Producing Canadian Literature by Kit Dobson

Author:Kit Dobson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

No Reason to Fool Yourself

Interview with Aritha van Herk

Aritha van Herk is the author of Judith (1978), The Tent Peg (1981), No Fixed Address (1986), Places Far from Ellesmere (a geografictione; 1990), and Restlessness (1998). Her wide-ranging critical work is collected in A Frozen Tongue (1992) and In Visible Ink (1991). Her irreverent history of Alberta, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2001), won the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award for Alberta Writing. That book frames the new permanent exhibition on Alberta history at the Glenbow Museum; Audacious and Adamant: The Story of Maverick Alberta (2007) accompanies the exhibit. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a University Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Kit Dobson: What have your experiences been in applying for Canada Council funding or funding from provincial bodies over the years?

Aritha van Herk: I have applied for very few Canada Council grants to artists because I feel quite strongly that they should be for artists who don’t have any other income. I had success with those that I applied for before I had a permanent position. I found in my work with them that the juries have been quite fair and balanced, given the very limited amounts of funding that they have available to them. So I would say that I have been successful as an applicant. I’ve been impressed as a juror also. I think the Canada Council has been key to people finding at least a little support to undertake substantial work. I must say that I feel that the Canada Council doesn’t need defending, but on the other hand without it we would have had less production of Canadian material, whatever we might say about what the results have been. In terms of my applications to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, which is the major arts funding body in Alberta, I have applied and had a very idiosyncratic record. I’ve had, I think, two grants, and I’ve been turned down quite a number of times. It is a body that doesn’t have the same strictures as the Canada Council, but it also seems to be in an entirely different realm in terms of its feeling that it has to fund whatever it is that comes out of Spuzzum, Alberta. I know Spuzzum is in B.C., but you get the idea. There you see the difference between being judged by a jury of your peers and one that is community-based: you are likely to encounter a jury of government fall-overs. Although I have served on juries for them as well, I am far less impressed with their ability to read what might be considered arts production in light of someone who is really serious about his or her work. The aesthetic is completely different and quite variant. It seems to be much more informed by “community values” and the nonsense attending that designation. So I am less impressed with them, not only because of my personal success or failure but because their standards seem very different.

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