I RECENTLY had the pleasure of chatting with Charlotte Gray, arguably one of the country’s best historical biographers, for this year’s fall preview. In her forthcoming book, The Promise of Canada: 150 Years – People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country, Gray profiles a handful of public figures who have in some way left an indelible impression on Canadian identity and culture as the country prepares to move into the next 150 years of its existence. One of Gray’s subjects is the indefatigable Margaret Atwood, who not only helped usher a new impression of CanLit onto the international stage, but, with Graeme Gibson in the early 1970s, pushed for the formation of an advocacy organization, now known as the Writers’ Union of Canada. “Atwood had never embraced the Romantic notion that a true artiste should be aloof from grubby reality,” writes Gray.
The thinking that a national writing community could exist, and the idea that authors’ livelihoods require protection, is still a fairly new concept in this country. “There is so much we take for granted,” Gray told me. “We don’t even realize how recent some of this stuff is.”