Storied Franchise

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

If the University of British Columbia's creative writing program didn't exist, the CanLit mavens might well have invented it.

Ask yourself: what runs through the marrow of our fiction? Survival (so said Margaret Atwood over 30 years ago). Multi-ethnic voices. A deep preoccupation with the land and the climate and the inner life of our new urban reality.

But running through these thematic strains is a burgeoning style that's increasingly sleek and sharp and polished: the smart, edgy, entirely contemporary stories that seem to be the staple of some of our newest writers.

On its 40th anniversary, you can't help thinking UBC creative writing had something to do with this. Just look at some of its graduates over the past few years: Annabel Lyon (Oxygen, The Best Thing for You), Christy Ann Conlin (Heave), Lee Henderson (Broken Record Technique), Madeline Thien (Simple Recipes), Kevin Chong (Baroque-a-Nova). It's one of the country's most coveted master of fine arts degrees. Sure, there are other schools – the universities of Victoria, New Brunswick and Windsor prominent among them – but UBC was first (founded in 1965 by poet Earle Birney) and it's earned the kind of cachet that must drive its rivals to distraction.

Oddly enough, you don't need to track back very far to find the roots of this success. The late 1990s will do. Before that, the program hummed along (its model, the University of Iowa's legendary Writers’ Workshop) with a steady stream of accomplished students (from, say, Bill Gaston to Morris Panych), but near the end of that decade a great collision occurred: a batch of excellent students and teachers were swept up by a book business turning young writers to gold.

If publishers have always been willing to take a flyer on a new, exciting voice, first-time authors suddenly became something irresistible. This bull market, Quill & Quire, the Canadian book industry's trade magazine, recently suggested, began in 1996 with the publication of Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (McClelland & Stewart) and Knopf Canada's New Face of Fiction series (which included Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees). Naturally, creative writing schools now seemed an unlimited source of bright, young talent. No one hit pay dirt like UBC.

Professor Keith Maillard, the program's co-chair, first became aware "the earth was beginning to move" when his student Eden Robinson's MFA thesis turned into a two-book deal with Random House; the second, her novel Monkey Beach, was nominated for both the 2000 Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award. That same year, student Nancy Lee joined Toronto literary agent Anne McDermid's roster, before selling a then-unpublished collection of short stories (Dead Girls) and an unwritten novel to McClelland & Stewart for reportedly $30,000; indeed, nearly half the graduating class of 2001 finished school with a book contract. Every publishing house, it seemed, needed its own author from the Buchanan Building.

Christy Ann Conlin, author of Heave. Photo by Marie Cameron. Courtesy WFNS

Soon, the program was like journalism school after All the President's Men. Applications spiked. (Last year, there were nearly 200 applicants for up to 25 autumn spots.) Matriculate, some imagined, and you'd be with a major publisher in no time.

"Ah, yeah," Maillard said recently, beginning to laugh. "For a lot of people, that's what they want."

It was an enormous shift from when he started teaching there in the late '80s. "Students would come and sit in my office in those early years and say, 'What is this MFA degree going to do for me?' At which point I would look them in the eye and say, 'Absolutely nothing.'"

But UBC has since taken a more hardboiled approach to reality. Ask fabled editor Ellen Seligman. While she rejects any suggestion of a "special relationship" between publishers and the academy, she admits that professors there have pushed students to submit work, going out on a limb to speak directly to publishers, alerting them to special, emerging talent.

"I am not aware of any other creative writing school that is so dedicated to the future of the students in that way, which is a very concrete way," says Seligman, McClelland & Stewart's publisher of fiction and senior vice-president, singling out professor Linda Svendsen for feeding these networks. "[Publishers] are not buying something to be fashionable. It's a question of bringing writers to the attention of publishers; there has to be that connection."

To say that publishers are hooked on creative writing grads, however, makes many in the industry bristle.

"It's a trend manufactured by the media," Toronto literary agent Denise Bukowski says, dismissing the notion that there's a huge boom for people in these courses getting book contracts. "It's very hard to convince the media that fiction isn't what they think it is. Publishers are running scared right now because fiction isn't selling."

Both Bukowski and Seligman chose their words carefully when we spoke, still bruised, perhaps, from the media-fueled bickering from a few years ago. With its sudden explosion of authors, UBC was given a great deal of coverage, locally and nationally, for better or for worse. "VanLit," locals dubbed it. A "post-national, post-industrial Pacific Rim cultural experiment," according to the Vancouver Sun. In the Globe and Mail one unnamed author called the young novelists rolling off "the assembly line" in Point Grey a "precious mob…incapable of anything more than pure craft."

Critic Noah Richler was also suspicious: a more studied approach didn't mean we were producing better fiction. "The short story," he wrote in the National Post in 2002, "has been much diminished in Canada, where it has been subsumed to the purposes of the MFA schools. Too often, what we're getting these days are short pieces of fiction and not short stories. Professional samples, really."

But these samples worked. They often had something hugely desirable to publishers: polish. "You couldn't have gone through UBC two years and not had that polish," Maillard says. "If there's nothing else we do, we try and get that gleam."

Still, the faculty isn't trying to smooth anyone out; as Linda Svendsen has observed, they're hoping writers will "get it said better, truer."

Maillard thinks this recent crop of UBC grads had the qualities publishers have always been looking for. "If you look at that whole lot of published writers, there's youth. There's enthusiasm. Also this greatly overworked word, edgy. I'm not sure what it means. But I think there was the feeling that these kids were pushing the envelope."

Polish, youth and edginess: it's an attractive combination. But is it golden? Bukowski, for one, thinks not. The market has fallen flat; international publishers are signing fewer and fewer first-time authors. And some deals are nothing more than a piece of paper. “What’s a book deal? You can go to a small press and get a book deal for $200,” she says. “That’s a book deal. Is that what they want?”

In a tighter market, the handful of writers who do get substantial deals might emerge from anywhere – banking (Timothy Taylor) or journalism (Miriam Toews) or film (David Bezmozgis). If Bukowski’s right and the climate is changing, you wonder if emerging authors will still choose the academy. To teach, the degree is essential, but will Maillard find more students asking what it will do for them? In all likelihood it depends on whether UBC’s voices stick. And that we may only begin to know after all the chatter fades, many years from now.

Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer.