State of the Arts

My nearly two decades in Canada have made me fairly familiar with our national penchant for self-deprecation. Still, when I recently began preparation for my citizenship test, I was disheartened by the official study guide’s thin “Arts and Culture” section and flummoxed by its gaps. Our writers? Neither Margaret Atwood nor Alice Munro is among the “men and women of letters” mentioned in the sixty-odd pages of Discover Canada, though Louis Hémon and Charles G. D. Roberts are. And our musicians? R. Murray Schafer must be there, I thought. Nathaniel Dett, too. Surely, Leonard Cohen. Alas, no. Prophets in their own country, I suppose.

By coincidence, the Vancouver writer Max Wyman’s The Compassionate Imagination was published around the same time that I received my test dates from Ottawa. As I read my citizenship study guide in tandem with the veteran commentator’s seventh book on the arts in Canada, I was struck by his diagnosis of my disappointment...