Do the math: If BC fiction writers produce 1/4 of the fiction in English Canada, why is recognition so pathetic?

All ten nominees for this year's Giller Prize
and the Governor General's (English) Fiction Award are from Ontario publishers.

BC authors registered 108 fiction titles with Public Lending Rights (PLR)in 2007.

To lead the way into our coverage of 50 new fiction titles from British Columbia, we asked Andreas Schroeder-who has a new collection of novellas himself this fall-to comment on the ongoing proliferation of fiction from B.C. Here's his response:

Whether you agree this a good thing depends largely on your yardstick. I remember Irving Layton looking around the room at a League of Poets meeting as far back as 1979 and grumbling: "There's too goddamn many of us! They oughta shoot half of us and neuter the other half!"; On the other hand, if you subscribe to the Manure Pile Theory of Literature, we're clearly on a roll. You need a lot of manure to grow prize pumpkins.

According to the PLR's databank, Canada has produced roughly 8,000 fiction titles during the past half century-and a quarter of them came from B.C. writers. The vast majority of these titles from B.C. have been produced in the past 20 years. While the province's population increased by a mere 25%, our fiction output during that same time increased by almost 500%.

With respect to those pumpkins-just where might they be found? The obvious answer would be to look at the list of winners for the Governor General's Award for English Fiction but B.C. hasn't had a GG winner for fiction since 1980. In fact, we've only had two winners of a GG fiction award (Jack Hodgins and George Bowering) since the Canada Council took over the GG's in 1959. Both their winning titles were published from Ontario.

Even the GG shortlists produce slim pickings-rarely more than one B.C. author is shortlisted per year, and many years none at all.

The glamorous, newer Giller Prize for Fiction is virtually a carbon copy. No B.C. fictioneer has won the Giller in the 14 years of its existence. Yes, we've had an almost formulaic one title per shortlist every year (except '95, '97, '99 and '01, when there were none), but that's as close as we've ever been to that particular brass ring.

And it gets worse. If being a B.C. fiction writer seems a handicap, being a B.C. fiction writer published by a B.C. publisher appears to double the problem, at the very least. Never mind that our two GG fiction winners weren't published by a BC publisher. Of the 12 B.C. fiction writers who have made the GG shortlist since 1979 (the year the Canada Council's archive for the GG awards begins listing finalists), only one was published by a B.C. publisher. That was Carol Windley for her debut collection of short stories, Visible Light, published by Oolichan Books in 1993. The other 11 were all published by Ontario publishers.

Can it get any worse than that? Well, yes, it can. One might be forgiven for assuming that our own book prize for fiction-the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, inaugurated in 1985-would go at least some distance toward filling the pumpkin box. After all, its winners have to be BC authors. But who's published them? Does geography and publishing politics possibly influence the pecking order of a prize limited to authors who have lived in this province for three of the past five years?

Answer: It turns out that of the winners of the Ethel Wilson prize for BC fiction since 1985, a mere three have been published by BC publishers. Twice the winners were published by Douglas & McIntyre, once by Talonbooks. All the rest were published by Ontario publishers. And the shortlists reveal much the same story. They reveal an almost unbroken record of having only one shortlisted fiction writer published by a BC publisher every year. Most of the rest were published by Ontario publishers.

So what should we conclude from this? It depends on whether you favour conspiracy theories, Alice's Law of Coincidental Coincidences, or plain bad luck. Is there something inherent in B.C. fiction that just doesn't work for Torontonians? Or is it that Ontario publishers cream off our most successful authors and leave only the beginners and the mid-list authors to our BC publishers? If that were true, why aren't more of those B.C. authors published by Ontario publishers winning GG's and Gillers?

Alan Twigg, publisher of BC BookWorld, has made it his business to keep track of the "uneven playing field for fiction"; for 20 years. Before writing this article, I asked him to comment on my research. His response was blunt. "The fiction game is played in Moscow,"; he wrote. "We are in Vladivostok.";

Public Lending Rights founder/overseer Andreas Schroeder of Roberts Creek has re-investigated his Mennonite roots for three novellas that comprise Renovating Heaven (Oolichan).

[BCBW 2008]