The culturally minded of Vancouver are a particularly dogged, tenacious tribe — they have to be. I've heard colleagues describe efforts toward fostering a vital, thrumming arts scene in the "City of Glass" as being like trying to get a really good cup of tea at Starbucks. That is to say, you can get tea, and it's not bad tea, but this doesn't change the fact that tea, ultimately, is not what Starbucks is about. It will always be an afterthought, a begrudging concession to us mulish, unfashionable tea-drinkers. So it is with Vancouver as brewer of artistic ferment.
I recalled the metaphor while biking into Vancouver's Yaletown neighbourhood to congratulate friend Stephen Osborne, the recipient of the first annual Vancouver Arts Award for Writing and Publishing. Riding along the eastern seawall — impossibly new condos shimmering into the sky on one side and grinding, screeching construction work kicking up dust on the other — is like being swept into the city's pulsating nervous system. This, the bike-riding art-fart is left to despair, is where the city's passions truly lie. This is the java that keeps its dark heart pumping.
Yaletown, Osborne tells me, was once the publishing district of Vancouver. "We're the only ones left," he reflects, speaking of the offices of the magazine he founded, Geist, which he shares with the publishing house he also founded, Arsenal Pulp Press. When I ask him how the writing and publishing scene has changed since the then-called Pulp Press was established in 1971, Osborne replies: "The main thing was, it almost didn't exist. There was almost nothing around, so that was one of the motivations — I had friends who were writing, but there were no publishers."
After publishing his brother's book of poetry on a $25 printing press from an antiques store, Osborne says, "I knew I wanted a better press. I ran Pulp Press for a year on my brother's UIC, and the people I was hanging around with — D.M. Fraser, Greg Enright — became the editorial part of the operation. These people are all dead now," he adds with some alarm. "So I'm some kind of ancient mariner."
Better to say that the feting of Osborne's contributions to West Coast literary life is long overdue. Central to these accomplishments is Geist, the largest and perhaps most distinctive literary publication in Canada.
Founded in 1990, Geist had an unpaid staff of two — Osborne himself and his life partner Mary Schendlinger, who remains managing editor. Since then, circulation has gone from 500 to 8,000, and, thanks to a recent endowment from the Tula Foundation, continues to climb. Geist has twice been voted Magazine of the Year by the Western Magazine Awards.
The endowment was strangely providential for Osborne. "The day the guy sent me an e-mail saying he was interested," he marvels, "I had already started making plans to go out and find funds." And the difference this funding has made to the magazine has been huge, reports Osborne, resulting in increasing circulation, opening doors to further funding opportunities and, most importantly, allowing the magazine to, "carve out a cultural territory into which [we] can lead [our] readers." To put it in simpler terms: actually paying Geist writers.
"Literary magazines have let writers down," Osborne explains. "We need subsidies from every place we can get it, but we shouldn't get it from the writers. The effect is that we can't make literature, we can't actually contribute to a literature as publishers and editors, because we're not in a position to pay for the literature we want." All editors can do, therefore, is "passively await submissions, ask for contributions as a favour." Clearly not Osborne's idea of the editor's vocation.
Geist's content reflects its pro-contributor mandate, regularly featuring Canadian literary luminaries, but also bringing along newer, unpublished voices. One of these, first-time novelist James Sherrett, published Up in Ontario in October with Turnstone Press. Sherrett was struck by Osborne's obsession with craft. "To my eyes, it seemed as if he had spent his whole life preparing and dedicating his mind to writing."
Having published his own work in magazines and newspapers for years, Osborne's most recent offering can be found in En Route, featured as a winner in the travel-writing category of this year's CBC Literary Awards. Having only just returned from a trip to Ottawa to receive the award, Osborne is now bracing himself for the bright lights of the Vancouver Arts Award gala this Friday, where he will be honoured alongside six other local eminences, including architect Arthur Erickson.
"They honour seven people in an advanced state of decay," Osborne smirks, explaining the concept behind the VAA in typically self-deprecating terms, "and we in turn get to nominate our protégés. So the award goes to me, and I get to give $5,000 to a protégé, which is really wonderful."
Wonderful indeed, and a heartening and much-needed nod of encouragement to the ever-toiling tea-drinkers of Vancouver's artistic and cultural scene.
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