Richard King photo by Michael Derkson

 

It started out as many things do in the book business—with lunch.  Sheila Moore, who was, at the time an executive at Alliance Québec and in charge of things cultural arranged to meet me, I was, at that time, the co-owner of Paragraph Bookstore) and Simon Dardick, the co-owner of Vehicule Press to discuss the possibility of establishing literary prizes for books authored by Québec’s English-language writers. She had had a meeting with Endre Farkas, a poet and promoter of poetry in particular and writing in general, who suggested the idea of establishing a literary prize as a way to promote English-language writing in Québec. Endre taught at John Abbott College in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, a suburb of Montreal, and so could not be present at the aforementioned lunch meeting.  The basic idea of establishing prizes for English-language writing was a no-brainer; the hard part was determining how to put together the infrastructure, a board of directors, people who would do the actual work of getting this project off the ground.  Moreover, we had to find people who had the time and the desire to work on the project who would be willing to do it for free.  We had an idea whose time had come, but we did not have any money.

           

Fuelled by good food, some drink and good company, our lunch meeting ended on a euphoric note.  We agreed to look for the people we needed to put the literary awards idea action.  Sheila volunteered the offices of the Alliance Québec for meetings and for all manner of help with backroom office work.  At this point, the awards did not have an official name; we referred to them not-so-simply as awards for English-language writing by writers resident in Québec.

           

At one point in those early days, I suggested that we award unpublished manuscripts but wiser heads, primarily Simon’s, prevailed and we quickly decided to reward only books published in the previous twelve months.  (Simon offered to let me read all the unpublished manuscripts he had in his basement should I wish to see why my idea was pure folly.  An offer I declined).

           

The memory plays tricks, it tends to erase anxiety over time but looking back at those early days (roughly twenty-five years ago) in the founding of what came to be known as the QSPELL Prize, I recall that it was surprisingly easy to put together a board of directors of people who were involved, in one way or another, in the English-language culture of Québec, and who were willing to do the work necessary to make the idea a reality.

           

The 1980s were an interesting time in the long history of English culture in Québec.  Jonathan Penney and I opened an English-language bookstore in the heart of downtown Montreal and made it into the first bookstore café in Canada—probably one of the first ones in North America.  The exodus of English people from Québec, mainly from Montreal, did not dissuade us.  In fact, we thought that the exodus would, in a strange way, help us. We felt that Classics, Coles and W.H. Smith, the national chains of the time would be unlikely to expand in Québec thus leaving the market to our store—Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore & Café, as it was officially called. I came up with the name by flipping through a Petit Robert looking for a French word that had the same meaning and more or less the same spelling in English and that had something to do with books and writing.  There may have been a better choice in the X or Z section of the dictionary, but I stopped looking when I hit on the word “Paragraphe”.) 

 

Jonathan and I made two decisions very early in Paragraphe’s history that I am convinced ensured its success.  The first was to be an English-language bookstore that provided service in both English and French so as to tap into the large market of Québecois who wished to buy books in English but preferred booksellers who spoke French.  Second, almost contradictorily, we decided to make our bookstore the centre of English-language literary culture in Montreal. There was one other bookstore that was sowing and harvesting in the same field—The Double Hook—but we figured that there was enough business for the two stores.  Jonathan and I had and still have a great deal of respect for Judy Mappin and her partners and staff of Double Hook. We believed that we were benefitting from the faith that Judy had in the literary culture of Canada. During the years we owned Paragraphe, we were fortunate to be able to work with Judy on many projects. 

           

One of the first books launched at Paragraphe was The Anglo Guide to Survival in Québec, published by Eden Press, led at the time by the brilliant Pamela Chichinskas.  This book became an overnight success in Québec and Paragraphe made a quantum leap forward in terms of publicity, the best kind of publicity—free publicity.  None of the chain stores carried the book in the critical first few days following its release.  (The Toronto-based buyers were slow to get the jokes in The Anglo Guide to Survival in Québec and when they did get them, they misunderstood them and were afraid to carry the book for fear that it would insult their French-speaking customers.  The managers of one of the chain stores ordered the book surreptitiously in the hope that it would sell out and therefore be eligible for reorder before the Toronto head office knew what was going on.) On the night of the launch, Paragraphe sold 400 copies of it and our bookstore established itself in the minds of both French-speaking (who learned of the book thanks to an article in La Presse by Lisianne Gagnon) and English-speaking Québecois.

           

The point of this digression into the history of bookselling in Québec is simply to show that in spite of, or maybe because of, a Parti Québécois government, the Referendum, and the exodus of the English, the time was ripe to flex a little English literary muscle.  And this brings us back to the founding of QSPELL.

           

I am sorry to say that after all this time I cannot remember the names of all those who served on the early boards of directors but I do remember that all of those who served gave freely of their time and energy to make the award a success.  I do remember that the first formal meeting included Endre Farkas, Judy Mappin, Simon Dardick, Philip Cercone of McGill-Queens University Press, Sheila Moore and Sheila Fischman.  Again, I apologize to those whose names I cannot remember; the fault is that of an aging former bookseller and is in no way meant as a slight.

           

For some reason, the board decided that I should be the President of the committee that did not yet have a name.  I shall be eternally grateful to the board for giving me that opportunity.  This short essay is in some small way my way of thanking them.

           

One of the first orders of business was to come up with a name for the prize.  I thought that the Québec Society for the Promotion of English Language Literature or QSPELL would be a worthy, albeit lengthy, name for the award and organization.  The board of directors had other ideas.  It preferred the Québec Society for English Language Literature or QSELL, proposed by Philip Cercone.  Philip agreed to take on the responsibility of dealing with the Office de la Langue Française (referred to by one and all as l’Office) to find a translation that would be acceptable to it.  As it turned out, l’Office did not like the name Québec Society for English Language Literature. It could not find an acceptable, sensible translation for it.  At some point in the conversation, Philip must have proposed the Québec Society for the Promotion of English Language Literature as an alternative and l’Office, bless it, liked it and was able to provide an acceptable translation.  So, QSPELL was born with the Office de la Langue Française as its midwife.

           

Now that we had a name, we could print stationary and send out fund-raising letters.  We agreed that we had to award prizes of at least $2,000.00 in three categories: Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry.  There was, of course, still the small problem that QSPELL had no money.  A letter was composed and Sheila Moore and the staff of Alliance Québec typed well over twenty copies to send to various businesses and foundations.  The first company to respond positively was Montreal’s English-language daily, The Gazette, owned at the time by Southam News. Clarke Davey, a character straight out of THE FRONT PAGE, was then the publisher of the newspaper.

           

And this brings us to another digression…

           

A couple of years before the founding of QSPELL The Gazette cut its book pages from, three or so to one.  Louis Dudek, poet, professor of English Literature at McGill University and an all-around wonderful person, had the idea of starting a petition demanding (well, asking really, Louis was nothing if not polite) that The Gazette reinstate its three-page book coverage.  Doris Giller (who, after her untimely death would have a book prize named in her honour) was the editor of The Gazette’s book pages at the time and supported the petition privately but for obvious reasons could not do so publicly.  The independent booksellers of Montreal showed no such reticence: The Double Hook and Bibliophile, to name two, supported Dudek’s petition.  Because Louis was an early and loyal customer of our store became the unofficial headquarters for what came to be called “The Gazette Book Page Petition”.  The independent booksellers gathered several thousand signatures (and a lot of coverage from radio and television stations in the city) and arranged for a meeting with Davey to present the petition and to argue for the reinstatement of the three-page book section.  Davey was taken with our petition and our good-natured arguments in favour of devoting more newspaper space to books and restored the book section to its previous length.  From that time on I enjoyed a terrific relationship with Clarke and with the Gazette both personally and as co-owner of Paragraphe. The Gazette co-sponsored many events with Paragraphe, not the least of which was the “Books & Breakfast” events that I inaugurated almost twenty years ago.

           

I don’t think I would have had the relationship that I had with Davey and with The Gazette had it not been for Louis Dudek and his book page petition.

           

Davey responded to our fund-raising letter and arranged for Simon Dardick and me to meet with him to discuss the possibility of making a contribution to QSPELL.  Simon and I must have been totally charming and well-spoken because it took us less than an hour to get Davey to commit The Gazette to a $2,000.00 contribution to QSPELL.

           

Somehow the Board raised the money it needed to proceed with the awards.  I don’t remember who the other contributors were in that first year but I do remember that raising the money we needed was not as easy as we thought it would be from our first successful effort.

           

Our next problem was to select judges who would decide which books in each of the three categories would be shortlisted and which of those would be the winner.  QSPELL was once again lucky.  One of the original board members, the award-winning translator, Sheila Fischman, was uniquely well-qualified and well-connected with just about everyone in the Canadian literary community to head the jury selection committee. She worked with a small number of board members that excluded writers and publishers to find jurors who would do the work of reading a year’s worth of books for very little in the way of an honorarium.  The names of the judges were a well-kept secret; I did not know who they were until the night the winning books were announced.  In all the years that Sheila was in charge of selecting jurors, I do not think there was a single complaint regarding the quality and integrity of the judges.  They were the best and the brightest of Canadian letters.

           

I had no idea how hard it is to be a judge until I, became a juror for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal a couple of years after I left Paragraphe.  Reading a year’s worth of books in three months turned out to be the easy part of the job.  The hard part came when the jurors met to discuss their choices for the award and had to not only defend those choices but also convince the other jurors that this or that book, more than the others, deserved the award and the cash that went with it.  I was on the jury the year the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal was, for the first time in its history, awarded to an English author: David Soloway, the poet who was also the first recipient of the QSPELL prize for poetry.  The jury’s deliberations that led to awarding the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal to Soloway remain secret but I can report that the discussion was interesting and, at times, heated. At the end of a very long day and evening’s deliberation, the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal jury was aware that it had made a small but important historical decision.  In retrospect, I realized how difficult the work of the QSPELL jurors had been.

           

The first-ever QSPELL awards were announced at a gala event at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.  Alliance Québec, a very different organization in the days of Michael Goldbloom, Royal Orr and Peter Blaikie than it is now, was instrumental in ensuring that the QSPELL awards came into existence.  The board invited Blaikie, the then chairman of the board of the Alliance Québec, to speak at the awards gala.  The intent of this decision was to publicly acknowledge the help and support provided by Alliance Québec. Of all the decisions we had made, this turned out to be the most controversial.  More than one member of QSPELL complained that giving the podium to the AQ was tantamount to politicizing the awards and creating the risk of ghettoizing them.  This, of course, never turned out to be the case.  I thought then and still think now that it is totally appropriate to show gratitude to those people and institutions that helped launch the QSPELL awards.

           

The Québec Society for the Promotion of English Language Literature came into being due to the efforts of the members of the first board of directors.  We were a group who loved books and who had an abiding respect for the writers who wrote them, writers who are the heart and soul of the book industry in Canada and around the world.  It is an obvious truth but one worth repeating: without writers there would, indeed, be no book industry at all. 

 

It is an obvious truth but one worth repeating: without writers, QSPELL would not have existed.