THE ROAR OF A LITERARY LION
‘I just want to put out a book every year that has stunningly good short stories in it’
John Metcalf has been editing a collection of Canadian stories for years. It’s what our writers do best, he says.
Edited by John Metcalf Oberon (oberonpress.ca) $19.95
Best Canadian Stories 12
It certainly feels as though the Canadian short story has had a revival lately, what with Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13 and Carrie Snyder’s Juliet Stories winning awards and doing so very well on the critic lists. And there’s another Alice Munro to savour.
But for John Metcalf, the short story never went away. In his opinion the discipline has always provided the best in Canadian fiction.
The occasion for an interview with this fierce lion of Canadian literature is the recent release of the Best Canadian Stories of 2012 by Oberon Press.
For about 42 years, Oberon has been soliciting and compiling into a short volume the hidden gems of CanLit. And for many of those years, Metcalf has been involved in editing the volume. Along the way, some of the most interesting literary voices, both as editors and as writers, have been involved.
The series was started in 1971 with a book called Fourteen Stories High, which was edited for Oberon by David Helwig, the writer and professor, and Tom Marshall, both of whom were in Kingston at the time. Helwig was teaching at Queen’s University.
After Marshall left, Helwig carried on with the blessing — urging — of the publisher, making the first book into an annual event intended to represent all the new writing that was beginning to appear in the early 1970s from the literary magazines and in manuscript form, Metcalf said. As well, the first of the small presses, such as Coachhouse and House of Anansi, were starting up. It was a period of great activity and nationalist fervour.
Helwig drew in the well-known literary editor Joan Harcourt, and this new duo continued for a few years. Metcalf took over in 1975 when Helwig was offered a job in Toronto at the CBC. Metcalf headed the project for about seven years, then he handed off to a successor. It’s a bit like tag-team wrestling.
Metcalf worked with Harcourt, he says, until there was a fallingout. She left, he stayed. Metcalf says he believed then, and is firm still today, that the only thing that matters is the quality of the work. Metcalf is not for turning.
At that time, Metcalf brought in writer-editor Clark Blaise to help out. Blaise had an extensive background in American writing. The appointment was not without controversy. There was an intense anti-American feeling in Canadian literary circles. But Metcalf persisted. “I brought Clark in because I knew that he knew what mattered. He was invaluable to me. We got down to some serious literary matters.” Metcalf decided to put his flag in the ground and call the short story collection Best Canadian Short Stories to signal that “we had stopped messing around.” The change was made over bitter objections, he said. Eventually Blaise left Canada and returned home to the U.S.
That period of nationalist enthusiasm in Canada remains a bugbear for Metcalf, the transplanted Brit. He believes that it produced Canadian writing of a certain mediocrity. As long as the book was “Canadian,” it was esteemed. That meant watereddown quality, he said. Nor had Canadians read widely enough, in his opinion, to know “what was what.”
To replace Blaise, he looked to where the best short-story writing was being done, the United States. He recruited the U.S. writer Leon Rook, David Helwig returned, and Metcalf left the scene until seven years ago, when Metcalf was tagged again and went back into the ring as editor of the annual after a long absence. In between, he led Porcupine Quill and today also shepherds Borealis.
The legacy of this series is massive.
“I think it is one of the most hugely important publishing ventures that the country has ever seen. It’s just that nobody knows about it.”
It has published writers over the years who have risen to national prominence.
To gather the stories needed for publication, Metcalf reads all the literary magazines in the country. “This ought to get me a bloody medal in itself,” he says, but many are coming to the editor in manuscript. After he does that, he writes to people he knows, soliciting new work. “It’s a great privilege for me because I get to see the work. But you get pissed off with it all.”
That’s because he publishes the stories, they are good, and no one in the country knows who these writers are.
For example, Caroline Adderson, the author of the first story in the book, the marvellous and powerful story Poppycock, has had several books published and has been in the Best Canadian Stories three times, and still no one knows who she is, Metcalf says. She is now teetering on the verge of a breakthrough with her latest book, Metcalf says, in the U.S. and in Britain, where one of her stories is listed for a rather lucrative prize.
“If this book came out and it, let’s say, won the Giller, everyone would go around and say, haven’t we discovered a wonderful new writer. And people like me would say, ‘You miserable bastards, where were you for the first six books when she was starving to death?’ ”
This speaks to a broader ignorance in the reading public, he says, pulling no punches.
“The only books that Canadians know about are books published by big houses that have had a big advertising budget put behind them.”
If Alice Munro, for example, had not been published in the New Yorker, no one would ever have heard of her, he says.
“What I say to people is, ‘Don’t puff yourself up with pride because you never recognized these people. The Americans did, but you didn’t.’ ”
For Metcalf, pretty much all the good writing in Canada is in the short-story form, which is the “unread form. Very, very talented writers are in a hard place in Canada, I think.”
About his own volume, he admits the word “best” is subjective. Or even the year, because “who knows when the manuscript was actually written?”
“I just want to put out a book every year that has stunningly good short stories in it, that people can read if they want to and enjoy.”
Some of the writers included in the book are Lynn Coady, Douglas Glover, Steven Heighton and Nadine McInnis, who teaches at Algonquin College and whose most recent collection of short stories, Blood Secrets, was published last fall.
If there is a great short-story writer out there in the bush whom he’s missed, he’s sorry, but he says, “I think I’ve got most of them.”
Why aren’t short stories read, as Metcalf has asserted?
They are very difficult, he says. “You have to know what you are doing when you read them. It requires commitment and hard work. And it requires having read hundreds of short stories beforehand so you, the reader, can understand what is being done and how it is being done.”
But judging by his slim volume, they are worth the effort.