The Montreal Story Tellers: Memoirs, Photographs, Critical Essays

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto.

In the last days of 1970 John Metcalf made a telephone call to his friend Hugh Hood: why not, he asked, form a group of short story writers who would read their works in public? Why not, he asked, “fiddle these poetry sods out of their ill-gotten perks” and put some money into the pockets of those more decent and wholesome persons whose writing has narrative content?

Thus was formed “The Montreal Story Tellers”: not a literary movement in any sense, but five writers — Metcalf, Hood, Ray Smith, Clark Blaise, and Raymond Fraser — who lived in Montreal (though none was born there) and who all desired a public.

“Writing is a necessarily lonely occupation,” states Metcalf in his memoir “Telling Tales” (pp. 23-42), “but writing in Canada approximates solitary confinement. I’m convinced that the lack of audience, the lack of response, accounts for the slow rate of composition of so many Canadian writers and their early silencing.” From 1971 to 1976 these five read to groups in libraries, high schools, CEGEPS, colleges and universities — and did find a response. Not only did they learn from that public response to their works, but they also responded to each other. Blaise states in his memoir (pp. 65-72), “I wanted to be as precise as Metcalf, as witty as Smith, as various as Hood, as irreverent as Fraser.”

The Montreal Story Tellers chronicles the five-year life of the group with a memoir by each of its members, photographs by Sam Tata, one to two critical essays about each, and finally Keith Garebian’s concluding essay. The best pieces in this collection are the splendidly satirical and beautifully crafted accounts by Hood, Metcalf, and Smith. Blaise contributes a more serious chronicle of the group and its times. And Fraser — the odd man out, the former writer of tabloid articles — writes a self-denigrating confession, “The Guy in the Wings with His Pint,” which contrasts strikingly to the “voices” of the more successful writers in the group. Taken together, the five memoirs read like a work of fiction in which reality is perceived, interpreted and perhaps distorted from five separate points of view.

In general the critical articles, which make up the second two-thirds of the book, vary in quality with the worth of their subjects. Some of the writing on Fraser and Smith is overwrought, precious or apologetic; most of the writing on Hood, Metcalf, and especially Blaise is full of both insight and logic, and delivered with grace.

The collection ends with a checklist of works by these five writers who, though possessing individual voices, came together for a time through their experience of the spoken word.