{"content":[{"text":"Westword Column","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.088788,"width":0.17209199999999997,"height":0.020863999999999994}},{"text":"As a brand-new book author – after several years of magazine journalism – I was \n thrilled to be able to join the newly-fledged Writers Union of Canada in 1978. One \n of its attractions was the close-up view one had of literary icons who were also \n members, and this must have been how I “met” Pierre Berton the first time – \n watching and listening to him hold forth at TWUC’s AGM and eventually being \n introduced to him possibly at the post-AGM lunch he and wife Janet hosted at \n their country home in Kleinburg outside Toronto. (I was repeatedly introduced to \n him; he never remembered me from one introduction to the other.)","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.123485,"width":0.704256,"height":0.142787}},{"text":"Several things impressed me about his presence at the AGMs over the years. \n For one thing, he did not need to be there, as I needed to be: his career was \n already stratospheric, he had no issues with publishers, he was rich. But he was \n always there, usually in the front row, engaged by the agenda, in full throat with \n his points of view, even after others of his stature (Margaret Atwood, Alice \n Munro, Peter Newman) came for awhile and then moved on. For another, his \n faithfulness to TWUC, even when early in its development members still \n seriously debated whether nonfiction writers had a right to belong (I was there for \n some of this; it was humiliating), was a model not just of loyalty but also of \n writerly self-esteem. Here was a die-hard nonfiction writer who was nationally \n admired and, more to the point, read, and who assumed he had a place in the \n evolution of something we called Can Lit. (He won Governor-General literary \n awards!) I remain deeply grateful for this.","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.280303,"width":0.7021169999999999,"height":0.22990899999999997}},{"text":"But I had come to his work fairly recently. In 1971, after two years in Europe, I \n returned to Toronto, with the American Sixties experience working its way out of \n my system, to find the intellectual and artistic milieux in the full throes of what \n would be called Canadian cultural nationalism. (TWUC itself was a product of this \n ferment.) I put myself on a crash course of reading Canadian literature, catching \n up with what had been written while I was abroad and in fact doing the first \n sustained reading of Canlit in my life.","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.524242,"width":0.7051959999999999,"height":0.12528800000000007}},{"text":"This is how I read Sinclair Ross for the first time (scandalizing my first editor, \n Robert Fulford at Saturday Night magazine, who was appalled my generation \n had never heard of As For Me and My House, and who promptly sent me off to \n Barcelona to interview its author – those were the golden days of freelancing, \n clearly). And Hugh McLennan and Martha Ostenso and Shiela Watson and \n Margaret Laurence. And journalistic exposes about Canada’s subservience to \n American capitalism, Canadian capitalism’s exploitation of the working class of \n Quebec, the emergence of Red Power, the American stranglehold on Canadian \n universities, and so on.","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.66356,"width":0.6952039999999999,"height":0.1602119999999999}},{"text":"And I also read the works of Canadian nonfiction writers who were not \n academics or politicians but story-tellers. I confess to an all-too familiar literary \n snobbery that had kept me from these books until then: if they were so popular,","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.837803,"width":0.686763,"height":0.05566599999999999}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}