Thoughts on culture, education, and having been a Canadian in the US

George Saunders always cracks me up….

Even Atwood makes an appearance in this great piece from yesterday’s Guardian about Saunders’ first trip to England:

After Hay, it was off to Salisbury, for the Salisbury Book Festival. As part of my study, I decided to embark on this trip after staying up drinking until 4am for two consecutive nights. I wanted to see how the famous “English countryside” would appear to an American author endeavouring not to be sick in front of one of his idols, the famous Canadian author Margaret Atwood and her charming, brilliant husband Graeme Gibson. Turns out I was unable to observe much of the countryside, because instead of gazing out of the window, I was gazing down at my feet muttering, “Why, you idiot, why, how old are you anyway, you freaking moron?” This portion of the study was further complicated by the fact that our driver was a sadistic former race car driver who, upon learning of my condition, attempted to come to my aid by telling me lengthy anecdotes about all the places he had historically thrown up in while drunk, and enumerating all the exotic, grotesque foods he had eaten just prior to throwing up, and taking corners faster than necessary, sometimes even going up on two wheels while glancing playfully over to see if I’d thrown up yet.

Guardian Unlimited Books | ‘Just who is this Magna Carta fellow?’

Wow, this is really cool. I can think of a pile of uses for this kind of money. I think I foresee another grant application in the works…. Once I finish the books I’m working on right now, that is. My hockey article is coming along, too, thanks to my kind writing group at the NWP Summer Institute. They’re coming in each day with great poetry and narrative essays and I walk in with “guess what? Here’s another page or two from my hockey opus!”

NEH has launched a new digital humanities initiative aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. Digital technologies offer humanists new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, and presenting scholarship. NEH is interested in fostering the growth of digital humanities and lending support to a wide variety of projects, including those that deploy digital technologies and methods to enhance our understanding of a topic or issue; those that study the impact of digital technology on the humanities–exploring the ways in which it changes how we read, write, think, and learn; and those that digitize important materials thereby increasing the public’s ability to search and access humanities information.

Digital Humanities Initiative

You’ll LOVE this one….

I guess a few people have been wondering where I’ve been lately. Readers?! You mean people read this? Cool.

I’ve been super busy of late helping to lead the National Writing Project in Vermont’s annual Summer Institute. I’ve had a great time with these folks and am learning a ton, much of which I hope to bring into my own classroom in the fall. It really amazes me sometimes how little we actually talk about pedagogy in higher ed. It’s been a revelation to me.

Here’s a picture of the group taken the other day.

The only downside (and it’s also an upside) to the whole gig is that it runs from about 8:30 to 3:30 four days a week, for the entire month. On top of all that, there’s my new job directing the Canadian Studies program (and we’re in the midst of huge changes that have to happen in the next few weeks for budget reasons) and there’s also my day job to consider…. I’m beat! I’ve not worked this hard in a long time. Needless to say, there have been days of late where I’ve been wondering about changing my line of work so I can actually get work done. I wonder if there’s an opening where this guy works….

More from me very soon….

This just in from the Green Mountain Curling Club. Looks like I may have another extra-curricular activity for the students in my Introduction to Canadian Culture class. Speaking of which, can you believe they let me teach a course like that? How cool is that, eh? More on that course as we get closer to September. Congrats to Rich and the rest of the GMCC on making this dream a reality. They just might make a curler out of me yet….

The Toronto Star had a great feature over the holiday weekend. They came up with top-ten lists of Canadian books and films, but also things like architecture and children’s entertainment.

I’m not usually a huge fans of lists like these and the choices they made definitely fall on the safe side. Still, it’s a great starting point. I’ve printed these off to give out to my students this fall in my Intro to Canadian Culture class. It’s important they know who Mr. Dressup was, if you ask me.

Here’s their list of ten essential Canadian books:

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), by Stephen Leacock

The Tin Flute/Bonheur d’occasion (1945), by Gabrielle Roy

Poésies complètes (1952), Émile Nelligan

The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), Hugh MacLennan

Beautiful Losers (1966), Leonard Cohen

The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood

Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Alice Munro

Obasan (1981), Joy Kogawa

In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Michael Ondaatje

Green Grass, Running Water (1993), Thomas King

Canada and the ImagiNation

Burlington, Vermont
July 1, 2006

I began Canada Day in my new office at the University of Vermont. It’s my first official day as Director of Canadian Studies and, it being Canada Day and all, I thought the Canadian Studies office was as good a place to be as any. It’s been a few years since the Canadian flag flew outside our building, as the last time we put it up our secretary was confronted by a troubled man who apparently has psychological issues about seeing any non-American flag flown in his country. After a mediation session with our staff, the man’s therapist, and campus police (I kid you not), it was decided that perhaps we’d best keep the flag inside for a while.

Given that this all happened a few years ago, I decided as I pulled into the office at about 7 this morning that it was time to dig out the flag once more. My first act as Director, then, was to open up a brand new Canadian and American flag and to put them both outside the front of our building, with the US flag positioned appropriately on the left (apparently we didn’t follow proper flag etiquette the last time around). It’s not often you see people hoisting flags on Main Street here at 7 AM, but there were only a few stares from passing motorists. It’s not really that unusual to see Canadian flags in Vermont, much to the chagrin of that fellow who stopped by to yell at, I mean, visit us one day. While Canada might not get much attention from the US — a survey this past week showed that only 4% of Americans polled correctly identified Canada as its largest supplier of oil — it’s not all that far from the minds of Vermonters. Furthermore, there are many Canadians who live here.

As most of us know, one of the things that makes Canada unique is that we’re a nation whose creation does not stem from violence via war or revolution. Canada was created, rather, out of ideas, out of conversation and imagination. If you think about it more, in fact, Canada today is not that much different. Canada is still a creation of the mind, as much, if not more so, as a physical and tangible space that we know through experience. As Canadians, most of us think that we know Canada, and yet 90% of us live within 100 miles of our southernmost border. How many of us have actually seen in person more than a minute fraction of our country?

We might well be a northern nation, but within the context of Canada’s borders it’s safe to say that there’s nothing very northern about Toronto, Calgary, or Halifax. For as much as we talk about Canada being the “true north strong and free,” few of us have actually seen the true north. For that matter, how many British Columbians have ever been to New Brunswick? How many Ontarians or Quebeckers have spent spring break in Victoria or the Rockies compared with those who head south to Florida? What holds us together as Canadians today, then, is still primarily a set of ideas, an ongoing act of the ImagiNation.

The other thing that’s been intriguing me of late is how technology is making the boundaries between nations more porous, the notion of citizenship more complex. The Internet, cell phones and cheap long-distance calls, the ease and inexpensiveness of air travel, and the influence of multinational corporations on the global economy make it easier than it’s ever been to feel more connected to a country or community outside of the one in which we physically reside. As we all understand, it takes far more than residency to make a citizen; we all know people who’ve lived somewhere their entire lives but who choose not to vote, not to read the newspaper, not to connect with anything more than their immediate circle of family, friends, and co-workers. In earlier times, though, it was virtually impossible to be a citizen, and certainly to feel as if one was contributing as a citizen, without being physically present in that community.

In my case, while I may not reside in Canada right now, I can still participate. I vote, watch the national news every day (which even if I didn’t get CBC and CTV here in Vermont I could still do over the Internet), listen to CBC (mostly Radio 3 these days) and I read my hometown paper (The Edmonton Journal). I even help to run a business in Canada, selling and promoting the literature of my country. And yet, the Canada that I occupy, is not one that I connect to on a physical level on a daily basis, though frankly I feel comforted by the fact that the border is only about 40 minutes from my house. My “Canada” is an intangible, and ultimately imaginary one, that I connect to daily through ideas, words, sounds, and images – more “nationspace” than nation state. Undoubtedly, for me, “Canada is a fiction,” as I recently heard Noah Richler say in an interview about his upcoming book This is My Country, What’s Yours?. It has to be a fiction for me. But it is for everyone else as well, even for Canadians living in Canada day in and day out.

So, where does literature fit in with all this? One of the things that has been fascinating for me teaching Canadian literature to American students is to watch what kinds of Canadas they create for themselves as they read everything from Susanna Moodie and E.J. Pratt to Eden Robinson, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Lynn Coady. I expected in coming here that I’d find the students’ visions of Canada to be reductive, simplistic, and not as rich as those of my students back home; that just hasn’t proven to be the case. Last week, I read, too, about a talk given at a recent conference on LM Montgomery that dealt with the huge following her books have had with young female readers in Finland. For those girls, their Prince Edward Island is no less real or strongly imagined than that envisioned by any Canadian who has ever read the Anne of Green Gables but never been there. There are many, many people around the world who regularly occupy “Canada,” without ever having been there. You only need to travel outside of Canada and meet one of the many people who are avid readers of writers like Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, or Margaret Atwood, to realize that Canada belongs to readers in a different but almost equally powerful way than it does to its own citizens.

From my Canada to yours, happy Canada Day.

Paul Martin

Wow, it’s been an insanely busy couple of weeks. I’ve been wrapping up teaching my online course on Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Jacques Poulin, getting settled in as the new Director of Canadian Studies (as of July 1), and prepping for teaching starting next week for the National Writing Project Summer Institute here at UVM. On top of all that, I managed to squeeze in teaching a one-day writing workshop and a three day holiday with Mona!

The online class has been great, though not surprisingly given everything that’s going on I fell behind by a couple of days. The students have been excellent, though, as I usually find to be the case with online teaching. As usual, I wind up at the end of an online course wondering if I should be teaching all of my classes online, rather than the reverse. For the next month or so, I’ll also be facilitating a course for UVM faculty on Teaching Effectively Online. It helps to be doing that right after finishing an online course myself.

The writing workshop in St. Albans was invigorating, too. I taught to a group of students ranging from incoming high school freshmen (given that we don’t use those terms in Canada, I still find them bizarre) to recently graduated seniors. The school, Bellows Free Academy, is a really interesting one. I met with Don Tinney’s Canadian Lit class a couple of times earlier this year and was thoroughly impressed with the people there. I gave the students some challenging reading this time: a chapter of Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction and the first few chapters of Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues. This is material I usually cover when I teach English 086: Critical Approaches to Literature. The group did great work with the material and really impressed me. Some of them could have easily fit right in with my sophomore 086 students at UVM.

It’s been a busy summer! But an interesting one and, while I sometimes dream of just getting a little bored once in a while, it’s hard to complain about getting a chance to do for a living some of the things you love to do.

In many ways, Tuesday was a hard day to be an Oilers fan. After watching in awe for the entire playoffs as the Oilers overcame everything from the Detroit Red Wings and the flu to the loss in the first game of the final series of Dwayne Roloson, the goaltender who played an enormous role in getting the Oilers to the finals, it’s almost unfathomable to think that they weren’t able to pull off a victory in the end. In other ways, though, it’s a great day to be an Oilers fan. Like anyone who has seen them play this season and especially during the playoffs, it’s hard not to be incredibly proud of all they achieved. I can’t recall the last time I’ve watched every game of a series from the first round to the last in the Stanley Cup playoffs. And, it was all GREAT hockey! Wish I could be in Edmonton this week for the rally for the team at City Hall.

My sister has some fine thoughts on all this as well on her fab blog.

So, anyone ready for next year yet? How long until training camp?

Wow, what a game last night! Carolina was dangerous throughout, but the Oilers outplayed them, and really deserved the overtime win. Great to see things finally going their way for a change. As an Oiler fan, you just have to be so proud of how these guys have played. They deserve to be in the Stanley Cup and, after winning the last two out of three, I think they know now that they can really pull this off. It’s hard to dislike Carolina, either, though. They’ve played well and deserve to be there, too. While the crowd in Edmonton has been amazing, making headlines in the playoffs with how the entire arena spontaneously took over the singing duties of the national anthem, I have to say that I was pretty touched to hear O Canada sung so well by the crowd in Raleigh last night. I mean, I’m sure a good portion of the crowd there has some Canadian connection, but it was stirring nonetheless. It all would have made a pretty special final game of the series last night, but man am I stoked to see Edmonton taking the series back to Edmonton on Saturday! GO OILERS!