Montreal's Anglo literary scene is more vibrant than it's been in decades

Insofar as we can speak of a golden age of English-language Montreal literature, the period from the 1950s through to the early 1970s stands out as a natural choice.

Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, Hugh McLennan, and Leonard Cohen all enjoyed success nationally and internationally. Richler enjoyed stirring the pot with blistering anti-nationalist op-eds in the New York Times, his jowly yet doe-eyed mug frequently appearing on the evening news. MacLennan won five Governor General's awards and summed up Canada's colonial reality in one pithy sentence: the Two Solitudes. Gallant wrote about the Montreal of her youth for the New Yorker and had enough of an impact on the collective cultural psyche to inspire the Lucinda Krementz character in Wes Anderson's "The French Dispatch", played by Frances McDormand.

Cohen now exists in his own sanctified realm, floating high above everyone both in his status as one of the greatest artists Canada has ever produced, and literally on the walls of Montreal high-rises. Although he lived the expat's life in Greece and Los Angeles for long stretches, he always came back, and Montrealers never stopped thinking of him as one of our own. As poet and Maisonneuve magazine founder Derek Webster writes in Montreal Poetry after Leonard Cohen, "Cohen the King became Cohen the prodigal son, embraced by anglophone... and francophone Quebecers alike."

It's a measure of how big a place Richler still occupies in the psyche of Quebec's francophone majority that just last year La Presse columnist Patrick Lagacé described him as a "racist who hated francophones". Although he despised the Quebec separatist movement and nationalism in all its forms (being from a Jewish family that fled the charnel house of 20th century Europe), Toula Drimonis refutes this characterization in her recent book, We, The Others. She quotes a passage from Richler's 1992 volume of political essays Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country: "So far as one can generalize, the most gracious, cultivated, and innovative people in this country are French Canadians. Certainly they have given us the most exciting politicians of our time: Trudeau [père], Lévesque. Without them, Canada would be... a greatly diminished place."

In a June 1997 article for the New York Times, Richler elaborated further: "[Francophones] have already rendered unto Canada our most talented playwright, Michel Tremblay; that internationally renowned maker of theatrical magic, Robert Lepage; the films of Denys Arcand (''The Decline of the American Empire,'' ''Jesus of Montreal''); and the Cirque du Soleil." His point was that French Canadian culture was thriving, and so the nasty side of nationalism—Premier François Legault trying to scare us into believing the French language will disappear without further immigration controls, for example, or Parti Québécois leader Paul Saint-Pierre-Plamondon saying Ottawa is actively planning Quebec's decline and "assimilation"—was unfortunate.

All of this is merely preamble to point out that there was once a time when our writers were central to the city’s culture. They responded to and generated the day's headlines, engaging in heated polemic and becoming recognized public figures in the process.

If you're a book nerd and lit lover, this may be cause for wistful nostalgia, as well as a reckoning related to the current vitality of the art form. These days you'd be forgiven for thinking that literature and poetry have been reduced to the status of something as quirky as, say, philately or mycology.

You've gotta love it, because it sure as hell ain't a living—at least not for most people.

The ebbs and flows of Anglo writing in Montreal

The broad strokes of the narrative about English-language literature in Montreal are that the aforementioned golden age was followed by a few lean decades in the 80s, 90s, and early aughts. Not that there were no writers, but they had a harder time finding audiences and defining themselves. English Montreal seemed to exist in a kind of purgatorial interzone—not quite part of Quebec, but not connected to Canada either. Whenever I met young Ontarians around this time, they were often surprised I didn't have a French accent and would compliment my English.

As Webster notes, the meat of Canada's English-language publishing industry had gone down the 401 to Toronto, and "by the end of the [1980s] Montreal ... [was] a strange, almost Orwellian city of boarded-up storefronts, riven aesthetics, political uncertainty... constant ethnic and linguistic tension, and cultural suspicion. Cut off from North American mainstream society, the city's writing community began to fragment into a half-dozen enclaves..."

Quebec was feeling the effects of a historic demographic, political, and sociological shift that had been a long time in the making. It impacted art as well as industry. Growing up in the Eastern Townships in the 80s and 90s, I remember thinking that Montreal, whenever we visited it, was a graffiti-splattered, cracked-out wasteland. We'd come in to see AC/DC, The Cult, and Lenny Kravitz at the Forum, and then hightail it back across the Champlain bridge. Most rural Anglos my age, when they reached their twenties, were moving to Toronto or out West. Only the hardcore remained, braving recession, chronic unemployment, and a rancid feeling of stagnation. At least the rents were cheap.

Linda Leith, in her book Writing in the Time of Nationalism, documents the arc from said golden age to this period of upheaval and on to an "Anglo literary revival" that began in the late 1990s. She argues that the groundwork for this revival was laid by the founding of the Blue Metropolis literary festival in 1997 and the Quebec Writers' Federation in 1998.

"We had a big hurdle to cross in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and we’re in a far better position now that we have some solid infrastructure in place to support us," she says. "There's a lot of energy and talent now, and the scene is very lively, quite diverse, almost unrecognizable from 25 years ago. There are still challenges, but... the feeling of being a minority within Quebec may in some ways be a tonic with some positive effects."

Non-profit outfits such as the Association of English Language Publishers of Quebec (AELAQ) mirrored the kind of support that francophone arts organizations like SODEC and l'Union des Écrivains du Québec provided their members earlier on, in response to their own struggles as a cultural minority within North America.

"The Blue Metropolis and the Quebec Writers' Federation (QWF) raise the profile of Quebec Anglo writers within Quebec and beyond," Leith continues. "The growth of AELAQ membership and its annual book fair are impressive developments, as are the QWF and AELAQ’s increased visibility in the francophone milieu."

This institutional infrastructure, along with the launch of Concordia University's creative writing program in the 1970s, laid the groundwork for the current vitality of Montreal's Anglo writing community.

An early aughts revival

By the early 2000s, something new was brewing.

"There was a pretty big resurgence that happened in the mid-2000s," says Dimitri Nasrallah, the award-winning, bestselling writer of Hotline and fiction editor for local press Esplanade Books. "I use the mid-2000s mark because that's when the internet became a thing and you could work remotely and that changed the landscape. You had a generation of writers like myself, Heather O'Neill, Rawi Hage, Madeleine Thien and Neil Smith who all began around that time. We all benefitted from the internet to get noticed beyond Montreal."

Refreshingly, this new crop of writers wasn't shackled to the dominant social issues that had consumed entire generations of Quebecers throughout the 20th century—namely, the binary of Anglo-Franco tensions and its associated drama. Richler, Gallant, and MacLennan had all written extensively about the linguistic and class conflicts specific to their generation. Post-1995 referendum, a sense of fatigue permeated not just the politics of Quebec with its Liberal Party-PQ split, but also the culture.

Some places, it's true, get addicted to their historical traumas and tribal tensions, even internalizing them as part of what makes them unique—but surely we had other stories to tell?

Hage, Nasrallah, and Thien—along with French-language writers like Kim Thúy—broadened Quebec's literary palette by writing about their experiences as immigrants and were rewarded. Hage's De Niro's Game won the 2008 International Dublin Literary Award and Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2016. O'Neill, an Anglo who never left, spun magic with gritty local stories told unsentimentally. Like Richler before her, whose urban universe she shares, she vaulted into literary stardom and has proudly repped Montreal in the New York Times and other publications.

Music blogger Sean Michaels’s 2014 debut Us Conductors was proof that you could now find success writing about anything from anywhere and that local writers no longer had to be limited by or beholden to the unignorable but often perplexing character that is Montreal. The novel was a surprise bestseller and won the Giller and Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan prizes.

It's hard to believe it's been nearly two decades since these writers first made their entrée en scène. But it's heartening to note that while they're still at the height of their commercial and critical powers, a newer generation is already busy at work. Unlike the doldrums that followed the 1970s, a smoother transition seems to be taking place.

Today's new wave

"There's a new wave cresting right now," says Nasrallah. "I'd attribute this to a proliferation of community-based bookstores that have popped up all over the city. We have Pulp down in Verdun, Librairie Saint-Henri Books, De Still, and Drawn and Quarterly is like the pioneer for that template. They're all internet savvy and very visual in their curation and they attract a lot of young people into a kind of lifestyle that you can create around these books. Books are cool again.

"And what's also great about today's scene is the proliferation of the LGBTQ+ and POC communities, what you can do with the intersectionality of writing, and how Montreal speaks to that. The confluence of those two things seems to be where today's wave is at."

Local presses like Metonymy and Metatron have made a name for themselves by embodying Montreal's punky DIY ethos, releasing exactly what they please. Vallum is going strong for poetry. De Still and the Montreal Review of Books regularly host book launches and readings.

Perhaps most surprising is how fully formed and confident many of today's young writers are. Frankie Barnet's Mood Swings is a hilarious satire that takes place in a dystopic Montreal in which all animals have been eradicated—without being about Montreal per se, it effortlessly captures the city's essence. The New York Times was rapturous in its recent review, praising the novel as "a work of art... that transcends its buzzwords."

David Connor's debut Oh God, The Sun Goes was lovingly reviewed as "surreal and dreamlike" by the Los Angeles Review of Books last year. And Montreal-bred Sarah Bernstein, though now living in Scotland, was shortlisted for the Booker award for her novel Study For Obedience.

Yolk and friends

Central to much of the current action is Yolk. In just a few short years, Yolk has put on a series of creative events in unexpected locales, like "Egg the Poet", poetry writing pop-ups at Time Out Market Montréal downtown, writing ateliers and other events. This summer they put on the inaugural Montreal Fiction Prize, judged by Giller-prize winner Souvankham Thammavongsa.

Yolk's autumn schedule will culminate with its second annual Literary Oktoberfest, a networking event and showcase for writers, editors and publishers at Riverside Saint-Henri that attracts industry professionals from across the continent.

Founder Curtis McRae, whose debut story collection Quietly, Loving Everyone will be published in December by Esplanade Books, has a been a force in bringing different groups of Montreal writers together.

"It's an exciting time to be a writer in Montreal," says McRae. "It's a smaller community, but it's content with its underground identity [as] more of a subculture, and I think that's an interesting place for a writer to be."

Along with his Yolk events, McRae also co-hosts a monthly reading series called 2 Readers 1 Musician with writers Zoe Lubetkin, Ellen Orme Adams, David Connor, and Braedan Houtman. This series is an intimate gathering of like-minded literati which has featured the likes of Frankie Barnet and Neil Smith, Alexander Manshel and Misha Solomon, and attracts an orbit of young up-and-comers like Eva Crocker, André Babyn, and Paz O'Farrell.

All of this new energy warms the heart of an interstitial Gen Xer like me, crammed as we are between two influential generations. In a city that has weathered many exoduses, it's wonderful to see young writers choose Montreal for its culture and lifestyle, and for whatever founts of inspiration they find here. For a while, it seemed like nothing would come back after the 90s. But motivated doers like McRae and his peers have shown that you can still thrive as a writer in Montreal today, and benefit from a flourishing community.

Here's to a new golden age.

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