The Screen, the Literary Stage, and the Boardroom
(Scholar-Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with Helen Walsh, Novelist and Literary Activist)
Amatoritsero Ede: It is great to finally have this conversation with you. I would like to begin at the beginning – by which I mean to say, with the Diaspora Dialogues (DD)! What is it; and what inspired you to initiate that unique (now long-standing) and unparalleled culturally diverse Canadian literary mentorship program, DD?
Helen Walsh: I’m delighted to talk about DD for many reasons, including the fact that that is how you and I met! I had been working in the US as a film producer and moved back to Toronto in 2004. I started developing a TV series project with filmmaker, Guy Maddin, and quickly remembered how frustrating it was to work in the Canadian entertainment industry, with its overly cumbersome CRTC rules that stifle initiative and Telefilm funding envelopes that kept certain gatekeepers in control of projects. So, I knew if I was to stay here in Canada, I’d need to work in literature not film/TV. At the time, I was publisher/president of the Literary Review of Canada (a labour of love, so unpaid), and had never really had a job I didn’t create. I’m entrepreneurial by nature (the nice way to say it; the other way is I’m allergic to authority), so knew I would launch some kind of organization or initiative. And if I was going to throw myself into raising the money to start something new, I wanted its impact to be meaningful. I spent several weeks having informational lunches with people in the industry. It was clear that lack of diversity was a huge issue – a thousand-fold over where we are now. On the writing side, there were superstar writers of colour like Michael Ondaatje, Austin Clarke, Rohinton Mistry, but that was not true of mid-list or emerging writers. (And on the industry side, i.e. agents, editors and publishers, it was and continues to be massively unrepresentative.) The situation was so obviously inequitable for individuals, bad for society and unsustainable for literature. If publishing and CanLit were to survive and remain relevant, they needed to more fully represent the lived experience of the people who called Canada home. So that is how it began. I launched DD in 2005 with the support of The Maytree Foundation, and a small grant from the Toronto Arts Council. Maytree continued its support for ten years, and other foundations came on board. We were able to achieve operational funding from the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council by 2006/7. Canada Council was slower to come on board. We still don’t have operational support from them, but they’ve been very generous the past few years with multi-year project grants. We are grateful to also receive donations from corporations and individuals. DD supports writers across diverse communities to develop both craft and career, with opportunities to publish and present their work. We run a whole suite of short- and long-form mentoring programs (fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, drama, children’s picture books) as well as professional development workshops and seminars, to help build a sustainable career in the arts. Because writers don’t create in a vacuum, we run drop-in and mixers to provide community, as well as networking and pitching opportunities (since this is still a business where who you know counts as much as your talent.) We also produce 15-20 events a year to assist our alumni and other writers in building audience, and in practicing their public reading and interview skills.
A.E.: What has the impact of DD being so far – for example, what are some measurable ways in which DD has transformed the Canadian literary landscape.
H.W.: Alumni of DD’s mentoring programs who’ve gone on to publish include Catherine Hernandez, Janika Oza, Salma Hussain, Alicia Elliott, Sahar Golshan, Derek Mascarenhas, Reema Patel, Zalika Reid-Benta, Silmi Abdullah, Francine Cunningham among many more. Our alum have also been nominated and/or won major literary prizes. Playwrights from our dramaturgy program such as Augusto Bitter, Sarena Parmar and Evan Placey have seen their plays produced on main stages including the Shaw Festival and London’s West End. The list of writers involved with DD is a long one – more than 800 writers and artists have participated as mentors or mentees, emerging playwrights or dramaturges, commissioned artists or panellists, readers or performers. More than 600+ new literary works have been created, 400+ events produced and an audience in excess of 350,000 Canadians has attended those events. DD has the highest rate of alumni getting published than any other writing program in the country. We can work with a writer for years on revisions to a manuscript before submitting to agents or publishers. Alumni have become mentors in DD programs, giving back by helping the next generation of emerging writers.
A.E.: Your novel, Pull Focus, has a fictionalised Toronto Film Festival as one of its settings. Now, would you say your cultural activism has somehow spilled into fiction? Is it Art mimicking life?
H.W.: Yes, for sure. I’ve been a magazine publisher, festival director, film producer and artistic director. Bits of all that experience went into building the world of the novel, and the character of Jane, the protagonist. Also, in each of those roles I’ve had to raise money either through pitching or fundraising, so the book’s theme of power and money is one whose dynamics I’ve constantly had to juggle. Clearly my own experience from the film world shows up in the novel, including the #metoo theme of sexual harassment. But beyond that, the strange beast that is celebrity, the juggernaut of production (film or festival), the sublimation of personal life, the camaraderie and the backstabbing, the inherent drama and big personalities. . .and yet, despite all, a profound and sustaining love of film. This novel wouldn’t have been possible – or at least recognisable in its current form – if I’d never worked in film.
A.E.: Of course, I am being playful here; but in how far is the heroine of Pull Focus your alter ego? Or is this an over-reading?
H.W.: Well. . .the inner idealism coupled with an outward pragmatism for sure. The dark humour, yes; the work ethic and the love of film and the arts. But not, I don’t think, Jane’s intense privacy or wariness. She grew up very poor in a household full of secrets that leads her to distrust people at first and keep them at a distance. I didn’t. I’m more of an extrovert who would rather extend trust and be proven wrong, than vice versa.
A.E.: Let me rephrase that. Writers write out of lived experience. How much did your knowledge of, and insights about, the culture industry in Toronto influence the writing of Pull Focus.
H.W.: It very deeply influenced it – both Toronto, as well as my time working in New York City and Los Angeles as a film producer. Although there is little actual violence in the novel, a Hitchcockian sense of threat looms large. And that’s because this novel is very much about the lived experience of women in a world where gender and power are indivisible, particularly in the entertainment industry which has been fraught with sexual harassment and assault.
A.E.: Of course, there is politics everywhere in the real world. And especially because of that, the verisimilitude in Pull Focus is so arresting and believable. An attentive reader would wonder if the novel’s political intrigue is an accurate mimesis of the Canadian culture industry. Is it?
H.W.: I’ve never worked at TIFF, and the novel is fiction, but of course it’s influenced by my experiences of working in the Canadian and US culture industries. A former very senior TIFF exec asked me if I had been hiding in her office during meetings, it was so cannily insightful. When I did the Irish book launch for the book in June 2022, I was interviewed on stage by Grainne Humphreys, Festival Director of the Dublin International Film Festival. She said for twenty years she had been trying to explain to her mother what she did for a living. Now, she said, she could just hand her my book and that would explain everything. I was greatly flattered by that.
A.E.: The crime/mystery thriller is a demanding genre – if only for the one reason that the writer must pull the reader along page after page till the very end. I can think of some masters of this genre like James Hadley Chase, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle or Mickey Spillane, and so many others. What is your relationship to, and attraction for, this genre rather any other.
H.W.: I’ve always been interested in the moment when the ground shifts beneath us – because of an external event or internal epiphany – and everything in our lives is viewed with greater clarity, or greater suspicion. I think that is from reading so much Alice Munro growing up. Her writing couldn’t be more different than mine, but it’s that sudden shift that surprises yet seems inevitable. And I think I’ve always been interested in stories where the stakes are high, and the drama intense. At university, my undergraduate degree was a double major in literature and criminology. The study of criminology is the study of sociology, psychology and the criminal law. I’ve always been intensely interested in why people do what they do, and the institutional factors that come into play. So maybe it was inevitable that I would write a suspense novel that is as much about character as about plot. I can’t stand actual violence – I’ve just abandoned an audio book of a Michael Connelly novel because it’s just too explicit. But as I said earlier, I’m a fan of the Hitchcockian sense of doom. I read widely, including mystery and thrillers, although I’m more a fan of suspense than police procedurals or hardboiled detectives. And I do love myself a solid spy novel. The genre question is interesting. Pull Focus is a crossover novel so there was a lot of discussion about classification and comparators. In bookstores it’s stocked under general fiction; online retailers list that and Mystery/Thriller. It’s a challenge because the publishing industry likes simplicity; it wants you to stay into a neat little box with clear comparators that the audience can understand. But I feel like we’re finally moving beyond siloed genres, in part because a younger generation of writers don’t feel bound by them. I read hundreds of submissions a year through my work with DD; the creative curiosity and determination of emerging writers to tell their story in whatever narrative style they feel appropriate, is hopeful.
A.E.: As exemplified by DD, you are very active in arts advocacy and cultural rejuvenation. So, I am surprised that you left the Literary Review of Canada. What happened?
H.W.: In 2017, I was in Winnipeg producing a book talk with the novelist David Layton, who had been my mentor through a couple drafts of Pull Focus by that point. He asked where the latest set of revisions were, and I burst into tears. I’d started Pull Focus in 2012, but between running Diaspora Dialogues and the Literary Review of Canada, along with Spur and the travel involved, there was little opportunity to write, and certainly no time to keep coherent a complicated story line. Plus, my close friend and the mentor who got me started on Pull Focus, Priscila Uppal, was very sick, and so time seemed suddenly very short. I knew I could only run one organisation if I was going to create room for a writing life, and I wanted it to be DD.
A.E.: Can you tell us about the SPUR Festival; is it, perhaps, something like taking socio-cultural and political conversations like those published in the pages of LRC unto a more direct, immediate face-face public sphere – the festival podium/stage?
H.W.: That was exactly the intent. For print magazines and newspapers to stay relevant in the massive upheaval of the digital age, I feel they need to contribute to an intellectual public square in different ways. When we launched Spur in 2013, the middle of the bell curve in politics and society was already hollowing out in favour of either extreme end That’s only worsened in the decade since. We need public forums for robust, respectful discussion (and disagreement) of ideas. And I think sometimes they need to be in person. I was glad to see the launch of a new festival in Toronto – the Provocation Ideas Festival.
A.E.: You have worked in film production in the past. Are we likely to see a film adaption of Pull Focus at some point?
H.W.: I hope so! The content, structure and pacing are ideally suited for an adaptation and in some ways, I wrote the novel with that in mind. There was always a heavy focus on characters, on the relationships between characters and on the world of the novel. I started with that (versus with plot) and storyboarded the original draft and every revision.
A.E.: What manuscript/s are you working on now, if any.
H.W.: I’ve written a follow up novel, called Pull Back. The title is also a camera term, to describe a camera shot that pulls back and widen, so we can see more of the background context. That’s what the novel does – take a larger look at the global issues of power and money. I’m just beginning a third related novel with Jane as the protagonist, this time set in London, UK, when she takes over an organisation very much like the British Film Institute. I think that’s probably the last one in this mini-series (I’m introducing a character in Book 3 I’d like to carry on into a separate piece of work), although I had originally only planned to write Pull Focus, so who knows!!
A.E.: Finally, I would like to thank you for taking the time out of a busy schedule to talk to MTLS.
H.W.: Thanks so much for the invitation, Ama. Very much appreciate it.
