Thoughts on culture, education, and having been a Canadian in the US

This is a great new movement aiming to spread compassion around the world. We all could use more of that, couldn’t we?

On February 28, 2008 Karen Armstrong won the TED Prize and made a wish: for help creating, launching and propagating a Charter for Compassion. Since that day, thousands of people have contributed to the process so that on November 12, 2009 the Charter was unveiled to the world.

Fall registration begins for Seniors on Tuesday, November 17, and opens up for everyone else gradually over that week. Make sure to check the UVM Registration schedule to see when you may begin registering for Spring classes.

I’m setting aside enough 15 minute appointments over the next week or so to meet with all 50 of my advisees. I’ll be available to answer any advising questions and to help review your choice of courses for the fall semester. If you’ll be a senior planning on graduating in spring 2010, you should definitely come to see me before registering so that we can make sure you’ll be set to graduate.

Keep reading after the break for further details and to choose your appointment time.

[Read more →]

POETRY READING BY RANDALL MAGGS

Below you’ll find the latest newsletter from Northwest Passages. Closing down our beloved site after 14 years is hard, but necessary for us. There are lots of good books for sale at our site right now, so make sure to check it out.   

NWP moves on

Greetings from Northwest Passages. I know that it has been a long time since you have heard from us, but I’m writing today with important news. As of December 31, 2009, Rob Stocks, Sarah Bagshaw, and I will no longer be in the business of selling books. Northwest Passages will cease operation at the end of this year.

This decision has been coming for some time and probably should have been made a long time ago. We’ve loved much of what we’ve done at NWP and have had a hard time letting go of our passion for selling and promoting Canadian literature. With the directions our lives and careers have taken in recent years, not to mention the changes to the landscape of publishing and bookselling in Canada, we feel it is time for us to close our store.

We are very grateful to all those of you who have supported us over the 14 years our site has been online. This newsletter’s editorial talks in more detail about our history, but suffice it to say that we have loved working with so many great authors, publishers, distributors, and, most important, customers from across Canada and around the world. Northwest Passages never made us anything close to enough money for us to even consider this a part-time job, but the site did help

Although we have stopped bringing in new books, we still have a considerable inventory of fine Canadian books that we are hoping to clear out by the end of this year. If you’ve supported us in the past, we hope that you will take some time to look through our inventory. Any of these books would make great Christmas gifts for your loved ones or excellent additions to your own personal library of Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism.

To see which books we have in stock, just go to our website at http://www.nwpassages.com You can either go genre by genre and see what’s “in stock now” or head right to the “On Sale” heading on our site. Either way, you’ll discover many great works of Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism at excellent prices.

The future of Northwest Passages?

Over the next seven weeks, Northwest Passages will be clearing out all of its inventory and preparing to close down our retail operation. We will, however, entertain any offers from parties interested in taking over Northwest Passages and carrying it on into the future. As mentioned below, with Twitter and blogs and espresso book machines these days, perhaps someone might want to take this established brand and bring it back to life in a new form. We’ll definitely be willing to talk to anyone who’s interested. If this interests you, please contact Paul directly at paul — at — nwpassages.com

Passages: 14 years of Canadian Literature Online

In the fall of 1995, my best friend Rob Stocks and I came up with an idea that, for better worse, would go on to be part of our lives for the best part of fourteen years. Rob, an early Internet entrepreneur in the days long before this would become a common term, and I, a grad student just starting a PhD program in Comparative Literature, thought we might be able to combine our interests and expertise to create an online bookstore. What would make this online bookstore unique was that it would focus solely on Canadian literature. In the years since, we have put thousands of hours of work into our business and have helped sell thousands of Canadian books to readers around the world. Much of this work has been done by Sarah Bagshaw, who for years now has been the heart and soul of NWP.

When the Northwest Passages website went live in the summer of 1996, Amazon.com was still a new enterprise that many doubted would ever be capable of turning a profit. Although there was no Canadian equivalent to Amazon whatsoever, but Rob and I didn’t have much interest in the “everything for everyone” approach to bookselling online. We envisioned that the Internet could become home to a multiplicity of niche booksellers who could provide both a deep selection of an online store and the knowledgeable customer service of an independent bookseller. Northwest Passages would target the valuable and, still to this day, underserved market of Canadian literature.

In the early days of Northwest Passages, many people in the publishing industry viewed us great suspicion. As crazy as this might sound today, it sometimes took me weeks to persuade certain publishers that putting a picture of a book’s cover up on our website would neither violate copyright nor anger the book’s author. While publishers gradually warmed to my argument that this was no different than putting a copy of the book in a store’s front window, they were clearly unprepared at that time for the massive changes that the internet would soon bring to bookselling and publishing. When we launched, many publishers did not even have websites and none had any people on staff devoted to online marketing of any sort. Furthermore, most publishers were either unable or unwilling to provide us with digital data of any sort. Many of the early book covers and book descriptions that still exist in our database were all painstakingly scanned or entered by hand.

One of the things at the heart of our early vision of Northwest Passages that long set us apart from other online stores of any sort was that we wanted our site to be as much of an information resource as it was a retail store. Ultimately, as the three of us will readily admit, Northwest Passages was always more successful as a hub for information about Canadian books than it was as a store. At its peak, Northwest Passages saw thousands of different visitors accessing our site each month and over 1000 readers subscribed to our newsletter, The Compass. At the same time, however, we never sold enough books to pay even one of us a salary that would enable us to look after the store full-time. Because we held limited inventory and brought in books as people ordered them, it was very difficult for us to compete with the behemoth online bookstores (Amazon.ca and Chapters-Indigo) or local stores where you can walk in a find a book within a few minutes. The lure of immediacy was hard for us to overcome in the minds of our customers.

Where we did succeed commercially was mostly in sales to customers outside of Canada. Accustomed to moderate to long shipping times for purchases made by mail or online, these clients were more than willing to wait a few weeks for a book to arrive. More important, they appreciated having a bookseller like Sarah who was eager to help them obtain the books they wanted and who would keep them apprised of the latest Canadian releases and literary news. We also did well selling course books for Canadian literature courses taught everywhere from Australia to Italy. These customers especially will feel the loss of Northwest Passages acutely.

Looking back at what we began 14 years ago, it’s clear that Northwest Passages was ahead of its time. In some small ways, perhaps, we helped push some Canadian publishers on to the Internet more quickly than they might have otherwise done. With the technologies that surround us today such as Twitter, blogs, ebook readers, and Espresso Book Machines, I can’t help but wish sometimes that we were starting out again today with the same youthful energy and enthusiasm Rob and I shared in those early days of the Internet. We are once again at the dawn of a new and exciting era for publishing and bookselling in this country that will require us to start thinking in new and innovative ways about what it is that we do.

Over fourteen years, our lives have grown in rich and wonderful ways. So too has publishing and the selling of books. Today, Rob, Sarah, and I are ready to leave Northwest Passages behind and to go our separate ways. With his company ideaLEVER, Rob continues to innovate in the world of ecommerce and content management. Sarah, who has really kept NWP running for much of the last decade, has taken her expertise as one of the best booksellers around to KidsBooks in Vancouver. I, as many of you know, am now in the US teaching Canadian literature at the University of Vermont and directing its Canadian Studies Program.

We are incredibly grateful for the support we have received from family and friends, publishers and authors, professors and students. Most of all, we want to thank our incredibly loyal customers, some of whom have stuck with us since our first days online. It has been our great pleasure to get to know so many interesting people from all corners of the world.

Canadian literature, as we have seen firsthand, continues to have a wide international audience. We have been honoured to have helped readers everywhere get their hands on thousands of Canadian books.

On behalf of Rob, Sarah, and myself, thank you again for all of your support.

Paul Martin

October 20, 2009

  

I’m excited to announce that, at 4:00 pm on Friday September 25th, award-winning Canadian writer Joseph Boyden will be reading at Memorial Lounge in Waterman.
The author of a short story collection Born With a Tooth , novels Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce , and his recent biography of Métis leaders Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, Joseph Boyden has quickly ascended the ranks to be one of Canada’s most widely read writers working today. His novel Three Day Road (2005) won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year, the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in the US was also featured as a pick on the Today Show book club. In 2008, his second novel, Through Black Spruce, won the Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious fiction prize.
Born and raised in Toronto, Boyden completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans and then returned to the northernmost regions of Ontario where he worked for two years in the James Bay region as a Professor of Aboriginal Programs. His time there working with the Mushkegowuk Cree, not to mention his own Métis ancestry, have made the land and people of this region his “muse and obsession” and the setting for much of his work. Today he divides his time between Northern Ontario and New Orleans where he and his wife, novelist Amanda Boyden, are currently Writers in Residence.
Joseph and Amanda will both be reading at the Burlington Book Festival on September 26th, but I’ve managed to arrange for Joseph to do a reading at UVM at 4 pm at the Memorial Lounge. I’ve taught his novel Three Day Road to hundreds of students over the last three years in courses ranging from English 180 and 182 to my TAP class. It’s an extraordinary book and I think this will be a great opportunity for students to hear him read and to ask him questions about his work.

For more information on Joseph Boyden and his work, see his website at http://josephboyden.com.
Reviews of Through Black Spruce:
“Powerful and powerfully told. . .Much of this novel reflects its crisp, poetic title…Will speaks with the straight-faced good humor of Louise Erdrich’s Nanapush…in the novel’s most moving section, Will flees to live along in wilderness few people ever even see. It’s an experience beautifully rendered in the raw poetry of Boyden’s prose.”
—The Washington Post

“Anguished, angry Uncle Will’s revenge drama is almost perfect in pitch and execution. Tragedy and comedy unspool together in a startlingly casual manner when Will speaks, they way they do in life.  When Boyden is at his best, as he often is here, he is matchless.”
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Reviews of Three Day Road: “Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road is a brilliant novel. You will suffer a bit, but it’s overwhelmingly worth the voyage.”
—Jim Harrison

Later this afternoon, Edmonton publisher Spotted Cow Press will make history by launching its latest book simultaneously in two Canadian cities.

What makes this event unique is that Spotted Cow Press will be printing off copies of S. Minsos’ novel Squire Davis and the Crazy River in each of these locations on Espresso Book Machines, making this the first “Double Espresso book launch” in history. After a reading by the author, both the University of Alberta Bookstore in Edmonton, owner of one of the very first Espresso Book Machines ever produced, and the Titles bookstore at McMaster University in Hamilton, who acquired their machine more recently, will start printing copies of the book simultaneously for customers to purchase on the spot. Customers at the Titles bookstore will be able to watch the book launch in Edmonton, 3000 km away, via live video.

Spotted Cow Press and the University of Alberta bookstore already made history on this front when it launched (PDF) Twice in a Blue Moon, a new collection of poetry by Joyce Harries, using the Espresso Book Machine on November 15, 2007, which might well be the first launch of a new literary title using the machine. The cutting edge approaches of both Spotted Cow Press and the U of Alberta bookstore are only just now becoming more mainstream with more Espresso machines starting to appear in bookstores such as the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, VT, and with Google announcing just yesterday that it will being to sell copies of over 2 million currently out-of-print book titles via the Espresso Book Machine.

(Here’s a PDF link to the Spotted Cow Press press release about this afternoon’s event)

If you’re interested in following along online, I expect that there will be a few people twittering from each event. Just look for the hashtag #doubleespresso or follow @pjmartin or @MACBookstore on twitter.

I’ve got my head down these days and am working on nothing but my book. I need to take a few moments to say the following:

Even as a non-American, I’m getting a bit freaked out by the rhetoric of the anti-Obama crowd. To me, it’s gotten beyond bizarre and is getting plain scary. I would feel even more disheartened if I saw something like this happening in my own country.

This great editorial cartoon makes light of all this, but, really, can people actually think that it’s okay to pull their kids out of school so they don’t have to hear a message from the leader of their country? That scares me. Of course, those are probably the same people who would be up in arms if they tried to pull the Pledge of Allegiance out of the schools.

I’ve told my kids that, as non-Americans, they don’t need to say the pledge, but that they should be respectful of it. Obama is not their president and this is not their country. I’m happy, though, that they get to watch his speech in school tomorrow. Obama is such a fine example of what is possible when you value education and develop an insatiable curiosity about the entire world. He’s the best role model of any world leader that I can recall. I feel very sorry for the children whose parents are removing them from school tomorrow. That narrow-minded action by their parents is teaching them the exact opposite of what education should be about.

All four Martins had a great time at Shelburne Museum this evening. The Tragically Hip were excellent, as usual, and the setting was a wonderful place to see a concert. It’s always kind of a surreal experience seeing The Hip here in Vermont because, although tonight’s gig was sold out, the venues and crowds are vastly smaller than what one would find in Canada. So, it always feels like a special treat getting to see them in such an intimate venue.

It was a great outdoor gig. As always with a Hip show, it seems, there were lots of dudes in ballcaps (my photo is Exhibit A), but this time there were also lots of families with kids and many people in their 40s and 50s who just wanted to see a great band on a gorgeous summer evening. Some people packed their own picnic dinners (I saw some rather elaborate gourmet meals going on) and other people packed the Magic Hat beer tent. Heroically, though, The Hip managed to transcend the diversions and the gorgeous scenery and captured the crowd’s hearts, ears, and minds. A perfect evening.

I’ve been trying to write about things other than healthcare, but it’s hard these days to keep my mouth shut when I hear some critics in the US pointing to Canada’s system as the doom and gloom scenario awaiting the US if Obama manages to accomplish his planned changes to the American system. This morning, I watched this video by Steven Crowder entitled “ObamaCare Yay or Nay? The Truth About Canada!”. What he finds is important and it points to some of the many problems currently being experienced in Quebec, especially by those people without a family doctor. What it does not prove in any way, really, is the failure of the Canadian system as a whole.

Here’s an expanded version of the comment I just posted on one of the many conservative blogs that is now using this video as their top evidence of how the last thing they want is for the US to look to Canada for inspiration.

As a Canadian currently living in the US, I watched this video with interest. I saw nothing that resembles my own many experiences with healthcare in Canada. As with the United States, the level of service one gets can depend greatly on where you live. For me, I’ve consistently had longer ER wait times in the US than I ever had in Canada (my son has asthma and I’ve visited emergency rooms on a number of occasions back in Canada). Just a few weeks ago, my wife and nine-year-old daughter waited 7 hours in our local ER in Burlington where she went because of chest pains and trouble breathing. All in all, though, I have to say that we’ve had fine service in both countries. In terms of service, access to care, and high quality of care, I’ve seen no difference. The big difference, though, is that my employer and I pay thousands of dollars per year for our coverage in the US. That works out to far more than the difference between the income taxes I paid in Canada compared to what I pay in the US. I pay slightly less in income tax here, but four times what I paid in property taxes in Canada, and my employer in Alberta paid under $200 a month for my family’s healthcare.

In the video, Steven Crowder, who if I recall correctly is a dual citizen, visits Montreal, Canada’s second biggest city and the place in the country that seems to be having the worst time of things by far. When I lived in Edmonton, if it were an urgent matter I could usually see my GP on the same day that I called. After-hours, there were a number of 24-hour clinics where the wait would be longer but I’d always be able to see someone. For urgent cases, we’d go to the ER and the wait was always understandable; the more severe cases always go first, as they should. Crowder goes on and on in this video about how in Canada they have to ration care because of the system. I’m sure my University of Vermont colleague down the hall, who is fighting with her insurance company here to get approval for some desperately needed spinal surgery, would be happy to talk about her experiences of care being rationed in the US. It’s rationed in the US all the time, not because of a lack of capacity in the medical system, but rather to increase shareholder earnings in the for-profit insurance system.

The major problem in Canada has, to my mind, very little to do with universal healthcare itself; there can always be greater efficiency in any system, but the system in Canada at the moment is underfunded, particularly in Quebec. Crowder’s video documents this underfunding very well with the clear problems in the Quebec system’s shortage of capacity at the moment. Despite this underfunding, the results in Canada are still superior to those of the US. Canada puts 30-40% less into healthcare than the US does and yet Canadians’ life expectancy is longer, patient satisfaction levels are similar if not higher in Canada, and no one ever goes bankrupt over medical bills. The question of higher tax rates in Canada, as I suggest above, is all relative. In Quebec, Crowder is right that with sales tax people do wind up paying the 8% provincial sales tax on the 5% federal sales tax, but there are other provinces that have solved this by “harmonizing” their sales taxes so that they are charged only one tax rather than two separate ones. In Alberta, there is no provincial sales tax at all and there never will be. Paying tax on tax is absurd, but one can’t say that happens in all of Canada.

While we Canadians, like people everywhere, wish our taxes would be lower, 85% of Canadians recently surveyed said that they wouldn’t dream of trading their healthcare system for that of the United States. Universal healhcare works. It’s more effective than what we find in the US in terms of its ability to treat everyone equally. It’s also, contrary to popular belief here in the US, far less bureaucratic than the US system. Just stop by a Canadian hospital or doctor’s office and look for the billing office. You won’t find one.
To see the problems Crowder found in Montreal as representative of all of Canada is as foolish as walking into one of the poorest areas in a major US city and describing the whole country as being rife with poverty and crime. The Canadian system needs to be improved and better funded, without a doubt, but overall it’s still very good and works well for most Canadians.

Finally, as Canadians, it doesn’t do us any good to be smug about how well our system works, because it doesn’t work anywhere close to as well as it should for many Canadians, and particularly First Nations people on reserves and the Inuit . Just because we’re ranked slightly higher internationally than the US doesn’t mean that we still don’t have a lot to learn and lots to improve. Because of our sometimes foolish and shortsighted preoccupation with what Americans think of us, it’s easy for us to get distracted by comments in the US about the good and the bad aspects of our system. What we really need is to start looking seriously (as they are doing right now in the US) about how we could do a much better job at providing better access and quality of care to all Canadians. Instead of focusing how much better our system might be than that of other countries we should start looking at how much worse our system is than that of the nations higher up the list.

Followup: This report from CNN offers a pretty balanced assessment of the state of things in Canada.

This blog’s in hibernation mode until I get my book done, but couldn’t resist stopping in to talk about coffee and donuts…

This story on a recent survey on Canadians’ taste for Tim Hortons is interesting and is probably something that’s bound to come up in this fall’s freshman seminar “From Pucks to Parliament: Exploring Canadian Culture.”

Now, if only I could convince someone in Vermont to open a Tim Hortons, something I promise to do if I ever win the lottery.