Whose past? My past, obviously: I was Bart Gerrard, one of my noms de plume—the name of a then-forgotten and probably now more-forgotten Canadian newspaper caricaturist of the turn of the century. That’s the turn of the century before the turn of the century we just had.

But also the past of Canada, or Kanada, as we sometimes, then, in the seventies, found it clever to say. (Why did we find it clever? I’ve forgotten.) Bart Gerrard drew Kanadian Kulchur Komics for a small populist leftish periodical that had originally been called This Magazine Is About Schools, but had then become more general in its interests, re-naming itself as This Magazine. (“I write for This Magazine.” “What magazine?” “This Magazine.” “What?” “Who’s on First?”) (It is now called simply This, so no longer gets involved in this kind of circular conversation about its name.) Bart started drawing for it through Rick Salutin, an old friend, who thought the sometimes portentous and pulpit-thumping tone of This Magazine could use a little lightening up. Anyway, I’d always drawn stupid comix in private, so was not averse to doing it in public. As you can tell from the drawing, the strip was often cranked out on the fly: I was living on a working farm at the time and running a huge vegetable garden, so KKKomix sometimes had to take second place to slug-destroying and hay-harvesting, not to mention the TV script writing and other forms of scribbling I was doing to make a living and support my poetry-writing and novel-creation.

The central joke of the Survivalwoman comics was this: in 1972 I’d published a book called Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which had made waves of a sort, not all of them friendly. This book was an attempt to distinguish what people wrote in Canada from what they wrote in the United States and the United Kingdom, in riposte to what we were so often told: that there wasn’t any Canadian literature, or if there was, it was a pale echo of things written in large, cosmopolitan, important places. Survival against the odds—both natural and human—I took to be one of the leitmotifs of such Canadian writing as I could get my hands on then, in the dark ages before the Internet, print-on-demand, and Abe Books.

Pair that leitmotif with the fact that, in the world of comix, Canada did not have a superhero of its own—Nelvana of the Northern Lights and Johnny Canuck and their bros and sisses having vanished with the demise of the wartime “Canadian Whites” in approximately 1946. (King of the Royal Mounted did not count, being American. Anyway, King had no superhuman features, unlike the present-day Wolverine.)

So what more appropriate than Survivalwoman: a superheroine with no discernable powers, who had a cape but could not fly—hey, it was Kanada, always lesser—and came equipped with snowshoes? The visual design was based on me—curly hair, short—as was part of the personality—earnest and somewhat clueless. This figure later did some fundraising for This Magazine, as a set of greeting cards, in which Survivalwoman sits on the curb looking dejected, as was her wont.

As Hope Nicholson has told me that she only understood about half of the references in the strip, here are some interpretations for you. In the Origin Story, Holier Pierre is Pierre Trudeau. We culture types were mad at him because he paid scant heed to us and our efforts: in that dimly remembered era, support for culture came from, guess who, the Progressive Conservatives! The middle finger is the same one Pierre had given some journalists. The rose relic is of course his buttonhole rose. The innocent, pure-minded Canadian was a cliché, and also a joke: we ourselves knew that this was not our real nature or indeed our real history.

The “Amphibianwoman” sequence is about a very high-profile concern in the 1970s: the Quebec separatist movement, then at its height. Why “Amphibian?” After the disrespectful slang applied to French people at the time, which was “frogs.” (I myself do not see why this should be derogatory, as I am an amphibian-fancier and my company is named O.W. Toad. But that is another matter.) Amphibianwoman is portrayed as sexier and more sophisticated than the naïve and flat-chested “anglo” Survivalwoman because we “anglo” gals were often treated to comparisons of that kind. (Why can’t Toronto women dress as well as Montreal women, and so forth and so on.) “René” is of course René Levesque, then the leader of the separatist forces. And as usual, the anglos (squareheads or wooden throats, in Quebecois slang) were told they just didn’t understand. They often didn’t, so fair enough eh?

In the Love Life strip, Survivalwoman has encounters with both Pierre (again), who (again) isn’t forking out for Culture, and Superham from the U.S., interested—as so often—in Canada’s natural resources. The final “Exit, pursued by a bear” animal panel is a reference to Marian Engel’s novel Bear, featuring a love affair of sorts with a bear, which had just rollicked upon the scene.

There you have it, young people of today. Don’t judge me. You will anyway, but wait forty years and see if anyone understands your political cartoons! Plus ça change, eh? Adieu, and bonne chance!

Excerpted from The Secret Loves of Geek Girls: Redux, published by Bedside Press. The book is now available at hopenicholson.com or on Amazon.

Restore Our Anthem’s website has a FAQ section that addresses all of this, including this popular sentiment: “The National Anthem isn’t supposed to be taken literally. Ex. ‘Mankind’ represents everyone.”

Restore Our Anthem’s response: “We have a feeling if the word was ‘daughters’ it would be taken literally.”

I imagine that before 1918—the year when almost all Canadian women (aboriginal women had to wait until 1960) finally were allowed to vote in a federal election—they were probably told there were better things to think about (and probably after 1918 too). Speaking of history, was there such hostility when the lyrics “From far and wide” and “God keep our land” were added in 1968? We’ve changed anthems before, our kids aren’t singing “God Save the Queen” or “The Maple Leaf Forever” every morning. There were French versions and 40 English versions before the Stanley Weir’s 1908 lyrics, which were changed only five years later—“thou dost in us command” became “in all thy sons command,” So Restore Our Anthem is respecting history, right? They want a lyric changed, not the whole song. We’ve done this before, Canada. And we’re still here.

“If you want to get upset about tradition,” writes Times Colonist Jack Knox. “Consider this: In 146 years, Canada has had a female prime minister for just 133 days.”

Now that we know “In all of us command” won’t disgrace our nation’s history, we can calm down. After all, if words don’t matter, let our young country continue to evolve.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna writes Gender Block every week and maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

“I know what I wanted to tell you,” she said both times, “so-and-so died.”

The first unfortunate object of forgotten conversation was a dear old great aunt in Vancouver I hadn’t seen in a decade. The second was my childhood family doctor, whose last prescription for me was filled at least 20 years ago. My mother is the meticulous and dedicated reporter of demise in our family. She spreads the detailed news of death and disease, and these are usually the lead stories in any call from her. In this, she shares a curious simpatico with a writer of whom both she and I are fond, Michael Ondaatje.

Is there another writer anywhere who makes sickening violence and death into beauty with such regularity and skill? I hear someone shouting—perhaps wailing—Atwood!, and indeed, Peggy and Mike can be justly seen as the twin pillars of Canadian moroseness. Why bring a character’s life to a satisfying conclusion amid doting pets and darling grandchildren when you can murder, beat, maim, dismember, explode or burn them beyond recognition? But while Atwood hurts her characters as object lessons in the indifference of the universe, Ondaatje’s cruelty has the air of fetish about it. It is violence for art’s sake. His is a stunningly beautiful landscape of suffering.

In Divisadero, the reigning Governor General’s Award champion, Ondaatje cripples one character with childhood polio, has a horse kick the stuffing out of the same girl and her sister, induces a father to attack and nearly murder his daughter’s lover, and has that same daughter stab and almost dispatch the attacking father.

Later in the book, the almost-murdered lover is beaten into amnesia by some gambling colleagues and must undergo a second round of recovery and recall. As well, a literary flashback takes us through the life of a French poet who is blinded in one eye when glass shards pierce his cornea, and who later witnesses his one true love die of diphtheria. In an Ondaatje novel, not even a poet is allowed a life of quiet. Then again, this is the same writer who flung a nun from the Bloor Street viaduct, blew up a nurse with a roadside bomb and forced a lovestruck archeologist through the agonies of body-wide third-degree burns.

When we were younger, my writer friends and I made a game of Ondaatje sightings around town. Someone had spotted him in a liquor store, buying a wine that screamed of excellent taste. Another had a long, uncomfortable conversation with him at a book launch. Yet another is proud to report he used the urinal beside Ondaatje’s not once but twice in his travels. In each instance, the tellers of the tale escaped literary harm despite their proximity to this genius of personal disaster. So far, Ondaatje has not clubbed a character with a wine bottle, talked one to death or had him painfully assaulted during urination.

I note a brand-new Coach House title, Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, brings potential bio-terrorism to the Toronto subway. Helwig’s characters drop to the tiled platforms in delightfully Ondaatjean style. Of course, Ondaatje began his career as a Coach House author. Is Canada’s hippest small press the source of all this pain and morbidity?

In my student days I edited and handmade a literary magazine called ink, and we printed the covers and trimmed the final books at Coach House. I did the trimming myself on their diabolical-looking industrial book cutter, an awesome machine that can straighten the edges of 20 magazines or more with one precise machine-driven cut. I never passed my fingers beneath the blade without visualizing the horrible damage it could visit upon me.

Once, deep in concentrated trimming, I was interrupted by someone standing beside me. A voice asked me to trim a pile of Brick magazine covers. As I handed back the trimmed pile, Michael Ondaatje gave me, and the deadly cutting edge, a grateful smile. I realize now I’m lucky to have escaped with my life.

In her new book, Imagining Toronto, York University geography professor Amy Lavender Harris creates a literary map of that identity building. What she finds is a literary scene that is reflecting the city’s shifting geography, moving into inner suburbs like Scarborough and North York, and well into deep suburbia: Pickering, Vaughan, Ajax.

Harris began writing her book two years ago after scouring the city for books for a Toronto literature course. She soon found herself delving into the city’s literary history, as framed by the narratives of iconic neighborhoods like the Annex, Parkdale and Cabbagetown. Now she has oriented the city’s public spaces in its literature, tracing Toronto’s identity to the streetcar lines and architectural icons that recur in its literature.

It’s those architectural icons that often define the Toronto identity, for better or worse. “The CN Tower comes to mind because it’s the most iconic, as well as in some ways, hated, symbol of Toronto,” she says—but that was until Michael Lee-Chin’s crystalline addition to the Royal Ontario Museum was unveiled, Harris notes.

Harris says there is plenty of literary history to left to map. “If you could say everything there was that could be said about Toronto, then it would be a pretty boring place.”

The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology is a fundraiser to restore the Ontario home where he nurtured aspiring young poets and made a mean wild-grape wine.

The ramshackle A-frame house Al Purdy built still stands by the lake in Ameliasburgh, Ontario. A place “so far from anywhere,” he wrote, “even homing pigeons lost their way.”

Inside, it’s nearly as it was when he died 10 years ago. His drawers and cupboards still hold the flotsam and jetsam of a well lived life.

Outside, wild grass has reclaimed a shed that was once a guest house for young poets like Michael Ondaatje. Purdy’s writing room, another shed, sinks slowly into the muddy earth. The main house is badly in need of a new foundation.

That’s where the Al Purdy A-frame Trust comes in. A collection of poets, authors and CanLit lovers want to raise the money to buy the land, save the house, and start writer-in-residence program in the A-frame.

“Nurturing young writers was a second vocation for Al,” said Jean Baird, the project’s head. “And he was blunt!”

Canada hasn’t done a great job of preserving its physical literary history, Baird says. The childhood home of author Joy Kogawa is preseved in British Colombia, but 60 years passed between it being her family home and becoming a historic site. Purdy’s house is still owned by his wife Eurithie, and remains largely untouched since his death.

The book The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology is an amazing piece of Canadian literary history, and a fundraiser for the project.

The anthology has the same cobbled-together yet built-to-last feeling as the A-frame itself. It’s a summer scrapbook of essays, poems and pictures by authors including Denis Lee, F. R. Scott, and Margaret Atwood. Purdy’s own essays and poems flesh out the famous cottage that was once CanLit’s own homemade-wine fueled summer camp and setting for many of his poems.

The A-frame was the go-to spot for aspiring Canadian poets and acclaimed wordsmiths alike for 40 years. Many of the aspiring poets, like Ondaatje, later became the acclaimed in part due to their visits to the A-frame to hone their skills.

Many of the book’s contributors, including Eurithie, credit the house as the catalyst that transformed Purdy’s writing from his awkward early attempts to the beautiful and often brash verses he wrote in his middle years about the land and our history.

So we built a house, my wife and I

Our house at a backwater puddle of a lake

near Ameliasburgh, Ont. spending

our last hard-earned buck to buy second-hand lumber.

-Al Purdy, from “In Search of Owen Roblin”

Baird says it’ll cost about $900,000 to buy the house, upgrade it to current safety codes, and establish the writer-in-residence endowment. So far, most of the money the trust has received has been in $10 and $20 increments from poetry-loving Canadians. The push is on now to get several large donors to really get things rolling.

For more information about the project, or to make a donation, visit Harbourfront Publishing’s website.

Alice Munro's new book, Too Much Happiness

Alice Munro, one of the giants of Canada’s literary scene, has always been a tremendously sensitive and humane writer; in turning down yet another nomination for the prestigious Giller Prize, she’s proven to be an equally sensitive and humane cultivator of Canadian writing talent. Having already won the Giller twice—for The Love of a Good Woman and Runaway—Munro said that she would withdraw her new book, Too Much Happiness, from the arena in order to give a younger generation of writers a kick at the can, her publisher told the Globe:

“Her reason is that she has won twice and would like to leave the field to younger writers,” Munro’s publisher, Douglas Gibson, confirmed this week. “In my role as greedy publisher I pointed out that the Giller Prize produces so much publicity, that even to be nominated for it is tremendous publicity,” he said. “But her mind is made up on this. Alice preferred to withdraw from the competition.”

You could argue that withdrawing at this point whiffs of condescension, robbing other writers of the thrill of throwing their work into the arena with her and (however unlikely) prevailing. But knowing what we do about Munro and her books—every one is her “last collection before retirement,” until the next book comes along—I think this is a more generous and gracious move. She doesn’t appear to write for glory or money or prizes. She writes because she can’t not write. The spot that Munro’s withdrawal leaves open will be worth much more to someone else, maybe a writer with less exposure and fewer sales who nonetheless has something remarkable to say.

I look forward to more books from Alice Munro, who at 78 is still prolific. But like all ecologies, artistic and literary environments need new growth and development, and in stepping aside like this, Munro has shown her support for that natural and necessary evolution.