The Kootenay School of Writing

The Kootenay School of Writing has been the centre of avant- garde literary growth in the Lower Mainland for the past 14 years. Based in Vancouver, the KSW offers a variety of creative writing and literary theory courses and often sponsors readers at the space it shares with the Or Gallery. Recently, I spoke with Lisa Robertson, a member of the KSW collective to talk about how things are working for them today, what their current creative aesthetic is working out of, and the recent benefit reading with poets Robin Blaser and Sharon Thesen.

As the name suggests, the KSW did not originate in Vancouver, "it began as the creative writing department at David Thompson University Centre in Nelson. DTU was a university which was shut down by the social credit government in 1983 because it wasn't making a profit. The university heavily stressed interdisciplinary studies and had a really strong creative writing programme which included Colin Brown, Jeff Derksen and Gary Whitehead. After their university was closed, a number of participants in the programme decided to continue their work independently, so they all moved to Vancouver and founded a non-profit society which they called The Kootenay School of Writing (after the location of the old school)."

Although the KSW founders originally visioned the organization as one which would grow into a credit granting institution, their cirriculum did not meet the requirements. Instead, Robertson explains, "it was organized around the form of an artist-run centre. It's a non-profit society so it's structured with a board of directors and all of the programming and organizing is carried out by a collective of working writers. We're all volunteers and there is always between five to 12 working members on the collective board at all times."

The idea of a collective is unique because it offers a certain equality that conventional work places cannot. Robertson explains how, "there is no idea of 'position' within the collective. We meet (depending on schedules) between once a week and once every three weeks. We talk about what we would like to see happen, who's going to read, and we plan course cirriculum."

All of the writers involved in the KSW collective are active in Vancouver's writing community. This allows for multilateral access to opportunity within the KSW. As Robertson explains "we are all writers and academics and so forth, so everybody has their personal connections. All of these connections get brought together in the course of our planning. Whatever we are finding out about in our lives as writers, we make situations where events can occur.

Because the writers involved with the KSW collective are active in the literary community and because they are active in a grassroots sense, it results in a wide range of courses offered at KSW.

"We offer creative writing courses and ones that are more theory based-such as the course being offered this fall on Malaysian poetry. What all the courses have in common is that they all offer something that is not being offered through the standard educational institutions. When Little Sisters Bookstore was taking the government to court for censoring gay literature we offered a course with Lorraine Weir on queer theory and censorship. We like to tie things into actual political issues in communities in Vancouver."

Simon Fraser University, hailed once as being extremely political when it opened in the mid 1960s, lacks the edge in its curriculum that smaller non-government regulated organizations like the KSW have. Robertson stresses that "the KSW has an interest in both political and aesthetic interests that the universities doesn't welcome. We have a strong base in an avant-guard literature that is coming out of modernism. That is an aesthetic position that is embraced less and less by English departments. We offer courses on people like Gertrude Stein-people whose work has been marginalized by the whole canonization process in English departments."

Historically, no written aesthetic manifesto exists for the KSW. However, Robertson notes that "the school has changed over time and reflected different aesthetic interests which reflect in the interests of the people on the board at the time. Presently there's more of a shift to gay and lesbian queer aesthetics, which wasn't really a position that was central to what was going on before. There is also a really strong support for feminist thinking and feminist theory in writing that is continuing to develop and is being reflected through our programming. It really all depends on who is putting energy into it. I can say that because we feel it's our role not to reproduce what's been going on in mainstream culture and institutions."

The artistic and aesthetic goal of the KSW is rather simple: there is "a strong interest in the aesthetics of the margins-whether they are socialist-worker margins, feminist, or avant-garde experiments in formalism, or simply an area that isn't central to the Canadian literary cultural paradigm." Robertson goes on to say, "we haven't really been providing a programme that embraces the middle-of-the-road, Canadian, lyric poetry. That is going on in a lot of different places. In fact, if people don't feel like looking very far, that's all they will find."

The unfortunate plight of the KSW is that of many cultural centres within other communities: the funding that exists for the artist community in Vancouver is rapidly dwindling. Without outside funding the KSW will no longer be able to keep up what they are doing-let alone keep their heads above water.

"The KSW gets a small operating fund from the province of BC and the city of Vancouver-this pays rent and utilities. The Canada Council reader's programme allows us to bring in between four or five readers a year and quite often we do collaborations with Green College at UBC, and West Coast Line. Unfortunately, our funding is getting cut because there is less and less funding being allotted to arts in general. The categories of funding to which we have access to are narrow as an artist-run centre. We've had little luck getting funding from the Canada Council. It's like they expect writers to adhere to a more capitalistic scheme than other artists...."

The KSW receives under $10,000 a year in subsidies. Besides sharing a space with The Or Gallery, KSW also accommodates Verb (a monthly literary pull-out featured in Terminal City), Boo, and Raddle Moon. The ArtSpeak Gallery is also a spin project of the KSW. If it were not for such umbrella organizations as the KSW, such projects would have a hard time managing or even simply existing.

If you are interested in taking courses at the KSW or just want to find out about future readings, call 688-6001 for more information. KSW is located at 112 W. Hastings (at Abbot Street).

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