Over the past decade, Canadian literature has pretty much been constantly on the verge of collapsing in on itself. As Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott so aptly put it in a column for Open Book back in 2017, “it would seem that dissatisfaction with the state of CanLit, strangely enough, is the current state of CanLit.” This column followed an incident in which Steven Galloway, the former chair of the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program, was dismissed from his post due to allegations of assault, and many prominent Canadian authors put their support behind him. 

Since then, this perpetual state of dissatisfaction has only worsened. It seems that the defining feature of CanLit is to be mired in controversy. Select notes over the past decade include the identities of writers who had written extensively of being Indigenous, such as Gwen Benaway and Joseph Boyden, being called into question ...