Minority Report: An Alternative History of English Language Arts in Quebec

Ed. Guy Rodgers

Montreal, QC. Guernica Essay Series

ISBN 978-155071355-8

151 pp. $20.00

 

Mr. Joel Yanofsky

Montreal, Quebec

                                    Open Letter to Joel Yanofsky

It is with disappointment and dismay that I read your article ‘Enfin Visible’ in Minority Report recently published by Guernica Press.  Not only is it a superficial overview, it violates two of the most basic rules of journalism:

·         Always check your facts.

·         Always have more than one source.

Your article might have been more appropriately called Linda’s Version. Any reader can see that you simply copied most of what Linda Leith posited in her recent book Writing in the Time of Nationalism published by Signature Editions. Looking at the number of times her name appears in your article, she seems to have been your primary source of information, even though there were a number of serious omissions in that book. Or were you simply taking dictation?

In your article, you write:  “By the late 1980s in Quebec, Linda Leith was in the wrong place at the right time. As a young teacher at the West Island CEGEP, John Abbott, she’d developed ….. and was offering the first course exclusively devoted to English Language Montreal writers.”  With all due respect, it is clear that you didn’t do much research on the writing scene of the 1970s and 80s before sitting down to write your piece.

Had you done so, you would have discovered that I was teaching at Abbott during those years that Linda claimed to have instituted the first course devoted to English-Language writers of Quebec.  I started teaching Montreal English Language Poetry as a course (The Other Language) in 1984, which predates Linda’s course by a couple of years.

Moreover, Ken Norris and I edited English Language Poetry of the Seventies (Vehicule Press) which introduced a whole slew of post-Cohen Montreal poets to Montreal, Quebec, and Canada.

I, along with the other Vehicule Poets, ran a poetry series from the early 1970s until the late 1970s that featured most Montreal poets writing in those days.

Ken Norris, Artie Gold, and I were the first editors of Vehicule Press that published Montreal poets in the 1970s.

And by the way, I was the one who invited Linda to join QSPELL.

Another example of sloppy reporting includes not crediting Poetry Quebec which commissioned and first published the Richard King article you cited.

There’s more. The Montreal Review of Books (mRb) was born after a presentation that Karen Haughian and I, co-presidents of the Association of English-language Publishers of Quebec (AELAQ), made to a Quebec parliamentary hearing. After the hearing, we received a start-up fund to start mRb.  The first couple of issues appeared as Allô Books.

I am equally dismayed by the omissions of important publishing houses such as DeltaCan, The Muses’s Company, DC Books and Nu-Age/ Signature Editions, the publisher of your own first book. Your so-called factual article makes it sound like Vehicule was the only press around.

More evidence of selective amnesia:  the omission of writers like Denise Roig and Carolyn Marie Souaid who were/are not only important writers but who  actually worked to help us become ‘Enfin Visibles.’  In fact, Souaid is one of the 154 artists featured in ELAN’s RAEV project, ‘Enfin Visibles’  (peers and fans proposed more than 1,700 artists for inclusion in a “group portrait” representing multiple artistic disciplines, regions and career stages.) The impressive output of these two writers speaks for itself. Their selfless community activism – the Urban Wanderers Reading Series, Poems on the Buses, Circus of Words/Cirque des mots and Poetry Quebec – deserves to be recognized and noted.

I don’t know whether you were responsible for the bibliographical reference appearing at the end of the book that lists poems focusing on Montreal, but a little research would have flagged John Glassco’s 1973 book-length work Montreal and Souaid’s 1998 book October. The latter is perhaps the only English-language writer in Quebec who has dealt in any serious way with this pivotal moment in Quebec history.  It was even shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Award!  If this is not a significant book, then I don’t know what book is. 

You had the opportunity to make an important contribution to the historical record-keeping of the English-language writers of Quebec but because of shoddy journalism, you have only contributed another layer of ignorance about what really happened in our community.  If we are going to be ‘Enfin Visibles’, then the story - the whole story – should be told Enfin, with Verité.

Yours truly,

Endre Farkas