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Volume 2 #1 |
Fall 1998 |
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EDITORIAL |
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In Prince George, one of the supermarkets has an in-house label which it calls "Memories of..." It offers "Memories of Kobe" hamburger patties and "Memories of Alberta" frozen pizza, to name but two. I doubt whether many northern British Columbians have been to Kobe and I, for one, don't associate supermarket pizza with Alberta. What they're really selling is a kind of false memory syndrome that arises around the idea of some place, though we may have never experienced that place directly. So it is with the narrative about writing in Montreal. Every scholar of Canadian literature knows the story of the McGill group/Preview/First Statement/Northern Review/Contact/Vehicule line of descent. We can recite the names from memory: Smith, Scott, Klein, Layton, Dudek, Cohen, Norris. We all look back to the Montreal of the forties through sixties as the source of modern English Canadian writing. Toronto and Vancouver certainly have produced "stars," but no other city can claim preeminence over Montreal as a source for influential Canadian literature. The phenomenon must have something to do with the minority position of English speaking people in Quebec. Somehow, this minority position of English Montreal writers is a refreshing change from the stereotype of the vilified "dominant culture": the white Anglo Saxon male apologists for the ruling class and the status quo whom we all love to hate. English Montreal writers have always been gutsy underdogs in the midst of a vigorous French speaking culture. This issue of It's Still Winter does a number of things:
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