Despite all the pressure from activists to shut it down because of the funder’s financial links to an Israeli defence contractor, the Giller Prize was awarded last month. Yet the gang of activist writers who wanted to cancel the Gillers are still hounding others who dare poke their heads over the top of the cultural trench.
Take the case of Hal Niedzviecki. The Canadian writer and editor and all-round supporter of Canada’s “zine” industry has been unceremoniously thrown out of his life’s work. He was the founder of Canzine — a long-running festival of the arts that activists closed down this year.
The problem, you see, is that Niedzviecki is both Jewish and a supporter of Israel. This just isn’t allowed to pass unnoticed and without consequence in today’s Canada. Now, those same activists are forcing the closure of Broken Pencil, a literary magazine Niedzviecki founded that is approaching three decades in print.
It wasn’t always this way. Niedzviecki explained in an interview that when he founded Broken Pencil in 1995, he was part of a generation of new writers trying to upend what they saw as their staid predecessors.
They wanted to bring new voices into the fold — LGBTQ+ and Indigenous voices — and to centre an urban and gritty reality that was anything other than the world of woods and wilderness of stereotypical Canadian literature. This rebelliousness was itself something of a tradition — rambunctious youngsters challenging their elders. The Boomers had done it, too — overthrowing what they saw as repressive sexual and moral values.
Way back in 1986, the zesty young journalist and novelist Heather Robertson, who won heaps of prizes for her novel, “Willie: A Romance,” which satirized the odd sexual hangups of former prime minister Mackenzie King, wrote in, the since shuttered magazine, Books in Canada: “My moment of liberation as a fiction writer came when I sat down at my typewriter and wrote ‘The Red Cross sucks c–k.’ To get that out of my WASP Presbyterian subconscious was totally liberating.”
We’ve come a long way from Robertson’s “Willie.”
A funny thing happened on our way through the 2010s. Our literary culture shifted away from being a place of challenge and revolt — where moral ideas were transgressed and overthrown. It instead became a place where writers had to uphold and bolster moral values. But don’t worry, we have been told, as these are social justice values. So it’s all good.
Challenging the orthodoxy isn’t new territory for Niedzviecki. Back in 2017, he mischievously suggested there should be a “cultural appropriation” prize for the “best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.” Needless to say, a bunch of activist writers lost their minds. They called for Niedzviecki’s head and they (sort of) got what they wanted.
What many outside the writing world don’t realize is just how fragile a literary life can be. You can piece together a life in the arts but it often involves taking small advising and consulting gigs — or teaching creative courses at universities and colleges — and writing a few pieces for newspapers and magazines. All of this isn’t individually worth very much, but if you add in the occasional government grant, you can eke out a somewhat reasonable life. It also helps to have a spouse with a reliable job.
In the wake of the appropriation prize controversy, Niedzviecki said that many of these side gigs dried up. They depended on the goodwill of a small number of cultural gatekeepers, who provided invitations and recommendations. But if you lose the goodwill of this tiny group — maybe by voicing opinions that are no longer acceptable — the invitations stop coming.
Niedzviecki was able to hang on — editing Broken Pencil and running the Canzine festival and doing other work. But the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 changed all that. This time, it was personal. As a Jewish Canadian with family who died in the Holocaust, he said he felt that he couldn’t keep silent. He had to speak out. And that’s when the literary thought police came for him.
Calling him a “Zionazi,” this September a gang of activists demanded a boycott of the Canzine festival he ran. The literary activists are mixed group, holding various government funded or grant-supported jobs as artists and librarians by day and then then running literary reputation hit-squads on the side. They claimed that Niedzviecki supported Israel and that he “denied that a genocide is taking place in Gaza,” thus “contributing to misinformation and hate.” They organized a counter event in Ottawa where, maybe not surprisingly, “masking (was) highly encouraged.” They got their way. Niedzviecki was forced to cancel his event.
At the same time, they came for his baby — Broken Pencil magazine, which he had run for almost 30 years. Never mind that Niedzviecki hadn’t published any of his political views in the magazine — only on his personal Twitter account. And despite the fact that Broken Pencil was still a home to the many diverse voices and views that the activists claimed to support, it wasn’t enough. They didn’t want him to shut down the magazine. They wanted him to hand it over.
They demanded that he step down as publisher and that the magazine adopt the “Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel” and publish an issue dedicated to Palestinian artists. They went after advertisers and the magazine’s staff. Three of its four editors resigned.
In this case, the protesters only half won. Niedzviecki certainly isn’t going to just hand over the magazine to his critics. They won’t get that. But after being forced to cancel the Canzine festival this autumn, Niedzviecki is now being forced, after a lifetime of editing, to shut down Broken Pencil, which he announced on Saturday. He continues to write. His new memoir will be published with Cormorant Books, the same house that published his last novel, “The Lost Expert.” But the damage is real.
This might seem like a little story about a small literary magazine and a writer you’ve probably never heard of. Yet this is about two big things. It’s about one man’s life and how a gang of activists can destroy it — how they can take away his livelihood and the business that he spent so much time building.
It’s also a story about the literary scene in microcosm. It’s a story about how the literary world went from being a place of playful upending of moral values with genuinely diverse voices to a real-life version “Mean Girls,” social justice style.
The Gillers are over, but the literary thought police don’t seem to be finished yet. And given that Canadian taxpayers are indirectly funding most of this — via cultural grants to writers and publishers — it’s also something we might want to decide to care about.
National Post
Christopher Dummitt is a historian of Canadian culture and politics at Trent University and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.