We Have an Imagination Problem

On CanLit, dissent, scarcity, and why I’m teaching what I know about building a press

Lately I have been looking around the independent literary scene in Canada and feeling lonely and bored.

Not because nothing is happening. In some ways, the opposite is true. People are still trying to make rooms for literature. They are still gathering around language, friendship, taste, and the feeling that something is missing and needs to be built. I know that impulse intimately because I have lived it. I know what it is to gather people around a sensibility and call it a structure. I know what it is to start something because the space you need does not yet exist.

What I have been feeling, though, is that activity alone is not the same thing as vitality. A literary culture can be busy without being especially alive. It can be full of projects and still feel aesthetically thin, fragmented, timid, or unable to gather enough force to alter the culture around it.

And to be honest, I am totally bored by most of CanLit. Not because there are no brilliant writers here. There are. Not because there is no talent. There is. But too much of the culture around literature in this country feels over-professionalized, under-imagined, structurally timid, and strangely unable to dream bigger about itself. Too much of it feels cautious in form, polite in ambition, flattened before it even reaches the page. We do not have enough readers for our own work. We do not have enough public appetite for literary risk. We do not have enough belief in literature as something that can disturb consensus, sharpen feeling, expand consciousness, or carry dissent.

And part of that is generational.

I do believe the industry remains shaped by older generations who built systems that now overwhelmingly preserve their own continuity. Funding bodies have not made it much of a priority to support the emergence of new and younger presses so much as to keep older presses alive indefinitely. I do not say that because I think older publishers have no value, or because I want to flatten this into a lazy generational war. I say it because younger and emerging publishers are being asked to build under materially worse conditions, with less stability, less access, and less room to fail, while much of the existing infrastructure still seems organized around maintaining what already exists.

I think that matters. I think it matters a great deal what kind of literature a country makes room for, and what kind of literature it quietly trains itself not to want.

When a country does not meaningfully support literature of dissent, often associated with younger writers but certainly not limited to them, it does not only produce fewer radical books. It produces a whole atmosphere. Fear enters the ecosystem quietly. Scarcity enters the editorial imagination. Publishers become more cautious, more defensive, more likely to choose what can be justified, explained, softened, or sold. Risk starts to feel indulgent. Difficulty starts to feel dangerous. Aesthetic ambition starts to feel like a luxury. What gets published is shaped not only by taste, but by pressure. What gets imagined is shaped not only by desire, but by constraint.

This is part of why the industry’s struggles matter to me so much. Canadian publishing is not healthy in any robust sense. The sector is under sustained pressure: a federally supported publishing base that has stayed relatively flat, rising production and distribution costs, shrinking margins, and a field in which most publishers remain very small and structurally vulnerable. The Canada Book Fund supported between 251 and 268 publishers annually from 2018–19 to 2022–23, while Statistics Canada reports that in 2024 industry revenue rose by 3.1 percent but expenses rose by 6.8 percent, pushing the operating profit margin down to 5.8 percent, the lowest level in the current series of available data. BookNet’s 2023 survey also found that 79 percent of respondents had scaled down print runs to reduce waste, limit overstock, and mitigate risk. Those are not abstract numbers. They describe an atmosphere of permanent caution.

So the contradiction is real. We are dealing, at once, with scarcity and excess: too little infrastructure, too little money, too little public belief, too little serious engagement with our own literature, and yet often an abundance of projects that do not necessarily add up to a more alive culture.

Recently, reading a couple of essays in Discordia Review about Montreal literary culture helped me see one symptom of this more clearly. One of the essays critiques the city’s abundance of magazines. I did not come away from it thinking magazines themselves are the problem. If anything, I am moved by their abundance. To me, that kind of proliferation can just as easily be a sign that people still want to build, still want to dream, still want to make a container for literature even when the larger culture has not made enough room for it. What stayed with me was the deeper question underneath the critique: what is the difference between a scene that is merely active and one that is actually alive?

This is why I do not want to simply say there are too many magazines. I want to say that proliferation can be a symptom. It can be a sign of longing without enough support behind it. It can be a sign that people still want to dream, but are doing so inside a country that has not built the conditions for literary ambition to thrive.

That is where my own loneliness comes in.

Don’t creative people build what they need in order to remain legible, if only to themselves and their community?

After more than a decade of building Metatron, I sometimes look around and wonder how I became one of the only presses of my generation still here. I do not ask that from a place of pride. I ask it with grief, disbelief, and a clear sense of how many independent literary projects have had to fight for every inch of life, often without the support, mentorship, or structural clarity they needed to last.

And I look around the publishing industry and see the same names over and over again, both presses and seasoned authors. To me, that is part of the boredom. Too little feels genuinely out of line. Too little feels risky. Too little feels aesthetically or structurally surprising. And of course that is partly because very few people can afford real risk anymore.

When I started Metatron, I had no mentor. I did not come from money. I did not inherit access to publishing, or some clear roadmap for how a person like me was supposed to build a literary institution and survive it. I built as a low-income mixed-race woman, a language minority in Quebec, with very little guidance, and I built because I believed writers deserved daring, beautiful, unpredictable places for their work to live. I built because I needed that kind of space to exist. I built because I wanted my own voice and vision, and the voices and visions of others like me, to matter in a culture that did not exactly make room for us automatically.

I also built as a Millennial, through downward mobility, precarity, and crisis after crisis after crisis, in conditions that make it materially harder to dream and harder still to build. The older I get, the more I feel the exhaustion of that. The energy it takes to make something from nothing is not abstract. It is physical, psychic, economic, and cumulative.

That struggle did not make me pure. It did not make me special. It mostly made things harder than they needed to be.

And maybe that is exactly why I feel so compelled to teach now.

Because if I know anything after all these years, it is that the problem is not a lack of desire. The problem is that too many people are still trying to build in the dark. Too many people with real vision and real literary instincts still do not have access to the practical knowledge that turns a feeling into a form, a magazine into a platform, a press into an institution. Too many people still have to rely on luck, proximity, unpaid labour, exhaustion, or private sacrifice simply to learn the basics of how publishing works.

I have no interest in romanticizing that. I do not think struggle makes a project more serious. I do not think obscurity is noble. I do not think people should have to pay the same price in uncertainty that I did just to access basic knowledge. If anything, too much of independent publishing in this country has been sustained by unnecessary opacity. Too much of it depends on hidden labour, informal transmission, and people learning by crisis.

I cannot solve the boredom of CanLit on my own. I cannot fix the country’s weak engagement with its own literature. I cannot single-handedly repair the industry’s thin margins or reverse its failures of imagination.

But I can push back in two ways.

I can continue to publish books as though they are miracles.

And I can teach what I have learned.

That, for me, is the deepest reason I finally decided to teach. Not simply to explain how publishing works, but to help equip the next generation with more than longing. With tools. With structure. With a clearer sense of what is worth building, and why. If I want a literary culture that is less boring, less timid, less self-enclosed, and more alive, then one of the most useful things I can do is pass on what I had to learn the hard way.

My Independent Publishing Intensive is for writers, artists, editors, curators, and emerging publishers who want a clearer understanding of how independent publishing actually works now. It is especially meant for those who are hoping to build larger projects that may hold many voices, many books, or many future initiatives, because I want to talk not only about publishing as an idea, but about curation, editorial direction, sustainability, and the management of literary projects over time.

I want to speak honestly about what it takes to build something in contemporary Canada. I want to demystify the labour. I want to speak plainly about funding, production, design, editorial vision, publicity, audience, and the hidden work that makes the visible work possible. I want to teach the part that usually stays obscure: how a dream becomes a structure, and how a structure might survive.

Because that is what a press really is. A press is a way of seeing. A way of choosing. A way of saying this matters, this belongs, this voice deserves form, this work deserves to enter the world with care and force and style. A press is also a social architecture. It creates relations. It creates scenes. It creates continuity where there might otherwise be only isolated acts of expression. It makes a room, and sometimes that room becomes a world.

This is part of why I still care so deeply about small presses. Independent publishing still holds open a space for risk, dissent, style, experimentation, intimacy, and real artistic conviction. It can create alternate pathways for work that might not survive elsewhere. It can make room for the singular, the excessive, the uncategorizable, the unfashionable, and the future-facing. When a country does not support literature strongly enough, that space becomes even more important.

A free press is the symptom of a free society.

But a free press also requires form, discernment, courage, and knowledge. It requires people willing not only to start things, but to build them well. It requires people willing to protect risk from fear, and imagination from scarcity.

That is the work I want to be part of.

How about you?

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