I Read Canadian Day is a day conceived as ‘a national celebration of Canadian books for young people, with the goal of elevating the genre and celebrating the breadth and diversity of these books.’ But in 2023, its own website acknowledges that it’s also a day that celebrates the ‘richness, diversity and breadth of Canadian literature.’
As I walked this morning I thought about my own experience with Canadian writing, both as a child and an adult. I’m 65, so back in the early ‘60s, only a few authors easily spring to mind: Lucy Maud Montgomery, Morley Callaghan, and Farley Mowat. (Callaghan wasn’t primarily a children’s writer, but his young adult novel Luke Baldwin’s Vow was excerpted in one of our school readers.) A few years later, I read Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell.
All these books touch on what Margaret Atwood argued was the central theme of Canadian literature in the first half to 2/3 of the 20th century—survival. Sometime physical survival, as in Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens; sometimes psychological survival, finding one’s place, a theme in Montgomery and Callaghan and Mitchell. Survival isn’t a theme specific to Canadian literature, of course, and not every literary scholar agreed with Atwood, but it may be telling that when I was being interviewed by another Canadian about my own books last week, and I answered the question about deeper themes by saying that they were in part about the love of place, of a geography and landscape, his comment was, “That is SO Canadian.”
When Jack McClelland (and others) began to actively promote and publish Canadian authors telling Canadian stories in the 1970s, my earlier enjoyment of Mitchell and Callaghan and Mowat and Montgomery (a lot of ‘M’ s! – even Callaghan is ‘Morley” and prominent among Canadian writes of the time were Margaret Atwood and Margaret Lawrence….but I digress) made me predisposed to read what was being published. While those children’s books had been primarily rural stories, resonating with me and my own small farming town upbringing, I began to read of worlds I didn’t yet know: the Toronto-set books of Robertson Davies; the Montreal-set books of Mordecai Richler (another M!). And then into worlds, too, that didn’t exist – Ottawa writer Charles deLint’s urban fantasies set in not-quite-Ottawa; Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, that starts in Toronto but moves into another world altogether. At about the same time, British Columbia writer Wiiliam Gibson’s Neuromancer created language now part of our everyday speech (Gibson invented the term cyberspace in an earlier short story, but it was Neuromancer, his debut novel, that brought it into common usage). Neuromancer is the only book to have ever won the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award.
Perhaps a major turning point for Canadian children’s books came in 1979, Roch Carrier published Le chandail de hockey (The Hockey Sweater), a short story about a boy in rural Quebec who is sent the wrong hockey sweater – a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey instead of a Montreal Canadiens sweater. Adapted by the National Film Board into a short film, then published as a picture book by Tundra in the early 80s, it is my impression that The Hockey Sweater helped change the demand for Canadian children’s stories, although the timing must also have helped! The Canadian Children’s Book Centre had been created a few years earlier, and The Canadian Children’s Book News began publication in 1977. Since then, organizations across Canada have sprung up to promote Canadian writers of works for children and youth: the Forest of Reading program run by the Ontario Library Association gives out 10 awards for Canadian children’s books yearly – and of course the I Read Canadian organization’s mandate is to promote Canadian children’s books and reading.
Canadian children who read become Canadian adults who read (we hope!) and the breadth and depth of Canadian literature has never been wider. Indigenous voices, new-immigrant voices, voices of people marginalized for many and multiple reasons; memoir, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels; short stories, novels, novellas, whether published traditionally (by big presses and small) or independently produced; verse on broadsheets, hand-sewn chapbooks and hand-bound books; limited editions and trade paperbacks, ebooks and internet serials – so much to explore, to enjoy, to learn from. And to contribute to, by so many talented, passionate Canadians.
marianlthorpe.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.