, then you will probably learn that the cost of taking on too great a quantity of work, whatever that benchmark is for you, will be that the quality will suffer and that perhaps just one but more likely some of these projects will turn out sub-par. And, of course, this is bad news for a writer who is judged especially harshly by his or her last undertaking. In other words, if typically I am able to write twenty-five different newspaper pieces and ten other bits of work, but take on fifteen, then it is likely that I shall have a desk as I do today, with a couple of late pieces of work on top of many more. If, however, I recognize my ceiling, then I can choose more carefully, perhaps for the money or the travel and treats that come along with some assignments. Or reduce my targets because I understand that for a given time some less remunerative piece of work will require concentration. But in all of these cases I am better off if I have some idea of what that ceiling is – and whether or not I can raise it.

This year, despite having a surfeit of the overdue very badly paid labours-of-love and other work like this blog which pays very little. (I like Rover and have good reasons for doing it but we’ll get into all those web-led arguments another time.) I have raised my benchmarks and the revenue ceiling that goes along with it, mostly because it seems to me that this is what you have to do in hard times – i.e., not make excuses for yourself but leap at opportunity and make the best of it. It’s taken me stupidly long years – Malcolm Gladwell suggests what, it takes at least ten? – to figure out how I might actually manage to do this. But even sage analysis cannot for a moment guarantee better performance.

I have a couple of techniques for that which I’ll be happy to share next time. But another deadline looms.

These days, we’re all talking about Haiti.

Post Chris Anderson’s declaration of The Long Tail, we are used to referring to ‘The Conversation’ — i.e., the prevailing subject on people’s minds that, in our new digital age, is launched with such force and from so many platforms that it consumes a much greater piece of the pie of peoples’ attention than ever used to be the case.

In publishing terms, we know now that a bestseller like Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol sells a huge amount of copies at the expense of other books. The number of readers, the dollars in their pockets, and the time that is chosen by them to spend reading is limited, and so if one book grabs a lot more of this measurable attention then it follows that competing books will be noticed and read less.

This is why, following the Hollywood model, more and more reliance is placed on that first weekend. It is the moment when a book or a film release is new and has a chance to dominate ‘The Conversation.’ The leaping front end of a graph of consumers’ purchases registers the astonishing domination fewer and fewer items have over the market of our interests than any of those in the thin, almost infinitely extending ‘Long Tail’ that represents all the other purchases we might choose to make or, in the realm of humanitarian crises (and the charitable dollars they engender) all those conversations about places other than Haiti that we might be having.

To wit: have you been hearing as much about Afghanistan, lately? I’d say not.

The interest we invest in ‘The Conversation’, whatever that is, now looms a whole quantum leap larger than was ever historically the case. What has not kept pace with this new reality of the digital age, however, are the judgments that we make about the truth and context of a story. What we have not yet learned to do is to nurture in ourselves an appropriate leveling response to all of the web-catalyzed news we describe as ‘viral’ – those stories that replicate themselves through people, in each moment of contact (each conversation) by a multiplier greater than one. We have not yet learned how to assess the true importance of a viral story or the effect that its volume and all the reverberating echoes of it have on the way we conduct our lives.

One could well argue that last year’s recession (never quite the Great Depression redux that we were told in nearly hysterical terms by the media that it would be) was actually the first ever viral recession, and that its economic importance – at least in Canada – was very much exaggerated because of the amplification it was afforded by today’s multitudinous platforms. Our participation in the viral nature of the recession as a story had the net result of making our fear of it spiral to even more anxious heights and this dread much greater than the actual measured effect of it – i.e., the truth of it – ever was.

An ironic comparison can be made, given our borrowing of the term ‘viral’ from biology, because at the very same time the bona fide virus that was H1N1 did not go viral, though of course our conversation about it and our fear (as could be measured by the length of vaccine lineups) certainly did.

The terrible earthquake that decimated the cities of Haiti is the first humanitarian cause that could be said to have ‘gone viral’, a story that will likely reach its peak with tonight’s (Jan. 22) George Clooney telethon. (The coalition of Canadian broadcasters is playing back up band rather than going up against it, which is probably sensible). In fact, it had a significant precedent in Bob Geldof’s ‘Live Aid’ work for Ethiopia twenty-five years ago – this, at a time before web communication was widespread and long before campaigns like Obama’s could ever have been fought, which says something interesting and constant about youth as historical ‘gatekeepers’ at the front end of a story.

But now the attention paid to a story can be so instantaneously great that a proper analysis of new laws of conversation applied to the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake would show, analogously to the sales of Dan Brown or any other bestselling item, that the extraordinary sympathy people are demonstrating towards Haiti is detracting from other realms of humanitarian concern, so that a string of pieces in the media saying, “Hold on, what about [fill in name of other forsaken place]? Doesn’t anybody remember that life is bad there too (and that your money that used to be directed to this cause is now part of the Long Tail and now in peril)?”

But that is not the point I am wanting to make here, and before you are tempted to send some vitriolic comment my way, neither am I arguing that Haiti does not deserve the historic amount of attention that it is getting. (I have been to Haiti and know something about its dire straits, having produced a couple of BBC Radio documentaries from there back in 1991.) Of course it does – and of course it did so long before the earthquake and the attention we are presently foisting upon it, but that is another matter. As a writer, one of the things that I am interested in is how stories spread and so I am fascinated by how loud and public the Haitian story is. Recently, on the way to meet friends, I passed two groups of three people and both were talking about Haiti and how they had given some but would like to give more. I came home and my daughter told me that she was giving more money. before I’d even started to speak myself. Not quite a scientific survey, but what better example could you have of ‘The Conversation’ actually being one?

If you want some more scientific demonstration of the way in which today’s media platforms have altered the nature of public conversations, take a look at this graph on Google Trends tracking web searches (in the top part) and references in the news (in the bottom part) of Canadian attention put Haiti’s way. You might also look at the graph showing Canadians’ interest in Afghanistan. Note, in particular, the decline in searches and news stories at end of the second.

In time, I believe, we the public will become accustomed to the way we ‘pull’ our news off the web (i.e., search for it) and how it is concomitantly ‘pushed’ at us with much greater force than in the past by the media racing to keep pace and competing against an ever greater number of competitors. We shall learn to factor in this augmentation and to modify our reactions in line with a more sensible assessment of the lasting significance of these stories and the truths they purport to convey. We shall become habituated to their velocity, in other words, and better able to gauge the extent of either the alarm that we should feel (the Recession, H1N1) or the ecstasy (Obama’s election and what was meant to have been the total revision of democracy in America, our joy in helping Haiti and the illusion that it will alter much).

But it’ll take a few goes. For now, it will be instructive merely to be able to follow the graph of our attention and to see whether or not we’re still talking about Haiti next month and the month after in the face of whatever is the next Big Thing, or if all we are doing is registering the biggest case of ADHD the world has ever seen.

The jury’s out.

Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that my pattern of work is every writer’s, just hoping that taking a little look at how I write (and how much I write), while I write and try, finally, to put out something bigger again, might be of help to other writers wanting to make their way. After all, writers don’t talk to each other a whole lot about how they work, they’re a naturally evasive bunch, but I suspect that the working patterns of many writers do have a lot in common. Besides, just as a decent company constantly examines how it functions so, I’d say, should the writer.

Last week I argued that a writer has two principal barometers of success: praise, effectively, and income. I talked a bit about my own P&L, something we’ll return to, and how setting and achieving set targets can serve as an indication of ‘success’.

The problem with the second gauge, however, is that achieving set income targets requires, for most writers in the majority to which I belong, not doing the actual writing that is supposed to be the point of it all. I myself do not teach; meeting my own targets depends by and large on the journalism I do. Last year, I completed upwards of 75 assignments and made about fifteen significant trips (i.e., significant enough to be disruptive) to meet my target. These assignments ranged from making a radio documentary or writing a 5 000 word piece requiring multiple revisions, to some fairly easy newspaper assignments that nevertheless take a few days and a lot of back and forth and engagements that are even easier, once the writing has been done, but that still manage to be anxious-making and time-consuming.

Seventy-five assignments and a dozen trips works out to about one and a half sold pieces a week and a trip once a month. In last year’s case, that was also seventy-five assignments and a dozen trips that were not in any way related to one overdue book project and another as close to the heart that I have not sold—no publisher wants it yet–and that I am impatient to get to because I want to do it. That’s a lot of distraction with a whole lot of opportunity cost. If you’re trying to be serious as a writer—that is, wanting to build a corpus and actually write while you’re still able in body and mind (I came to the game relatively late)—that’s a whole lot of work that is stopping the writer from doing the work that is his real intent.

So, already, the second barometer fails: sure, in 2009 I met my (income) target, but it could as easily be said that I failed vis-à-vis the greater task by hiding behind this second barometer and accomplishing nothing that was going to add to the books on the shelf and that could be deemed in an authorial sense to be truly worthy of note. Not in my own mind, anyway.

In truth, the judgment’s a bit harsh. Work doubles up. Not all of it is wasted and even ‘downtime’ is often not. The point is that not being obsessed with targets—not making these enabling or substitute tasks the principal one—is the second barometer’s important caveat. It may be too soon to decide that the year was fallow; certainly, learning one’s rhythms as a writer is a big part of understanding how to be that decently operating company—the one that is described, to Canada Revenue and at corporate security desks, as ‘Self.’

More anon.

How does a writer gauge his success? Or, at least, how does he or she do so in a manner that makes it possible to carry on? (We’ll say ‘he’ and ‘his’, if that’s alright, as I’m the one that’s most on my mind). If you are Dan Brown or, here in Canada, Margaret Atwood or—all kudos to him—Lawrence Hill, then the question may not even occur. If, however, you are in the wilderness of the middle ground along with most of the rest of the writing community (and where even Larry Hill languished for many years), then you are likely to do so by two barometers.

The first will be whatever is your measure of critical success—good reviews, comments from friends, being nominated to lists, perhaps even winning a prize or two. These plaudits matter, even more so when that first royalty statement arrives and you realize just how much in the wilderness you are even with all those good reviews, comments from friends and nominations and so on. This may be enough to have you carry on without deciding that you are costing your family too much by the money you are not earning or the often less than charming company writing makes of you and about which you feel quite guilty a lot of the time. And such kudos may help in the face of the advance you have likely not earned back, information that is of course now available not just to your own but to all publishers, who will be making only one calculation: the number of units sold as a portion of your advance and portent of profit.

The second barometer, of course, is income. Most writers, the ones who cannot count on royalty streams, do something else—teach, broadcast, write for newspapers, magazines or advertising companies, etc. The sensible writer sets himself a target, has a ‘P & L’ sheet, a bottom line and decides on a figure in this, the first week of January, that says “it is permissible within the context of my family to keep at it.” I’m lucky. My wife has never, ever, put such a question to me (it is a question, the question of whether or not you can meet your target), and though I think of her as my Canada Council and understand the tolerance and encouragement that is her much greater gift to me, nevertheless I set myself targets and list all my possible sources of work and revenue to gauge whether or not I am operating as a successful company.

For writing—for the practical—is a business, is still a job, and for it to be pursued successfully then I must take all sorts of measures, and take stock, for instance, of the time I must invest not just writing but acquiring work and tending to my employers and sowing the seeds of possible work with others. Some of this information, at least to me, is quite interesting. “I am able to see, for example, that revenue accrued from my work on the web grew from less than 1% of total income in 2007, to about 2% in 2008 but to over 16% in 2009. Last year, possibly an anomaly, web earnings constituted my second largest “account,” amounting to a greater sum than I earned last year from all of Canada’s conventional newspapers and weekly periodicals and four times as large as I earned from any one of them individually.

I am sharing this information not only because I think that some sort of education about how to actually make money, writing, would be a valuable component of a creative writing course (I have never taken one), but because I am interested in the abstract and this trend confirms what, in the public arena, we already know, which is that the digital universe is becoming even despite us a very important part of our lives, not just for what it offers as entertainment or through social networks but as a generator of work dribbling down even to those who may not be seeking it.

And so, the New Year demands a plan. A business plan. But this year, the plan and the numbers are different. More anon.

Two passing thoughts:

I had dinner with John MacLachlan Gray a while back — he, the co-author of the classic Canadian stage play Billy Bishop Goes to War and several thrillers since. Gray has a wonderfully dry sense of humour. Were he an actor, and so inclined, he’d make a wry, slightly acerbic Falstaff, or at least I’d have him play the part that way. But he’s not. He’s a novelist. He enjoys his craft and the business of plot, especially. “The problem with Canadian novels,” he said, “is that everything has already happened. They’re just about people getting over it.”

I found it hard not to laugh at this summary, even as my instinct was to jump in and defend all those Canadian novels I very much like and, indeed, I haven’t quite managed to dispel the thought since MacLachlan Gray put it in my head several months ago now. It was there during the National Post valkyrie Barbara Kay’s nasty little attack on Lisa Moore’s February, albeit a novel of mood and feeling (for a beautifully argued retort, one I wish I had written myself, see Stephen Galloway’s column in the same paper — he of The Cellist of Sarajevo, a novel that has endured its own fair share of hostile volleys, some feeling that the B.C. novelist has no right to write about war as he has not experienced it, which is rubbish.)

It was there as, a few weeks back, my wife and I watched fourteen episodes of the BBC’s adaptation of Little Dorrit — a feast of plot and, interestingly, a story that revolves around the denouement of a Bernie Madoff-like investment scheme and bank failure that preceded the antics of Charles Ponzi, briefly a Montrealer, by half a decade. (Little Dorrit was published between 1855 and 1857; Charles Ponzi started his too-good-to-believe financial shenanigans at the Banco Zarossi, founded in Montreal in 1907.) And my preoccupation with the Canadian artistic tendency to mood over plot was there again when I went to see Tumbling Dice, a piece of dance by Andrea Nann’s Dreamwalker dance Company that featured her longtime partner Brendan Wyatt but also readings by Three Day Road author Joseph Boyden and poet Karen Solie.

One of these pieces was there to honour Remembrance Day, which struck me as extraordinarily ironic as Nann was using the beauty of the body (she dances very sensuously and has put in movement the poetry of Michael Ondaatje as well as The Tragically Hip leader Gord Downie’s songs) to commemorate the act of war that seeks in its finality to destroy bodies. This left me uncomfortable, an ambivalence that was resolved when, more recently, I had the extraordinary experience of watching Briton Lloyd Newson’s ‘physical theatre’ company, DV8.

The piece was To Be Straight With You, a highly politically charged piece about the homophobia that is — paradoxically you would think — rampant within minorities that are already besieged. Newson’s absolutely riveting piece took testimony that had been gathered over a few years from male and female homosexuals within predominantly Muslim and Afro-Caribbean British working-class communities and interpreted these recordings played into the theatre in astonishing and edgy pieces of dance. (The artistic design that used words, lighting and projected images in place of sets was also fantastic and will, I’d wager, be as influential and copied in future as Robert Lepage’s own stage magic has been.)

It was an electric and invigorating melding of dance, documentary chronicling, and political message. And, while using sheer entertainment as a vehicle, the show had a currency, a sense of rectitude but also an expectation that moral injustice can and should be addressed, that is missing from a lot of Canadian work. We were watching a piece in which the unjust events were happening before us, not in some inalterable past — and it was up to us, not the performers, to get over it. Fascinating. Catch the company when you can. And read a little Dickens, too.

We are living through a tumultuous age, in Canada, as we undergo a radical revision of our political idea of our nation. Out are any ideas about Canadians as peacekeepers, gentle multiculturalists, environmentalists, Charter advocates — or, frankly, of ourselves as liberals. In is the new Canada, militarist and an energy superpower that the Guardian’s Georges Monbiot described, this week, as the worst environmental transgressor in the world, ready to trade Candu nuclear goods with India, a country that has already used them in their own not so Cold War with Pakistan, and feeling no obligation to explain itself to anyone — even to its critics right here at home.

Right or wrong, what this transformation has demanded is a total jettisoning of previous assumptions about our national character and, in particular, all those ones that flourished in the Pearson and Trudeau years of government.

It was never going to be enough to simply evolve out of the old identity; Canada, the ‘soft’ power, had to be roughly, even brutally, shoved aside and discredited and I think it’s fair to say, now, that Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has been utterly successful in this. It has quashed the Canada that I grew up in — an empathetic, progressive place — and discredited it meanly and with vilification, just as it has done Richard Colvin, the senior diplomat who was previously within the fold but dared articulate his concerns about the treatment of detainees handed over by Canadian soldiers to Afghan jails (a criticism of political decisions and not, as it has been characterized, of the soldiers who obey such orders) and, before him, any other appointees who have made the mistake of doing their jobs conscientiously and not merely as directed by this nasty, invidious bunch.

Our ruling party’s mission has been an ideological one, with nothing less than the complete transformation of Canada — the political, cultural and historical place — as its mission. Why is this a surprise? You do not have to think hard to remember how much Stephen Harper visibly hated the Canada that he acquired, and if we have seen just a little less of his seething enmity, it is because his work has been entirely unimpeded by a pathetic opposition in tragic tatters. (And I use the word ‘tragic’, here, in its classical sense — of opposition parties and their so-called leaders completely bouleversés by the faults of their own character.)

Ideology can brook no criticism and sees no proportion in it (as federalist Québeckers who have lived through the separatist years well know). To criticize the smallest part of an ideology and its practices is to criticize the whole, and the articulators of such criticisms, any criticisms, are perceived of as the enemy of the radical transformation — in this case, of Canada into an unapologetically belligerent nation.

This transformation is mythical and profound and operates not just “on the ground” but also on the level of the psyche. I believe that this job well done has had ramifications on the cultural plane of our nation, too, whether or not we realize it.

It may seem trivial to speak of literary awards in this light; however, when I look at most of the literary prize lists and their winnowing and the laureates that were eventually crowned, I see an extension of this phenomenon that has alarmed me for some time. (If you admired the pilloried Canada, then you must find some way to defend it.) In the realm of literature, of what we have come to call CanLit, previous ideas about ourselves have been rudely rejected. Of course they have been; literature is on the front line of the stories we tell about ourselves. It is where our sense of identity is not just defended, but also presaged. With that in mind, I would even say that my own book, This is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, could be construed as one of the last acts of a literary mood that is now out of favour: specifically, the joy that book took in being curious and so very interested in Canada and our literature and the stories we tell, rather than being embarrassed and impatient with, well, home.

I believe that this sea change in our view of ourselves, and the relish we have been collectively taking (or tolerating or waiting out) is part of why, for example, the superb novelists Lisa Moore and Michael Crummey were rejected by the so-called “Big Three,” as the Globe & Mail’s John Barber recently dubbed the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor-General’s and the Writer’s Trust Awards. A Cape Breton novel that had, however, the distinction of prefiguring the news, and two others that were historical and set elsewhere — and that could not therefore be perceived of as too conventionally “Canadian” — took the top prizes.

Moore and Crummey, I believe, were shortchanged because of their novels’ mood, their literariness or even the fact of their young authors’ early track record of success (establishment, so soon!). The New Canada requires acts of rejection all over the territory and is why, too, the Giller judge Victoria Glendinning’s shallow, lazy column in a British newspaper is still upheld as a somehow appropriate takedown of Canadian novels even when she has recanted all the positions that her supporters here apparently think she made. Trashing Canada — the old version of it that must be slayed — is a patriotic act.

Permit me a digression from my literary mandate as I have been amused, recently, by the bravura if not hubris of that — well, “stellar,” I suppose you could say — Québecker, Guy Laliberté and his baffling and vainglorious expedition to space. You have to admire the fella for seizing the day — for enjoying his success and what his wealth has made possible. But a little of me had to imagine how the ordinary impecunious artist might have taken advantage of his apparently charitable spending and make the best of an extravagant situation that I am actually not sure benefited the thirsty much. I’m not trying to be a spoiler, just sharing a little of the practical side of being a writer, really. So here is a letter — fictional yes — as might have been written by an Ontario accountant seeking Mr. Laliberté’s business.

Dear Mr. Laliberté

Creative Accounting Ltd.

Another year, another Giller—and this year, though not in everyone, a surprise: Linden McIntyre, relatively late to the craft of writing, won for only his second novel. The Bishop’s Man, a timely story of damage control in a pederasty-rife Church in the diocese of Antigonish. Novelists have their nose in the air even when they are not trained journalists—think of Nancy Lee, a few years back, and her story of the Vancouver disappeared in Dead Girls, or even of Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lectures a year ago, Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. One more newcomer in the years to come and you could declare the Giller’s anointment of people who mostly do other things (Vincent Lam the doctor, Linden the journalist) a trend.

Its juries’ choices are, as ever, unpredictable. The Giller’s founding instruction that the prize be given to the year’s best book still holds, and this year has led to acclaim for a novel that not all would pick up for a bathtub read. I believe there are wide discrepancies in the assumptions that authors and, on the other hand, readers make vis-à-vis what are the reasons most of us turn to novels at all, the lofty theme versus the fascination of specific detail in a book that simply transports the reader being one of them. But that is a subject for another day. When the Giller was founded, 16 years ago, not least it was to rebut the political correctness of the Governor-General’s literary prizes, where fair representation of Canada in all its regional and ethnic complexity has historically tended to complicate and often compromise the more venerable awards’ mandate, and the lavish gala evening of the new award was a challenge to the GGs’ bureaucratic strictures and ceremonies of no surprise. (The winners of the many GG categories are known in advance to publishers and other interested parties, though the jury is kept secret until the end.) The fun of celebrating an art flourishing at home, rather than its endorsement by the Queen’s extended hand, was the plan.

So the excited, festive atmosphere of the Giller Prize, an award that has completely altered the Canadian literary landscape (and, as competition in all spheres does, that has jolted the GGs into something approaching renewal) was a vital part of it all. Founder Jack Rabinovitch and his crew filled the room with the lively and the genuinely interested—journalists and publishers and advocates of novels and of Canadian culture—along with all those who had, through friendships or their social position, came along for the book season’s swell night, and what reigned was a collegiate sense of being a part of something exciting. The balance of the impassioned and the establishment made the evening work, made it even electric—and typically, after the night’s remarkably generous open bar was closed, a core of flattered and appreciative authors and publishers and their companions headed to the bar downstairs and kept the party going.

Of course you can’t plan such a thing, but there was real camaraderie in those moments. It was quite wonderful to see my father Mordecai, previously a winner, who, more than once, quietly footed the tab for drinkers a little blithely assuming that someone (Jack? a publisher?) was going to pay for their tipple, sitting with Guy Vanderhaeghe and Lisa Moore and Alistair MacLeod and the short-listed authors who had not won but were still jubilant and the way these clumps of festive writers and their partners and sometimes their parents carried on. Camaraderie trumped rivalry, the banner year for me having been 2001, when the debut novelists Michael Crummey, Michael Redhill and Timothy Taylor were on the shortlist—I don’t even remember who the winner was that time—or the year before when folk had partied so long that it seemed pointless to go home and I went to record a live BBC World Service interview about the prize at a CBC studio in my tux and then joined Vanderhaeghe and Michael Ondaatje, who’d won that year with David Adams Richards—at the Jet Fuel in Toronto’s Cabbagetown district for a morning coffee.

Today, however, the camaraderie—that sense of Canadian authors and readers are all in it together—has withered somewhat. The notion that everybody on the shortlist is a winner, a point of view that used to be emphasized on the night and that was not always a cliché, is not quite as convincing anymore. The device of a long list that is quickly being adopted by other awards—this year, the B.C. Award for Canadian Non-Fiction followed suit—may contribute to the event’s surrounding publicity (though it does not do so all the time) but also introduces an “off-the-island” element that accentuates losing and not making the list in its three stages rather than the kudos of being noticed in the first place.

I’d also hazard that the very success of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the effect of its now being the pre-eminent of three national literary awards for fiction, the others being the GG and the Writer’s Trust Award, rather than having been the upstart alternative to the historical situation of just one (the GG), as well as the way this not-quite superfluity of prizes has been compounded by a cornucopia of regional and municipal awards and now long lists, is that all this conglomerated information acts as a handy survey for readers provided by juries as focus groups rather than as a cue for the curious. Today, my impression is that the lists are being gleaned by a public collecting them all as one general piece of data and then perusing these for the likelihood of a book as a safe buy, rather than for the excitement of a literary surprise. When there were just a couple of key shortlists, more readers than do so presently used to buy the nominated novels in their entirety with a view to judging for themselves. This year—blame it on the economy if you wish—I met far, far fewer readers and attendees that read all or even just some or a part of some of the short listed books.

If this is a trend, then certainly the proof of it is borne out in bestseller lists. Prior to this year’s Giller decision, just one of the short listed authors of any of the prizes, barring Alice Munro (who doesn’t count because she would have been on the list anyway), was on a couple but not all of the lists and not in a high position, and that was Annabel Lyon for her thrice-nominated consumer’s fair bet of a good read, The Golden Mean. Said the CEO of one of the major internationals recently, “We can’t sell short list anymore.”

The recalcitrance of a reading public that used to feel less bombarded by lists and more involved in the fun of it all is compounded by the web and media’s new reality. Through its mass of hollering platforms, most of them merely recycling the same information, overwhelming effect is wielded for just one or two books, these endorsing at the expense of runners-up and also-rans in the distinctive qualities of which we used to be more interested. Linden McIntyre’s book will now certainly sell well, but in the same way only Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce, the 2008 Giller winner, was the only shortlisted novel to have significantly benefited from that year’s contest, I would not expect to see any of the other books nominated in 2009 to make much of a splash.

And unfortunately, this new effect of the Internet on how cultural products are endorsed and pushed towards the public is being compounded by the presentation style of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a CTV team wanting to sell itself as sexy television. (This year, an oversight, no attention at all was paid at the actual Four Seasons event to the ‘Giller Light’ event that, every year, accommodates all those who are not invited and raises funds for Frontier College and their literacy initiatives. Where was Ben Mulroney when we needed him?)

It is much harder to believe that the Giller Prize is all about the shortlisted books and not the winner, as McIntyre insisted in his acceptance speech when press releases and, as happened on the night, videos trumpeting the award’s effect in the market place were announcing last year’s winner’s 300 PER CENT RISE IN SALES; the 30 000 TO 90 000 COPIES leap of the winning book and—I’m not quite sure where this figure came from—the 60 MILLION DOLLARS in book sales for which the Giller was claiming responsibility.

Small wonder then, that rather than feeling one of the bunch, the already internationally successful and shortlisted author I congratulated in the lobby party afterwards said, “What, for losing?”

The more that selling books—the secondary effect of an award that is meant to be for excellence—is proclaimed as primary, then the more likely (and rational) it is for authors and publishers to feel the pressure of not winning and succumb to the nasties of competition as a zero-sum game and to feeling not quite so chummy or collegiate and ready to gather and to celebrate in the bar afterwards.

Perhaps it baffles you that I am lamenting the party when the award makes one author very rich and provides some relief to the publisher. (If only all prizes led to sales. An amusing fact of today’s literary contests is that an author can bring home, as one writer I can think of did, thirty thousand dollars in prize money even as next to no copies of the book are sold and the publisher is left in the lurch. Don’t believe the Writer’s Union of Canada, publishers are not villains fleecing writers. They have a business to run.)

This is true. Sometimes I miss that more convivial spirit of the Giller’s first decade and feel a little melancholy at just how far CanLit’s success has already brought us. I suppose we were bound to lose that innocence and start fretting about the rewards, more—though maybe this is why so many prizes have no cash award at all. The French, with their Prix Goncourt and Femina and Medicis are a case in point. I used to think them cheap but maybe they are just savvy. The cash divides us. Which is a pity. Perhaps it’s time for a Canadian Prix Medicis—awarded, by the way, to Montrealer Dany Laferrière this year. That’s not the way we work, of course. We like celebrity. We like to anoint and to make the unsuspecting suddenly rich. Still, we could learn to emphasize the sales aspects of the prizes that we do have a little less.

P.S. Take a look at my friend Michael Winter’s short and sweet montage of the evening. He’s a talent, he is—a novelist and a painter and a blogger too. Thanks, Michael—and to the Ink Spots, too.