RECALLING A LITERARY SCENE PAST
Book chronicles the place that fostered Vancouver’s literary scene in the ’70s and ’80s
Most written attempts to investigate and preserve the past consider history with a capital H: large-scale events in distant lands, involving heroic figures whose actions influenced the lives of a generation. Local, “small h” history tends to be given short shrift; we forget — or fail to see — that ordinary people acting in the local sphere can also have a lasting influence, and are also worth celebrating.
Salt Spring Island publishing house Mother Tongue, co-owned and operated by Mona Fertig and her husband, Peter Haase, has devoted a lot of time and energy to address this imbalance, primarily through their Unheralded Artists of BC series, now in eight volumes. In The Literary Storefront: The Glory Years, Mother Tongue continues its celebration of local history. This time the focus is on Vancouver’s literary scene, during a period in which Fertig herself played an important role.
In 1977 Fertig was a young Vancouver poet with a big smile and a “can do” attitude, who saw a need for some kind of social space where fellow writers could meet and talk, encourage each other, give feedback and share resources. “Part of me was so young and passionate, yet part was also intuitively much wiser than I knew. Writers and artists work alone, and I love that part, working by myself; and then I like to be with the collective, where we bounce ideas off each other, feel stimulated listening to other people’s work, then go home to our rooms and write.”
Inspired by Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s legendary bookstore/literary salon, which was a nexus for the expatriate literary community in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, Fertig applied for a Canada Council Explorations grant, hoping to establish something similar in Vancouver. The grant request was approved, and on May 13, 1978, the Literary Storefront opened for business in what had previously been a second-floor dress shop on Water Street in Gastown. This was the first of several addresses the Storefront occupied until it finally ceased operations in 1985, a victim of dwindling finances and dwindling volunteer energy.
Gone but not forgotten: The Literary Storefront celebrates and documents the activities of Vancouver’s lively literary centre during that six-year lifespan. It’s a handsome volume, dense with photographs that show young poets full of optimism and hope, at work and at play. Histories such as this one tend to wax nostalgic; it’s always tempting to portray the past as a golden time, and based on the selected photographs it is easy to see how this might happen: everyone was so much younger in the past. We see poet Susan Musgrave, with long, straight hair reaching halfway to her waist; novelist Jack Hodgins, in ringlets and an open-necked white cotton shirt; youthful versions of George Bowering and bill bissett mingle with many others.
As well as providing a physical space where writers could meet and network, the Literary Storefront organized readings by established writers from further afield, providing opportunities for locals to mingle with luminaries such as Earle Birney, Edward Albee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Smart and Stephen Spender.
The initial Canada Council Explorations grant helped the Literary Storefront to get established, but once those funds ran out the Storefront’s survival depended on the ability of Fertig and others to raise money for operating costs, from paid memberships, admission to readings, and sales of an annual Birthday Book of writings by members.
It’s no easy task to breathe life into archival material, but Trevor Carolan, local poet and the author of this volume, was on the scene himself during the Literary Storefront’s “glory years,” and he’s done a more than creditable job in helping present-day readers to re-experience this vibrant period in Vancouver’s literary past. As Carolan puts it in his introduction: “For young writers like me, the Literary Storefront was an unofficial postgraduate education centre. It was where a generation of Vancouver writers … could learn how the writing and publishing game ticked. It was a chance to become part of a community.”
Inspiration is a form of energy which, if recognized as such, and honoured, can power change and even renew itself as it is transmitted.
Just as Fertig was inspired by the efforts of Sylvia Beach, she herself will no doubt inspire others further down the road. By preserving and sharing this local story of youthful idealism, The Literary Storefront: The Glory Years becomes part of the process by which inspiration is passed on from one generation to the next.