{"content":[{"text":"they couldn’t be interesting to someone as sophisticated and intellectually \n demanding as me! But they were a revelation, and I’m thinking here of Farley \n Mowat’s books about the North and Berton’s trilogy about the CPR – especially \n of Berton’s books which I read with the same unalloyed pleasure of being \n propelled along the page by story as I had had in my childhood reading. That \n these were Canadian stories that had previously held no interest for me (railway \n construction? cariboo on the tundra? yawn) made the pleasure even more \n piquant: not everything in the English language belonged to the American or \n British imagination. His research was formidable, his characterizations vivid, his \n language accessible, his narrative pace sure-footed. Admirable. His subjects \n were big and broad and he had found a voice to match that capaciousness.","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.088636,"width":0.692035,"height":0.19506099999999998}},{"text":"But – and here’s what is curious – for all the power of his texts in my life as a \n nonfiction writer at a critical moment, I did not want to write like Pierre Berton.","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.297727,"width":0.6702920000000001,"height":0.038242}},{"text":"I may have been a proud nonfiction writer in 1970s Canada but I was a nonfiction \n writer of a particular kind: a New Journalist. I’m not sure when I first called myself \n a practitioner of that brand but I certainly recognized myself in it when I read Tom \n Wolfe’s various essays in defence of it. My ardent Canadian nationalism did not \n prevent me from wildly admiring Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter \n Thompson, and other writers in Rolling Stone magazine, all Americans, all \n probing the dark fastnesses of the American psyche while Canadian nonfiction \n embarked on the recuperative mission of celebrating national mythologies. When \n the new journalism morphed into what is now usually called creative nonfiction, \n and I wrote in that vein too, I couldn’t have been further from writing like Pierre \n Berton who likely snorted in disdain of creative nonfiction’s anxieties about its \n literary credentials and its exhibitionism of the author’s ego.","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.35,"width":0.7032530000000001,"height":0.21240800000000004}},{"text":"But it was more than just a stylistic divide between Berton’s nonfiction and mine; \n there was also the political divide between us as Canadians on the liberal left. \n When I returned to Canada in 1971, I also returned to a full-blown women’s \n liberation movement and a soon-to-be flourishing multicultural politics, not to \n mention a society still licking its wounds from the October Crisis in Quebec. \n Eventually there would be a name for this too, this politics of deconstructing what \n had been simply assumed by earlier generations of Canadian patriots as “the \n Canadian story.” It would popularly be called postmodernism; it was experienced \n as the frontal assault of new intellectuals and artists on the too-comfortable \n accounts of Canadian history and society as seamless narratives belonging to all \n of “us” and told through the lens of remarkable white men (with a few plucky \n white women and a couple of noble Indians thrown in the mix).","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.576439,"width":0.7008700000000001,"height":0.21248499999999992}},{"text":"It is by now a familiar critique and has spawned its own counter-critique, but at \n the time of its ascendency among Canadian writers it was exhilirating stuff, and \n our literature is the richer and more mature for it. But one of my painful memories \n of Pierre Berton is from the annus horriblis of TWUC, when the project of the \n Writing Thru Race conference was pitted against members who feared for the","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.802954,"width":0.701902,"height":0.09051500000000001}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}