An Interview with Poet and Publisher Joe Blades
Franz Kafka wrote that Mother Prague has claws and won’t let you go. Perhaps the image can be adapted, made more optimistic, and extended from the capital of the Czech Republic to include all of the lands covered by the Central European Association for Canadian Studies. Many Canadian academics and artists have forged strong and happy ties with the broader CEACS region, and their interest, attachment and observations are ever-illuminating. For them, Central European claws have become arms, the fi rm hold, a warm embrace.
Th is interview – between poet and publisher Joe Blades and me (Jason Blake, your new Editor-in-Chief) – is the fi rst of what should become a regular feature in The Central European Journal of Canadian Studies. Joe, who has spent time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Serbia, and who makes his home in Fredericton, New Brunswick, is in a key position to tell us something about Canadian studies in our part of the world and to inform us about an often-neglected part of Canada.
> What got you interested in this part of the world? Was it through translating?
I was at a BookExpo Canada publisher’s tradeshow in Toronto, back in 2004, and attended a meeting with a publisher’s trade mission from Serbia and Montenegro who extended invitations to all of us to participate in the Belgrade Book Fair, the largest cultural event in Central Europe. I was the only one who accepted, which kind of surprised me. Th ere was one Québec publisher of nonfiction who went to Belgrade that year, but I was the sole English-language publisher from North America. There were no publishers from the USA.
> That is surprising. Do you sense that Canadian publishers want to look beyond Canada – that is, do you find a certain provincialism in Canadian publishing circles?
I honestly think there is a provincialism on many levels; micro-regionalism too. Fredericton is not Halifax; Windsor and Ottawa are not Toronto; etc. When the daily newspaper in Moncton refuses to review books by Fredericton authors because they are not “local,” one wonders how local “local” is – a 100-mile diet, perhaps?
In Canadian publishing, there’s a little star circle that is watched all the time. Even when Ondaatje and Atwood and that generation have stopped writing, everyone will continue to look to them. I don’t know if it is because so much of Canada’s publishing and the media industry is in Toronto, that it is so provincial and localized while proclaiming to be national. There is a real focus on Toronto, so there could be expectation that to be a successful national writer in English Canada that you feed the city and be fed by Toronto, even if that city runs on caff eine and adrenaline! I think they picked it up from the New York art world: If you want New York to commit to you, you have to commit to New York. I know that was the situation in New York from when I was a curatorial intern at a museum there in 1987. [...]
