In November of 2019 I spoke to Nyla Matuk about colonialism, activism, and resistance poetry for the Fall issue of the Montreal Review of Books. Matuk's book, Resisting Canada, was just about to come out from Véhicule Press, and I for one was excited to see such a revolutionary book in the Canadian literary milieu.The book is beautiful and searing, an anthology of voices championing defiance against a settler state that silences and abuses its population while simultaneously praising itself for its image as a progressive and liberal melting pot.There is never a bad time to honestly discuss Canada's oppressive tactics and colonialist heritage. But right now, as the federal and provincial governments, RCMP, and Coastal GasLink/Transcanada flagrantly violate Wet’suwet’en, Canadian law, and international law, it feels particularly relevant. To quote Erica Violet Lee, the land defense currently being carried out is "an enactment of Indigenous law and an affirmation of Indigenous life." As we witness Canada's assault on Indigenous rights, we must take action.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a writer in possession of a good idea, must be in want of a grant. Last year I was on a Canada Council granting jury, and it not only enlightened me as to how the whole process works, it also renewed my faith in the Canada Council in general, and in the granting process in particular.Over the years some of my writer friends had gotten the distinct impression that the Canada Council was this edifice of insiders. Those who got grants kept getting them, and those on the juries awarded grants to their writer friends. And this bitter conviction stopped many of them from applying. “I’m not going to win anyway, so why try?” It doesn’t help that by default, a writer’s life is an incessant litany of rejection.But after having been on the jury, I’m now convinced we all should apply annually.

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Someone with two decades of experience getting critiques of their writing shouldn’t curl into a ball after an editor’s comments, right?Then why, after receiving a developmental edit on my first attempt at a novel, did I find myself in such a pit of despair? (Yes, that pit, that ball; I was every cliché imaginable.)

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“I’m writing a novel in English that’s inspired by wǔxiá fiction.”As I finished speaking in Mandarin, forty middle school students stared back at me with stunned eyes. It was as if I had suddenly transformed into a xiákè, a wandering warrior, who had stepped out of the pages of a wǔxiá novel and into their classroom in Chóngqìng, China. In reality, I was only a visiting writer and translator, with no martial arts skills or supernatural powers, recently returned to visit the land of my birth.Gasps and questions continued, becoming louder and louder.Mrs. Hé shushed her students and turned to me with awe. “Wǔxiá fiction is so rooted in traditional Chinese literature and culture. How can you write wǔxiá in English?”

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I wonder sometimes if navigating the line between fiction and non-fiction and being steadily clear on which side of this line you’re on is a curse only authors of marginalized backgrounds and identities must balance on. The logic holds because, to my knowledge, non-marginalized authors are not asked about the truth in their fiction or the imagination in their memoirs: No one asks French-Canadian Booker winning author Yann Martel about his experiences living on a boat for 227 days with a tiger and a zebra. No one wonders if Elizabeth Gilbert inserted a bit of fiction into her memoir of eating pasta, practicing Shavasana, and drinking wine with a warm-blooded Latin lover.

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Having entered the professional writing community slightly later in life, outside of an academic environment, and in a province that still felt new to me, I would have felt adrift if it wasn't for Montreal's literary scene. The sheer number of cultural events happening at any given time makes it nearly impossible not to engage with, and therefore, finding a community doesn't become an insurmountable task. [read_more]

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Whether or not to separate the art from the artist is often debated as though an abstract idea, yet, any decision produces tangible repercussions. Many discussions fail to consider that different responses may be warranted when focusing on the work of living artists, who use the power and platforms gained from their artistic success to cause harm. Upon discovering that authors we support are predatory, we have a decision to make on how we will interact with them as readers.

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I find myself stuck on nineteen words these days, repeating in my mind, filling every last inch of space. They have bonded themselves to my TO-DO LIST, like cloud to sun, blocking out encroaching deadlines, commitments, the need to buy milk on my way home. They have raised themselves like a wall around my mind… a blockade between me and my own words.Nineteen words said Wednesday night by a very dear friend, over dinner in this broken city:

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Impostorism has been described as an internal experience of thinking or feeling that others view you as an impostor, as if it’s all in our heads, but more often than not, what’s in our heads are the stories we’re told about ourselves, and it’s hard not to speak in the narratives we’re given.

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Back in the summer, when reading outside was a thing, I was sitting on my stoop, engrossed in Tommy Orange’s There There, when an older white woman interrupted to inform me that she’d quit reading the same novel a quarter of the way through because it was “too sad.” She said it like, How could I be expected to digest such a thing? Like, Isn’t reading supposed to be a pleasure and what was this, some kind of tricky trick to make me feel bad? And then she asked me, dubiously, whether I liked it and whether I was going to finish it.

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Crossing an international boundary in the current social climate is not easy for anyone, but when you’ve got a Native man, woman, and two-spirit trying to cross in a borrowed car using only the Indian status card of the driver, things get complicated fast. As my friends and family who make the point of using their tribal ID at the airport know all too well, asserting Indigenous sovereignty in the face of settler colonial bureaucracy is a tricky thing

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I don’t know exactly when I started being exploited...At the time, I worked in the most absurd and fucked up place in the whole universe: a large industrial factory. The owners were related to each other, a nepotistic mess. It was a father and son team. The son was a forty-year-old man who was brought up to feel entitled to everything. He sort of ran the show or aspired to. His parents had both been abusive to each other and their children. There was no such thing as boundaries or professionalism in this job. They brought all their internal drama to work, and yelled and screamed at each other in front of me. I was the only administrative staff. The rest of the workers were in the back. [read_more]

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The world of The Blue Clerk comes alive in colour. It is all “violet toll roads, freezing violet, museums of blue, violet turbines, blue vistas,” (211) all “the sense of orange” (209), all “the escarpment of a yellow house” (209). This world is moving like the water by the wharf where the Blue Clerk lives, a space of experience and texture, rather than time and place. The text is urgent and it is contemplative, it is stressed and unstressed, it lives in the complexity of difference and duality. Within the narrative, the main fixed points are the conversations between the Clerk and the Author,

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Five-hundred-and-twenty-five years ago, confused Europeans “discovered” the “New World”. Heaps of broken brown bodies marked this great achievement as the Europeans congratulated one another. Brave explorers, selfless men of God, and devout Pilgrims soon began pillaging, raping, and slaughtering their way from sea to sea. They rename our homelands “North America.” Their descendants tell us that those men were seeking their fortunes, trying to save souls, hoping to find simple freedom for themselves.

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We can achieve so many positive & progressive actions, if the people who have the means to do something were at the very least, sympathetic to some of the things we’re discussing here. I don’t want to be one of those people who talks a lot about change but it’s never reflected in their actions. That’s one of the reasons these awards exist—it’s a conscious decision to try and set some kind of example.

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I’m always surprised to see blank stares on writers’ faces when I launch into a speech about copyright. Some of them aren’t clear why copyright really matters. Others aren’t sure what copyright even is. Fair enough—it’s not the sexiest topic in the writing world. But even if you don’t notice it, it’s fundamental to our business.

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I told someone a story because I knew they would spread it. Stories were told to me with the same intent. Between women in Canlit, these circulated narratives are often about men in the community. Charming abusers. Tenured predators. Shitty men with track records of repeated shittiness. Let’s be explicit: women don’t take joy from these stories, in being the orator or the audience.[read_more]

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I’m joining the team as the new CNF Editor. I'm ready to read all your nonfiction—but I have a particular fondness for the lyric essay, the flash essay, striking memoir, non-consumptive travel writing, interviews with surprising people, critical essays that teach us something, care about language and can be appreciated by a general audience, and mixed-or-hybrid prose pieces that actively redefine what creative non-fiction can be and do.

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Paige Cooper’s stories have appeared in a number of excellent journals and have been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. Her debut collection Zolitude was published by Biblioasis this past February. Hailing from Canmore, based in Montreal, and traveling widely in person and on the page, Paige creates fictional worlds that resist easy categorization or resolution. Brad de Roo spoke with her about narrative corruption, artistic tourism, short story form, and ‘the splashy chaos of reality.’[read_more]

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