Editing Modernism in Canada

Events

Invited Participants

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Kegedonce Press)
Robert Bringhurst (Simon Fraser)
George Elliott Clarke (Toronto)
Frank Davey (Western)
Kate Eichhorn (The New School)
Irene Gammel (Ryerson)
Carole Gerson (Simon Fraser)
Terry Goldie (York)
Paul Hjartarson (Alberta)
Robert Lecker (McGill)
Benjamin Lefebvre (Wilfrid Laurier)
Hannah McGregor (Guelph)
Roy Miki (Simon Fraser)
Heather Milne (Winnipeg)
Daniel David Moses (Queen’s)
Laura Moss (British Columbia)
Zailig Pollock (Trent)
Harvey Quamen (Alberta)
Bart Vautour (Mount Allison)
Cynthia Sugars (Ottawa)
Christl Verduyn (Mount Allison)
Darren Wershler (Concordia)

Participant Bios

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is the Managing Editor of Kegedonce Press, one of only four established Indigenous publishers in Canada. Also a writer, creative writing instructor, and communications consultant on Indigenous issues, she has extensive experience working with Indigenous writers and organizations, as well as with Indigenous publishers internationally. She is the editor of Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica (2003), the co-editor of skins: Contemporary Indigenous Writing (2000), and the author of my heart is a stray bullet (1993/2002).

Robert Bringhurst is a world-known poet, translator, editor, and independent scholar. His translation and editing of the oral stories of the Haida gave rise to controversies, but also raised fundamental questions at the time of its release about the cultural politics of Indigenous narratives being edited by non-aboriginal people. He is the editor and translator of the three-volume Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers (1999-2001) and the author of The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada (2008). Bringhurst won the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2005.

George Elliott Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, and a renowned poet, playwright, and literary critic. He has edited two major anthologies in African-Canadian literature: Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, published in two-volumes (1991-92), and Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature (1997). He also edited a special Africadian issue of The Dalhousie Review (1997, 1999) that blended interdisciplinary scholarly articles, book reviews, poetry, and short fiction. Finally, his major scholarly book, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002), includes a history of this body of literature and a bibliography of primary materials that establishes the historical, national, and bilingual existence of writing by Canadians of African heritage.

Poet, editor, and critic, Frank Davey is Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. He is currently writing a biography of bpNichol under contract to ECW Press. His 1980 book on Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster addressed the editing practices of those modernist poets in projects such as Contact Press and Combustion and Delta magazines. He has published four articles on Nichol since 1986, as well as articles on the editing of Canadian poetry anthologies, collected in his books Reading Canadian Reading (1988) and Canadian Literary Power (1994). He also has extensive experience as a working editor: he served with Nichol on the Coach House Press editorial board from 1976-88, edited the New Canadian Criticism series for Talonbooks from 1983-2007, was a founding editor of the poetry newsletter Tish in 1961, and has edited and published the journal Open Letter since 1965.

Poet, book historian, and literary editor, Kate Eichhorn is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School University in New York. She has completed since 2007 three collaborative editorial projects related to innovative women’s writing: Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (an anthology co-edited with Heather Milne and published by Coach House Books); a special issue of Open Letter on feminist poetics (co-edited with Barbara Godard); and Belladonna Elders Series, Vol. 6 (a book featuring interviews with and writing by M. NourbeSe Philip and Gail Scott for Belladonna Books, a US based avant-garde feminist press). She has also edited essay collections by Sina Queyras and George Bowering for BookThug Press. Forthcoming editorial projects include essay collections by Lisa Robertson and Gail Scott.

Irene Gammel is Professor of English, Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Modern Literature and Culture, and director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Institute at Ryerson University. She has edited eight books of essays and primary texts, four of them devoted to L.M. Montgomery studies. As a textual editor, she has contributed to the preservation of European and North-American modernist women’s heritage by editing the unpublished or out-of-print works of Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and New York poet and painter Florine Stettheimer. Most recently, Gammel has discussed the editorial politics of mainstream publishers’ re-issuing of “restored” editions, such as the restored edition of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

Carole Gerson is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She has 30 years of editorial experience in three significant areas: she has prepared such foundational collections of Canadian literary texts as The Prose of Life: Sketches From Victorian Canada (1981) and Canadian Poetry: The Beginnings Through The First World War (1994); reissued literary texts that were out of print, including Roland Graeme: Knight, by Agnes Maule Machar (1996) and Marie Joussaye’s Labor’s Greeting (2003); and worked as a member in the bilingual editorial team of History of the Book in Canada/Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada (3 vols, 2004-07), for which she co-edited volume 3, which covers 1918-1980.

Terry Goldie is Professor of English at York University and the author of several books, including Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (1989). As the non-aboriginal co-editor of the three editions of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, he has extensive experience in collaborating and co-editing with Aboriginal poet, playwright, and editor, Daniel David Moses (and Aboriginal poet and scholar Armand Ruffo, who has joined this editorial collective in the production of the fourth edition of this anthology), what has without doubt become the most important such anthology in the context of Canadian literature.

Paul Hjartarson is Professor of English in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the EMiC project leader at the University of Alberta, lead researcher on the Wilfred and Sheila Watson projects, and co-editor (with Shirley Neuman) of the print and digital editions of the Wilfred and Sheila Watson letters. He has been studying and presenting on what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin term “remediation” since 200, editing and publishing archival documents for over twenty-five years, and has been involved in collaborative editing and publishing for much of that time.

Robert Lecker is Professor of Canadian Literature and Greenshields Chair at McGill University. He is the editor of Open Country (2007), a large anthology of English-Canadian literature, and has recently completed a history of English-Canadian literary anthologies entitled Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation (forthcoming). He was the co-owner of a scholarly and commercial publishing company from 1977 to 2004 and the editor of the critical journal Essays on Canadian Writing during the same period.

Benjamin Lefebvre teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario and is director of the L.M. Montgomery Research Group. He recently edited L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted (2009), co-edited a restored and annotated edition of her First World War novel Rilla of Ingleside (2010), co-edited the interdisciplinary collection of essays Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables (2010), and contributed the case study on Montgomery to the Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing website.

Hannah McGregor is a SSHRC-funded PhD student in the University of Guelph’s School of English and Theatre Studies. She has been a doctoral fellow at TransCanada Institute since 2009 and a graduate fellow for Editing Modernism in Canada since 2008. Her dissertation research engages with the ethics of representation in the context of white Canadian women’s representations of “foreign” spaces. Via her work with EMiC she is also collaborating on ongoing editorial projects on Wilfred Watson and Martha Ostenso.

Award-winning poet, editor, and critic Roy Miki is Professor Emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University. For the past thirty years he has undertaken a range of editorial projects; he was the editor of West Coast Line from 1989-98, where he collaborated with guest editors to offer readers special issues on minority writers including Colour: An Issue (1994), co-edited with Fred Wah. He also edited Roy Kiyooka’s collected poems, Pacific Windows, which received the poetry award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Heather Milne is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg. Over the past two years, she has collaborated on two editorial projects, including Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (an anthology co-edited with Kate Eichhorn) and a special issue of Open Letter dedicated to the work of Lisa Robertson (co-edited with Angela Carr). She is the co-founder (with Roewan Crowe) of Hot House, a creative, activist duo committed to staging queer and feminist cultural and political interventions.

Daniel David Moses is Associate Professor of Drama at Queen’s University. He has worked as a dramaturge, editor, essayist, teacher, and artist-, playwright- or writer-in-residence with institutions as varied as Theatre Passe Muraille, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the University of British Columbia, the Sage Hill Writing Experience, Concordia University and, in 2006-2007, the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre. He has served on the boards of the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts, Native Earth Performing Arts, and the Playwrights Union of Canada (now the Playwrights Guild of Canada) and co-founded, with Lenore Keeshig-Tobias and Tomson Highway, the Committee to Re-Establish the Trickster. One of the most important Aboriginal poets and playwrights in Canada, he has co-edited three editions of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English for Oxford University Press (1992, 1998, 2005), in collaboration with (non-Native) Terry Goldie.

Laura Moss is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, and director of the UBC International Canadian Studies Centre. She is the editor of five books, including Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott (forthcoming), the two-volume anthology Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2008-09), and Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature (2003), as well as the associate editor of the journal Canadian Literature.

Zailig Pollock is Professor of English at Trent University and the director of the MA program in Public Texts. He is one of the general editors of the Collected Works of P.K. Page and has played a similar role for the Collected Works of A.M. Klein. He has also edited a number of individual works by Page and Klein. He has taught TEMiC (Textual Editing and Modernism in Canada, a two-week intensive seminar on the theory and practice of scholarly editing, held annually at Trent University) and has written extensively on editorial and archival theory and practice.

Harvey Quamen is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta where he teaches courses on cyberculture, postmodernism, science and technology studies, database-driven website design, and literary computing. He is the Digital Humanities lead for the Watson projects. His essay, “Editing the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Archives: Scholarly Editions ⇔ Digital Projects” (co-authored with Paul Hjartarson and Kristin Fast) is forthcoming in the Conference on Editorial Problems series published by the University of Toronto Press.

Bart Vautour is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. He is the editor of scholarly editions of Ted Allan’s Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939), and with Dean Irvine, Dorothy Livesay’s Right Hand Left Hand: A True Life of the Thirties (1977), both for the Canadian Literature Collection at the University of Ottawa Press. He is co-director, with Emily Robins Sharpe, of a four-phase project devoted to the recovery and presentation of Canadian writing about the Spanish Civil War.

Cynthia Sugars is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. As the co-editor of the two-volume historical anthology, Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2009), she has extensive experience in working editorially with historical as well as interdisciplinary material. She is also the editor of a number of collections of Canadian literary scholarship, including the compilation of important essays in the field, Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (2004), as well as Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (2004). In addition, she has published a textual edition of The Letters of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry (1992). She also serves on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals in Canada.

Christl Verduyn is Professor of English and Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University and Davidson Chair and Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. As the editor or co-editor of twenty volumes and/or special issues of journals, she has a wide range of editorial experience that includes the 1998 essay collection Literary Pluralities, Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries (2005), and her work as editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies.

Darren Wershler is a poet, non-fiction writer, critic, and editor. At Concordia University he is a member of TAG, the Technoculture, Art and Games Initiative, a cross-faculty interdisciplinary research team that explores the relationship between art and contemporary digital culture. He is also faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program in Toronto and a contributing editor for Coach House Books. He has edited and designed about 35 full-length books of various sorts, and has two Alcuin Citations as recognition of the merits of his book design skills. With Mark Surman, he wrote the first Best Practices guide for Canadian online publishers, commissioned by Library and Archives Canada and published in 2001. He has worked professionally as a copy editor, substantive editor and freelance consultant for Canadian presses of all sizes, particularly on matters dealing with digital publishing. He is the author or co-author of 13 books, including his own apostrophe, the first book of poetry published in Canada under a Creative Commons license.