Susan Swan First Vice-Chair, The Writers' Union of Canada

Tips for the Emerging Writer Stephen Harper
Dear Prime Minister Harper: I hear you are writing a book. On the history of hockey, no less. So I thought as someone who has been writing books for over 20 years, I would offer a few tips to you, an emerging writer.

First of all, you are starting your writing career at a good time. Canadian literature is known around the world for its excellence. At least six of our prominent Canadian authors have recently won major international awards like the Man Booker and the Impac Prize. And only a few days ago, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Alice Munro were noinated by an intenational jury for the Man Booker International Prize for a body of work. Many, many Canadian writers, both English and French-speaking, have found readers in foreign countries.

Why, just the other day a friend told me that on a sailing holiday in the Caribbean, she and her partner discovered they could trade one Canadian book for two American books with other sailors. These sailors were both American and Canadian and they all thought Canadian books were terrific, hence their exchange rate.

However, I admit that my first reaction to the news that you were writing a book wasn’t so charitable. I asked myself: is it right for Prime Minister Harper to be indulging his literary ambitions on our time? Then I realized that you are no different from many authors who hold down a job in order to buy time to write. So why should I be begrudge you the few hours of scribbling many of us struggle to fit in?

You mentioned that the research for your book has slowed down since you became our twenty-second prime minister. Naturally, I wasn’t surprised and I thought of suggesting that you try for Ontario’s $1500 Dollar emerging writers’ grant and hire your own researcher. Like all emerging writers in Ontario, you are entitled to apply, although this modest start up will barely cover a researcher’s fee for no more than a few months. Nor will it help much to offset some of your moving costs, Mr. Prime Minister, if, God forbid, you lose your day job in another election.

Anyway, it will all become clear sailing once you’ve found a Canadian publisher. Then you will be a candidate for the perks that are available to veterans like myself––the Canadian writer in residence posts (whose payments don’t come close to politicians’ salaries although these positions amount to a second, full-time job done to finance your writing.) Or maybe you will be able to scrounge up the odd grant although I should warn you that competition is tough since our literary success has encouraged novices such as yourself. But don’t let that discourage you: if your book manages to reach a few readers at the library, you will be eligible to receive the under-funded and now fast-shrinking fee for Public Lending Right paid annually to Canadian writers.

One thing, though. If your hockey book is bought by a foreign publisher, it will be tricky for your foreign publisher to dig up money to publicize your book. Publishers even in sports-positive country like the United States mean well but frankly, with an unknown foreign writer such as you, (yes, even a writer who heads up the country where the cold air comes from)––these American publishers will still need encouragement to promote your work.

Alas, the funding that once helped Canadian writers reach their world audiences has vanished. Thanks to you slashing $11.4 million from our cultural programs abroad, thirty years of support has gone overnight. Alas again, our cultural diplomats who were once employed to promote our culture abroad now have no way to publicize anything, let alone our writing. And knowing the stock you place in short term results, these hard-working folks may soon be out of a job altogether.

In short, I’m afraid our diplomats won’t be able to help you the way they once helped Margaret Atwood, for instance, or myself. It is precisely an emerging writer like you, one who doesn’t yet have any foreign readers, who will be muzzled.

But we all start in a small way, Mr. Prime Minister, when we write our first book. Even Yann Martel, whose world bestseller The Life of Pi has been translated into 35 languages, didn’t begin with the global readership he has now. It takes time and money for an author’s work to reach an audience.

And now I’m coming to my biggest tip. What countries like Ireland know (and Canada too, before you became prime minister): you have to grow literature, like other businesses. Just the way the Ministry of Natural Resources, (both federal and provincial), benefits the oil and gas industry by researching oilfields, and just as the flow-through tax credit encourages the Canadian mining world to develop risky mines––so has cultural funding helped us Canadians artists contribute to our economy through our valuable exports. Did you know that for every dollar you invest in the arts you get eight back, Mr. Prime Minister? Today, as a small country, we have been boxing above our weight.

My Spanish publisher, Pilar Alvarez-Sierra, mused about your dilemma with a possible (or not so possible) foreign publication: “The power of a country, its capacity to have a real impact in the world around, is also measured in its cultural representatives, I am positive about that. And a country should invest in opening their frontiers to the rest of
the world promoting its writers, painters, film makers, and so on. For example, could the Spanish government say that Almodovar shouldn't receive money from the cultural institutions for promoting his films abroad? He deserves it, and he gets it, and thanks to the first time he got the money to travel to America and promote his films there, he is now one of the best known Spanish artists in the world, and a huge publicist for Spain everywhere.”

So get those stars out of your eyes, Mr. Prime Minister. Sure, elbow grease and accounting procedures help, but writing a book, like the drilling a mine or an oil well, does not happen in a vacuum. Artistic talent, like business enterprises, thrives in a society with good infrastructures.

However, far be it from me to stop a writer like yourself from harbouring your dreams. Your book could still appear on a prize list whose financial awards––(however rosy the amounts sound in the newspapers)––don’t come close to covering the costs of living for the three to five years it takes to write another book.

Look here––say your publisher decides to enter your book in the $25,000 The Charles Taylor Award for Literary Nonfiction. And say your book is a gem, you may get nominated. Or even win it.

Not that I want to trick you into unrealistic expectations, Mr. Prime Minister. The reception to a first book is hard to predict. Actually, the reception to any book is unpredictable and I haven’t met a single publisher––Canadian, American, or European––who can tell me six months before their new books come out, which one will hit either the prizes or bestseller lists.

It’s gambler’s market, and you will just have to take your chances with the rest of us.

Susan Swan is a Toronto novelist who will be attending the Awakening in Ottawa April 16 on Parliament Hill as vice chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada.

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