Russell Brown

Lecker's Lost Worlds

I have known Robert Lecker and his (now former) partner Jack David for thirty years. I met them while they were still in graduate school, around the time Lecker joined David as the other half of the editorial team for Essays on Canadian Writing, an academic journal that helped expand the critical dialogue in the then-emerging field of Canadian literary study. The two men later founded a coordinated venture, ECW Press, which became that very rare thing, an important critical and scholarly press not associated with a university. They not only published valuable monographs on Canadian writers and literary culture but provided the scholarly tools (bibliographies, critical guides) that, pre-Internet, helped make the Canadian critic’s task possible. (They also published books by some of the major fiction writers of the period: Hugh Hood, Leon Rooke, and John Metcalf.) When it became evident that they could no longer support the press on a diet of literary and critical texts, David and Lecker turned to trade and popular publishing to keep things going. (By that time David saw himself as a businessman rather than an academic.) Eventually the partnership, and Lecker’s publishing involvement, came to an end; the journal, which had long been Lecker’s to oversee, passed into other hands, leaving him to look for new outlets. These milestones in Lecker’s career – and, one infers from some of his remarks, his wounded feelings over the break-up of a long partnership that was also a meaningful friendship – have occasioned this memoir. I could continue recounting Lecker’s career by discussing his role as a teacher of Canadian literature at McGill and by providing details about his extensive critical writing and other editorial projects. It is clear that by any standards Lecker has achieved success, and that his contributions to Canadian culture and literary study have

Poet Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah (review)

Author interviews have been an important element in Canadian literary criticism, no doubt because ours is a young literature in which the contemporary plays a substantial role. Collections of interviews began to be published in 1973 with Donald Cameron’s Conversations with Canadian Novelists, and Graeme Gibson’s Eleven Canadian Novelists, and since then perhaps a volume a year has been published. In Poets Talk, the most recent, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy interview seven Canadian writers about their poetry. Five of these writers are well known (Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, and Fred Wah); two may be somewhat less familiar: the Native author Marie Annharte Baker and the politically engaged Jeff Derksen. Because several of the poets in this volume are also authors of fiction, the focus is not everywhere so strict as the title of the collection might suggest. If you are interested in the authors being interviewed, these conversations are all of real value – but the volume is not without its weaknesses. Though the book obscures the fact, the time of these interviews has largely passed, and they feel somewhat dated. Poets Talk was published in 2005, but these interviews (which can be located in time only by internal evidence) took place as much as fifteen years earlier. Two (those with Kroetsch and Marlatt) are quite evidently from 1990; two are from a few years after that (the interview with Mouré dates from around 1993; Brand from around 1995). Several of these pieces are printed with dingbats, which suggest they have been spliced together from separate occasions: thus the first part of the Baker interview seems to date from the early 1990s but the last section is from 2003. Nothing else is that recent: no part of the Derksen interview (which also appears to have been assembled) is later than 2001; the interview with Wah is at least two years earlier than that. My second reservation concerns the interviewers. In the four interviews they conduct jointly, they sometimes get in one another’s way, and whether working together or separately (Butling with Brand and Baker; Rudy with Wah), their questions and responses are shaped by their own agendas as much as by their interviewees’ concerns.

Mordecai and Me: An Appreciation of a Kind (review)

university of toronto quarterly, volume 75, number 1, winter 2006 provide a cross-section of the field and a sense of the range of research being undertaken. The least satisfying, because most predictable, in my view are the papers that apply – using this word advisedly – conventional theoretical paradigms to the issues. One can tolerate only so many abstractions reiterating the same dozen phrases before the eyes glaze or the teeth clench. In contrast, I fully admire Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s very personal analysis of her family’s effort to raise their son in a home in which each parent has equal value and is equally recognized. Her detailed account and subtle understanding of ‘parenting [as] a school of moral reasoning and self-development every single day’ brings fatherhood (as experience not institution) into the picture in hopeful ways while making a powerful feminist argument. While Of Woman Born makes its presence felt in all the essays, mostly it seems to serve as pretext rather than engagement with Rich’s text. A couple of the pieces recognize Rich’s limitations (her racial perspective, of course), but it is clear that, as O’Reilly notes, her book has not been superseded. Rich is still the great mother of motherhood studies. (jeanne perreault)