Can So Lit

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece in the P-Dog about the always precarious future of Canadian Literature. Following up on that, it's great to see a lot of chatter lately on the merits of CanLit. Yesterday, Vancouver novelist Steven Galloway responded to National Post columnist Barbara Kay's recent musings in a strongly-worded, deliciously concise defence of CanLit for the NP's blog (Nat'l Post). Among the highlights:

Yes, Canadian literature is subsidized. So are tourism, mining, forestry, automobile production, small business and oil. In 2006 the petroleum industry alone received $1.4-billion in government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. I'll apologize for our subsidies when they apologize for theirs, because what writers do is every bit as important and vital as putting together cars, docking cruise ships or cutting down trees.

Today, Darryl Whetter at THIS Magazine weighs in, asking when Canadian writers are going to join the rest of us who live in cities. Word to that, of course, but I can't let it pass without repping for one of the best Canadian novels of the last 10 years which happens to be decidedly rural: Brad Smith's All Hat (recently adapted into a completely unremarkable film). It can't be the only Canadian example of a popular novel in the tradition of John D. MacDonald and Carl Hiaasen, but I'm hard pressed to think of any others.