Building a Regionalist Ecopoetics: Brick Books

Conducted by Eli MacLaren (U. McGill)

Small-scale publishing has long played a crucial role in the creation of literature in Canada. The scholarship on the literary small press is extensive and proliferating, much inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s model of the field of cultural production. David McKnight’s and Roy MacSkimming’s accounts of the small press in Canada are foundational, but they spotlight modernism and Toronto, focusing on the same prominent players: Contact Press (1952–66), Coach House Press (1965–), and House of Anansi Press (1967–). The moment is right for a similar study of Brick Books, an important small press devoted exclusively to poetry, founded in London, ON, in the 1970s. This research combine two main approaches: publishing history and literary criticism. How was Brick Books established? Which authors has this small press published? What was the editorial process? What is the ecopoetics of the most prominent books published by Brick Books?

Western University Library holds the archive of Brick Books in five accessions and 116 boxes. The key questions above will serve as avenues into this rich primary material. Two short-lived imprints in and around London, ON, Applegarth Follies (1974–76) and Nairn Publishing House (1972–78), preceded Brick magazine (1977–) and Brick Books (1979–). In 2012, Stan Dragland published a brief account of the succession from Applegarth, in which he describes the idealism of its founders, Mac and Jill Jamieson; their financial difficulties; his succouring them as reviews editor; and their break over the question of applying for a subsidy. The Jamiesons quitted London and Canadian literature, while Brick magazine took flight, buyoed by Canada Council funding and Dragland’s affiliation with the University of Western Ontario (1970–99). Examining the unpublished correspondence from these years will allow for an expansion of this account, which does not yet include Don and Jean McKay or Nairn. The administrative history of Brick Books will be pursued by tracing its changing managers, the splitting off of Brick magazine (which moved to Toronto), financial strategies, sales figures, and the move to Kingston, ON, in 2020. In November 1991, for example, Don McKay and Jan Zwicky sent a postcard to Kitty Lewis, managing editor at Brick Books, with the news, “We’ve accepted Anne Carson’s Short Talks”; Carson’s first book of poems would be published the following summer in an edition of five hundred copies at a printing cost of $3154 paid by Brick Books (file Carson, box 1972). That McKay and Zwicky played a crucial role in Carson’s emergence as a poet is one of many gems awaiting scholarly discovery in this archive. Research attention will concentrate similarly on Robert Kroetsch, The Ledger (1975); Don McKay, Long Sault (1975); P.K. Page, Hologram: A Book of Glosas (1994); etc.