Books in Canada

In 1921, ROBERT FROST (of all people) left New England to spend a few weeks as "poet-in-residence" at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. This may well have been the birth of the concept of the poet- or writer-in-residence (a visiting professional offering advice, counsel, and encouragement to student writers in return for a stipend from the institution). Certainly the University of Michigan, which is supposed to have pioneered the idea in the United States, didn't begin to act until several years later. Now once again Canada is in the forefront, this time with the computer-age equivalent.

Writers in Electronic Residence, or WIER, a program that allows public-school students across the country to have their writing evaluated by prominent Canadian authors through computer conferencing on the Internet, originated in the early 1980s. That's when a group of Canadian writers, including the critic Frank Davey, then a professor at York University, and the poet Fred Wah, started an online literary "magazine" they called SwiftCurrent. SwiftCurrent, which was far ahead of its time and lasted several years, linked certain postmodern writers commenting on one another's work with a number of civilian readers who could follow the debate but not take pail in it. One of these electronic onlookers was Trevor Owen of the Toronto Board of Education, who became one of the country's most honoured teachers.

In 1988, Owen adapted the basic idea for use in the classroom, as a medium for students to have interactive relationships with a real-life writer. When it began, Owen's scheme featured only one author, Lionel Kearns, the West Coast poet. It included only a small handful of pupils and was run out of Simon Fraser University, where Kearns taught and to whose education faculty Owen would soon be seconded. So quickly did the idea take fire that by 1991 there were many more authors and about 900 users. By 1993 (by which time Owen had been lent to York University), WIER was contributing to the support of eight writers. In the year just completed, the number grew to 10, who dealt with about 3,600 apprentice writers at more than a hundred schools in seven provinces and the Northwest Territories. "Our students may now reach out electronically into the world ... and bring what they find there back into the classroom," Owen told an American education journal several years ago. But the United States isn't the only country watching the experiment closely and envying its progress. Educators in Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands also monitor its success. "In fact, we hear from anyone anywhere there's a graduate program in online learning," he says.

Perhaps WIER is another example (like the telephone or the automatic teller machine) of Canadians using communications technology in new ways in order to get around problems of geographical distance and thin population density, though of course the results are more important than the theory. WIER may or may not nurture a future generation of Canadian writers; we won't know for years to come (though the students in a WIER anthology published in 1992 write remarkably well for their age).

What WIER does do is to make them better consumers of the word. As one WIER alumna told a Globe and Mail reporter, "The more I write, the more I want to read. And the more I read, the more I want to write." The observation was echoed by the novelist Katherine Govier, who was one of Owen's early writers-in-residence and later, in 1990, forged a link between WIER and the Writers' Development Trust, which she chaired at the time. "The program may or may not produce good poets and fiction writers," she has said, "but it helps make good readers." The WIER co-ordinator at the Trust, April Hall, says that the back-and-forth between writers and students "creates a feeling for the community of writing" which a teacher alone, however gifted, usually cannot instil. "Kids really get turned on by the idea of having someone like Susan Musgrave -- someone whose work they're taught -- reading and responding to their own writing. It gives them a sense of authenticity." Perhaps partly because of the awe factor, many of WIER's end-users are too shy to identify themselves to their literary mentors: a high percentage of the student poems and stories are transmitted pseudonymously.

Ironically (or maybe not), WIER's success comes at a time when the concept of writers-in-residence is drying up at the university level after a long period of growth in other venues.

The rise of the pre-electronic writer-in-residence was linked to the rise of creative writing as a separate discipline, distinct from "English." In retrospect, it would almost appear that when the poet Earle Birney founded Canada's first creative writing department, at the University of British Columbia in 1963, he made acceptance of writers' residencies inevitable. In any event, in 1965 the Canada Council began encouraging universities to make such appointments by agreeing to put up half the money. By 1993, the council was paying about $12,000 a term each for poets, novelists, and playwrights at 10 different campuses across the country. That's when the program was killed in that year's round of budget slashing. By then, however, another trend had long been apparent.

By the 1980s, the idea of the writer-in-residence had spread far beyond the handful of universities in the Canada Council plan. Community colleges and public libraries had got into the act as well, with the high-profile positions at the Metro Central Reference Library in Toronto and the Regina Public Library being the most sought after. An Ontario Arts Council initiative carried the concept into libraries across the province, in a well-orchestrated outreach scheme that benefited mediumand small-sized communities (sometimes very small ones indeed, which had never before seen Canadian authors on the hoof). WIER is to some extent the logical legatee and successor to all that activity.

The writers first receive two weeks' training, both electronic and pedagogic. "Some of them are complete novices with computers," says the Trust's April Hall (who is also WIER's only full-time employee). "I'd say about half of my job is supporting the writers technically." She adds that " a few are technological wizards," citing David McFadden as one example and Margoshes, the Regina poet and short-story writer, as another.

Communicating in the other sense is a different matter entirely. Susan Musgrave has often been the traditional writer-in(analogue?) residence, at the University of Waterloo, the University of New Brunswick, the University of Western Ontario and, at present, the University of Toronto. As she explains, "Being online you have to work harder at being tactful, because you have only words on the screen to get your point across. In person, you can read people's reactions in their body language as much as in what they say, and adjust your approach accordingly. Dealing with people by computer you can't necessarily tell if they're upset or not taking criticism well. High school students need advice and encouragement. The tone you use is the key to the whole thing. Writers all know how it is to be interviewed by the press and say something ironic only to see it appear in cold print as totally unsubtle and injurious. Well, here too the secret is this: don't be ironic -- it doesn't work." Yet caution has to be balanced against the fact that "debate" (as Owen calls it) is what makes WIER special.

The fees paid by the schools are not in themselves enough to support the program, which had a budget last year of $190,000. About half of this amount comes from a crazy-quilt coalition of other organizations in both the public and private sectors, from the Ontario Arts Council to Unitel. The Canadian Conference on the Arts in Ottawa gives some money for the training of authors, and the Lionel Gelber Foundation in Toronto donates funds for the purchase of the authors' books, copies of which are sent gratis to the teachers in the field. York University's education faculty (which took over from Simon Fraser's in 1993 after Owen returned east) contributes management expertise and computer time, while the individual schools (and authors) use their own hardware, including modems. The biggest single donor is TransCanada PipeLines, which has pledged $250,000 over five years to cover the cost of participation by schools located along the route of its pipeline, which runs from the Alberta- Saskatchewan border to Quebec. TransCanada calls this WoW, its Write-of-Way program (cute). WoW has done a lot to help make access to WIER more equitable across the country, though the Atlantic provinces remain underrepresented. In fact, there are no schools at all taking part in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Prince Edward Island.

This is a cue. Any teachers or school administrators wishing to travel in this particular lane of the electronic superhighway should contact April Hall at the Writers' Development Trust, 24 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5T 2P3. For the totally retrograde, the telephone number there is (416) 861-2490. For the somewhat more technologically advanced, the fax is (416) 861-0090. Those conversant with electronic mail should memorize the address wier@yorku.ca.