English going on now than there ever has been in Montreal. And I think the creative writing program at Concordia has contributed a small amount to that. I would say it's really an exciting place for young writers to be involved. Not so exciting for somebody like myself, who's been through all of these different stages, but I'm really glad to see it happening. I don't go to all of the events by any means, but I'm glad that they're there. One other way to answer the question is that when I went to Montreal I felt quite a solitude. I felt that a lot of the English writing that I had been surrounded by in Toronto when I was there, was just not happening in Montreal. I mentioned the Vehicule group, but by no means did this group play a huge part in the Montreal artistic life of that period that ended of the 70's. Barry: Can you tell us more about your publishing activity? Gary: I got this urge to start Quadrant and try to create some kind of an infrastructure for new writing to happen in Montreal. So in the end I produced 3 publishing companies: Quadrant, Nuage, and Cormorant. That was my little bit of activity to try and get some things happening in Montreal. Don: I was living in Fredericton in the 70's and you gave a reading there at some point, and when Cormorant was mentioned one of the profs told me that it would never work . Gary: It worked wonderfully well. We sent out 10,000 letters and offered 7 books for 30 bucks and we got 1000 subscribers: 10%. Nobody in the history of direct mail publishing, I think, has ever got 10% before. Don: Did you publish a book called Pilgarlic the Death? I remember reviewing it years ago and saying, "this is a great!" I just loved that book for some reason. Gary: It is a great book and I did it as a reprint; it had gone out of print and it's one of those books if you're interested in the mythic tradition in Canadian writing, it's wonderfully rich. It worked really well, that whole process, but it was a moment in time. You couldn't do it again now because the direct mail, the post office and phones, and electronic media are all full of people trying to sell you things. We were kind of lucky at a time when there was closing down in the large presses. People were open to this appeal. Barry: It was ambitious and unlike the tradition I grew up in. You had a marketing strategy. If you think about Talon and blewointment and all of the small presses operating during the 60's -- you see almost the reverse. The books wouldn't go very far because, for many reasons, there wasn't that marketing push.