by George Melynk
BAYEUX ARTS
2021/$19.95/108 pp.
“For an author examining his own work,” writes essayist and cultural historian George Melnyk, “literary judgment can be messy.” Well, that’s a good reason to leave the judgment to scholars who can view the work through a more objective lens. Unfortunately such reliable critics are few, and they are overburdened, or distracted, by the biannual geysers of new books pumped out by publishers dredging up literary nuggets (and fool’s gold) deposited by rivers of Canada Council grants. It’s not uncommon for an author’s entire oeuvre to get washed away in the sluice box of this deluge.
It is in this climate, then, that DIY litterateur George Melnyk has decided to summarize and critically examine his own published works in this “confession.” But if you are looking for juicy accounts of saucy literary romances, look elsewhere. “By writing this literary confession,” he explains, “I am going back to my printed books, trying to preserve their memory, and fighting to keep them alive in the culture by sticking my finger into an ever-expanding hole in an ever-thinning wall holding back the digital onslaught… but what I am really doing is consoling myself emotionally, trying desperately to somehow validate what I have done in the Age of the Digital Screen.” So with one finger plugging the Google dam, our author sets out to summarize, in only 104 pages, his 45 years of publishing and writing, in case you missed him the first time around. He begins with his forays into “radical regionalism” in his early days, on to his work on behalf of the co-operative movement, with gear changes into philosophy, the cinema, the essay and poetry.
Oddly, Melnyk sheds little light here on the sterling contribution to our literary culture that he made as the founding editor of NeWest Review back in the 1970s, and of NeWest Press which followed, vehicles sorely needed, which gave so many authors a place to publish poems, stories and essays of Alberta. As a young man he was a singular and dynamic essayist and a cultural operative, in mysterious and arcane Ad-monton, known to the poet Andrew Suknaski and myself as “The Melnyk.” The definite article was in deference to his being not so much a literary person as a literary project, or projects. To steal a trope from poet Tom Wayman, The Melnyk was editing in Edmonton, and all we could do was submit. His time at NeWest resulted in the creation of one of his best-known books, Radical Regionalism, which captured the zeitgeist of a resurgent West, eager to take its historical, economic and cultural place in Confederation.
Over the years, Melnyk ventured forth and transformed into a full-scale establishment figure: a treasurer of the Writer’s Union of Canada, executive director of the Alberta Foundation for Literary Arts, on the board of PEN, author of the two-volume Literary History of Alberta, full professor of Film Studies at the University of Calgary, winner of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Golden Pen award and an esteemed authority on Canadian cinema. He has been described, by playwright Frank Moher, as “probably the most important literary and political thinker in Western Canada since George Woodcock.” Yet in this book he repeatedly presents himself as an “outsider” to the literary establishment. For my money—as a long-time literary outsider in this province—if Alberta Literature was a corporation, George Melnyk would be on the board of directors. The man wears many hats: ideologue, polemicist, film critic, but the greasy bush hat of the outsider? Definitely not. From the portrait drawn in this memoir, I picture him “in full harness” (to use his term for when he’s in writing mode) sporting an urbane beret, or a fedora—and a jacket and tie is mandatory.
Sid Marty is the author of five books of poetry and five books of non-fiction. He lives in southwest Alberta.
