Winning a $50,000 cheque as a Scotiabank Giller Prize laureate or scoring a half-million-dollar advance from a publisher is always cause for jubilation for a writer, not to mention praise in the media.
But such triumphs are decidedly the exception – a distortion, in fact – of the writing life in Canada. The majority of published authors never get big advances, never see their books on the bestseller lists, never visit Rideau Hall for a Governor-General's Literary Awards ceremony nor share a tête-à-tête on CBC Radio One with Shelagh Rogers.
According to Statistics Canada, a Canadian scribe on average makes only between $18,000 and $22,000 annually from his or her writing – and this includes royalties from book sales as well as income from grants, giving readings and workshops, writing, say, reviews for magazines and newspapers, and earning a yearly stipend from the Public Lending Right Commission.
It is, in short, a hard life, fraught with long, lonely hours of work, occasional feasts and many famines (in 2005, an estimated 3,000 Canadian authors – 11 per cent of the total 27,500 who identified themselves either as self-employed or salaried writers – reported no earnings from their writing), not to mention the agony of public indifference.
But this life just might take a turn for the better starting this spring. Which is when the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists Fraternal Benefit Society expects to roll out its Writers' Coalition Benefits package.
The package will offer writers, editors, translators – “basically anybody in the writing industry,” according to Deborah Windsor, executive director of the Writers' Union of Canada – access to the insured extended-health-care services most salaried employees take for granted, such as basic dental and vision care, subsidized prescription drugs, accident insurance and physiotherapy. (Pensions are also on the long-term wish list.)
The catalyst for the initiative is Susan Swan, at 63 a much-published author (The Wives of Bath, What Casanova Told Me), academic (at Toronto's York University) and, until this year, chair of the Writers' Union of Canada. In this last capacity, she hosted a series of wine-and-cheese parties throughout 2007 for younger writers to get a feel for what they wanted the 1,800-member WUC to address.
Founded in 1973 by the likes of Margaret Laurence and Pierre Berton, the WUC, it's fair to say, has in the last 10 or 15 years lost some of the zip and purposefulness that originally shaped it. As Toronto novelist and Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith told Swan in an e-mail: “The image I have of [the union] is a place where under-published would-be writers over the age of 50 sit in rooms together and plaintively discuss ethnic and gender representation, the ‘silencing of voices' and things like empowerment.... And then they talk about organic gardening.”
As she went about her wine-fuelled consultations, Swan found a uniformity of opinion. “Pretty well all the younger writers said [they wanted] the same sort of thing – benefits, including pensions.” Swan herself needed no convincing: She recalled “passing the hat” in the mid-1970s for the noted Canadian novelist and short-story writer Norman Levine, and this at a time when, “I hardly made enough to pay my rent.”
Levine, in fact, died impoverished in rural England in 2005, joining Gwendolyn MacEwen, D.M. Fraser, Dorothy Livesay and Milton Acorn among those Canadian artists whose lives have ended in similar circumstances.
More recently, the Writers' Union found itself bringing “a very established writer” from Ontario to the attention of the Writers' Trust of Canada. The trust's George Woodcock Fund, created in 1989, provides emergency, short-term help to authors. The writer was “facing a very large dental expense that if it was not taken care of, could have built into future problems,” Deborah Windsor noted. “He was literally faced with the choice of fixing the mouth or paying the rent.”
Clearly the WUC, among others, is hoping for a more systematic solution to such dilemmas. Swan at first thought she'd have to petition the Harper government for help to get a no-frills benefits scheme going. But then fellow Writers' Union member and two-time Governor-General's winner Nino Ricci told her about the ACTRA Fraternal Benefit Society (AFBS), which has been the insurer and retirement trustee of English-language TV and film workers for more than 30 years.
