In Their Words: Interviews with Fourteen Canadian Writers

Louise H. Girard was Head of Book Selection, University of St. Michael's College Library, Toronto.

As the compilers state in the introduction, the idea for this book came about when they were taking a graduate course in contemporary Canadian poetry with Professor Frank Watt at the University of Toronto. During a coffee break it was remarked “that there wasn’t enough recent source material in which English Canadian authors discussed what they intended their work to say, why it took shape the way it did, and why at times it was misunderstood or misinterpreted.” Professor Watt presented them with the challenge of doing something about it and over a period of a few years the authors produced this work.

Unfortunately, as well intentioned as this work is, it does not go very far toward filling the real gap that had been identified. First, the format is odd. The writers were interviewed by both Bruce Meyer and Brian O’Riordan, yet the interviewers are never identified as individuals but always as “interviewers.” The result is the composite personality of “interviewers,” which is quite distracting.

Although it was pleasant and interesting — and these are the two words that best describe this work — to find my favorite writers among those interviewed, the choice of writers is in fact too unstructured to be very productive. By their own admission the interviewers were “led” to the writers either by writers they had already interviewed or by circumstances. The structural weakness that this reveals is also in evidence in the interviews themselves, which do not tend to focus tightly enough on the interviewers’ stated objectives.

And, finally, the compilers reduce their own credibility by such slips as failing to mention, in the brief biographical sketch of Brian Moore that precedes their interview with him, the fact that Brian Moore has won two Governor General awards — one in 1960 for The Luck of Ginger Coffey and also one in 1975 for The Great Victorian Collection. By omission the sketch implies that Brian Moore won this award only in 1960.

In spite of the limitations of this work, the lack of source material that led to its publication still makes it a worthwhile purchase — though not as worthwhile as it could have been.