Most Canadians live in cities. Why is our literature so relentlessly rural? Illustration by Graham Roumieu.

When he delivers public lectures, editor and writer John Metcalf is fond of illustrating CanLit’s paradoxical obsession with tales of the rural past by describing the query letter he once received from a then-unheard-of Russell Smith. Metcalf claims that Smith introduced the manuscript for his debut novel, How Insensitive, by asserting something along the lines of, “You probably won’t like this because it’s a Canadian novel but it isn’t about angst on the farm. CanLit always seems to be about angst on the farm.”

Thing is, most Canadians don’t live on, or even near, farms anymore. More than 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, yet the CanLit spotlights continue to shine on rural literature, usually of yesteryear. Why?

I’m entirely confident that this fall’s big fiction awards—that rise and fall of media attention as brief and predictable as a stadium wave—will once again prefer a rural yesterday to an urban today. In his new novel, Galore, Michael Crummey is clearly showing some CanLit thigh with not just rural Newfoundland history, but multiple centuries of rural Newfoundland history. Before lamenting the prevalence of these propagandistic tales from ye olde fishing village or down in them pit mines, let me clarify that this is not another urbanite’s call for more stories of hedge funds and wine tastings. All four of my grandparents were born on Canadian family farms, and I’ve spent half of the last decade in a fishing village of 200 souls. But with publishers, big media and universities giving us one rural yarn after another, someone has to put a stopper in the maple-syrup jug.

Ex-Saskatchewan novelist Michael Helm has been quoted as saying, “There’s a sense that the ancient agrarian rhythms [of Saskatchewan] still are there, and the question for a writer is how this rhythm works its way into your writing.” Oh, please. Helm is a professor. at York, one of our biggest universities in our biggest city. Gastropubs, bureaucratese, and tenure are more likely to influence his writing than are “ancient agrarian rhythms” (whatever they are).

I wonder why book clubs of contemporary urban women who live stories of career-and-home conflict, medically enhanced (or hindered) pregnancies, and life in the post-nuclear family choose to read Ami McKay’s The Birth House, a novel about a bygone, semi-literate midwife prying rural babies out with a washboard. Previously, I’ve commented on how unpredictable book reviewing is in Canada, and our lack of reliably critical voices is one reason no one cries foul on these tales of rural fowl suppers. More indicting is the fact that setting stories for urban audiences in (a) rural areas and/or (b) the past is another Canadian example of admiring something from away. Like an offshore queen or a neighbouring superpower, the rural past is elsewhere and well known, which is all that seems required by the CanCulture establishment.

We’ve become content to tell ourselves fictions about our fiction. The Nova Scotia of contemporary fact finds 40 percent of its population living in Halifax, a city with four universities (one of them devoted to the fine arts), over half a dozen yoga studios, not one but three artist-run centres (those hotbeds of poverty, creativity and incest), and higher per capita spending on reading, the performing arts and museums than Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. Yet the Nova Scotia stories that get publishing and media support are almost all the same: an octogenarian remembers the rural past, usually by returning to an old house. That’s exactly the plot of Don Hannah’s recent novel, Ragged Islands.

David Adams Richards moved from New Brunswick—where he still sets all his fiction—to Toronto over a decade ago, yet each new Richards novel finds another year from the past to inhabit. His fiction has the Y2K bug and can’t spin on over into this century. One-quarter the population of Newfoundland and half the population of Manitoba live in their capital cities, yet we still get one outport and farm story after another.

Sadly, the (mostly urban) study of CanLit worsens rather than corrects this preference for a literature of rural clichés over relevant ideas and lasting honesty. Far too many CanLit courses still contain Sinclair Ross’s prairie novel As for Me and My House (a lobotomy between two covers). Metcalf’s memoir Shut Up He Explained and CanLit scholar Robert Lecker’s Making It Real expose the marketing spin that sees Ross’s soporific novel perpetually described as “a Canadian classic.” If this book of dour prairie lit (excuse the redundancy) had truly sounded such a Canadian chord, why was it published in the United States and the U.K. a full 16 years before it found a Canadian publisher? Why, as Metcalf meticulously points out, were its Canadian sales so weak? Only conscription, in the form of university courses, keeps this moribund farm novel alive.

Literature’s job is to be incisive, not to be blindly contemporary, and the right voice can make any story gripping. A novel about sexting and YouTube isn’t inherently more interesting than one about muskeg and bison drives. But I for one am tired of counterfeit stories with no more heart than a provincial tourism poster.

The preference among Canadian literary awards for historical fiction has created a national literature devoted to burlap sacking instead of life in the sack. The repeat shortlisting of historical fiction, in which a rural or foreign yesterday is somehow more important than today, contributes to our excessively chaste literature. England has just seen the release of In Bed With, an anthology of smut by respected female writers. Meanwhile, in their new book The Porning of America, literature professors Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott examine how the internet has made porn and sexuality mainstream (hello, YouPorn.com). Yet here in Canada we still have a fiction devoted to mill town sagas and multi-generational farm stories, few of them emboldened by sexuality.

Here in Canada we still have a fiction devoted to mill town sagas and multi-generational farm stories, few of them emboldened by sexuality. Illustration by Graham Roumieu

Mary Lawson’s 2003 Crow Lake manages to have a plot that turns on the consequences of sex, but prefers to devote its prose to marsh fauna and the joinery of farmhouses, not farmhands. Andrea MacPherson’s 2007 Beyond the Blue is literally set in a wartime burlap factory. In life, we flirt by email. In our literature, we go to barn raisings.

Several Canadian literary magazines have recently released so-called “sex issues.” Pick up these earnest journals and you’ll find plenty of writing devoted to pop culture and shades of afternoon light. Etymology will abound. But no one will actually have sex.

Counter to this trend of dour and sexless fiction is Russell Smith’s self-confessedly pornographic — and recently re-released — novel, Diana. Part dirty love letter, part cri de genitalia, and part satire, Diana has many layers. This urban coming-of-age story follows a twentysomething Toronto woman in and out of a few jobs and several more beds. The vicissitudes of the publishing industry meant the first edition had become hard to find, so when Biblioasis, a new Ontario press, began re-releasing important but out-ofprint Canadian books, Smith emerged from behind his female mask to re-release Diana with a frank new introduction. Smith rightly calls it “silly” that Canadians don’t write or read about sex, “that area of conflict and pleasure which is so central to our daily lives, our relationships, our self-confidence, our whole sense of self.”

Globe columnist and Governor General’s Award nominee Smith originally released the novel under the pseudonym “Diane Savage.” Although he now regrets having tried to pass off the first edition as the writing of a woman, that gender-bending was obviously more than just a desire to court the largely female market for erotic literature. Writing as a woman allowed Smith to investigate important issues of submission and dominance both freely and authoritatively. Diana is submissive in one relationship, then dominant in the next; this trajectory provides an honest and complex portrait of female sexuality.

More generally, however, our sexless national literature perpetuates North America’s gender double standard and is even more discouraging of lustful, pro-sex women. Popular fiction by Canadian women has recently forgotten about birth control, with Ami McKay’s The Birth House featuring a cover image of a woman who is headless, barefoot, and pregnant, and Leah McLaren’s The Continuity Girl, devoted to a “sperm bandit” in search of a big belly, not the big O. Not Diana. Not Smith. His sweaty chapters are a sexual decathlon, taking us through exhibitionism, BDSM, three-ways, phone sex, fetish-wear, and swinging.

Smith’s affectedly female voice is interesting and socially valuable, even if it isn’t always successful. He goes straight to the genitals on the first page, which is exactly counter to any advice I’ve ever received (couldn’t we start with the backs of the knees?). The original use of a pseudonym may also have made Smith too cautious. The penis is freely described with a varied schoolyard vocabulary, yet Diana‘s happy spot is often referred to as “her sex.”

The fact that sex is everywhere save our (subsidized) literature is more than simply misrepresentative. It’s also a lost opportunity to capitalize on one of fiction’s specialties — privacy. We often watch movies with someone else, whereas fiction is almost always read alone. Diana is actually quite funny, and humour is another thing often lost in our overly chaste literature. Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version was one of the last novels to win the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and it’s full of sex.

If realism, social relevance, intimacy, and humour aren’t reason enough to up the porn quotient in CanLit, look at your thermometer. This is Canada. Is there a better way to keep warm in the winter?