Canadian Writers and Their Works; Fiction Series, Volume Seven

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

This volume, part of ECW Press’s 20-volume series on Canadian writers, contains an introduction by George Woodcock and five essays, each by a different critic, on five fiction writers. The five writers discussed are Clark Blaise (by Barry Cameron), Hugh Hood (by Keith Garebian), John Metcalf (by Douglas Rollins), Alice Munro (by Hallvard Dahlie), and Sheila Watson (by Stephen Scobie). Each essay follows a standard format: Biography, Tradition and Milieu, Critical Overview and Context, Works, and Selected Bibliography. Four of the five writers here (I am excluding Watson) are, to my mind, the most important practitioners of the short story active in Canada today. Watson has published considerably less than the others but is important as a trailblazer. As Scobie puts it (with some overstatement), “it is she who made modern Canadian writing possible” (p.264). All of the essays are conscientious and competent (Barry Cameron’s is particularly strong), yet tentative. The bibliographies of each essay tell us why. There is no “Critical Overview and Context” for the critics to draw upon. These major writers have not drawn the critical attention they deserve. It’s particularly distressing to see how consistently hostile, and wrong, reviewers have been, particularly about Metcalf and Hood. These essays are welcome, then, not as the summative statements the ECW series aims to be but as the beginning of long overdue critical analysis and recognition.