Publishing, writing, and the power of new media are critical components in our fast-transforming world. And in Canada it is especially fast changing if you consider that only thirty-odd years ago, this country played almost no role on the international publishing stage, few of our writers were recognized globally, and all struggled to reach audiences beyond our borders. Today, myriad Canadian writers are acclaimed and honoured, translated in every country. To help picture how this came about, I will offer here a couple of stories about this change that I’ve witnessed personally. They both reflect the importance of imagination in achieving far-reaching change: they tell us something about courage, and how we effect change; and how we use our stories—whether in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, whether in print or electronically—to speak to others, and for others, to that end.

The first story is about publishing in movement and the second is about women’s writing in movement. In the 1980s, a conference titled women in movement would have had a specific feminist agenda—and with good reason. Those reasons need no naming today, and are not altogether gone. But in many parts of the world they still hold medieval sway. So I will bring us around at the end to a remarkable online campaign that I and a few friends helped create in July 2010 to try to stop the death by stoning of a woman accused of adultery in Iran, Sakineh Ashtiani—which you will have read about, if the digital world is working!—because for me the threads come together in that final story. The first is a story about how and why Canadian writing suddenly leapt to prominence on the world stage during the 1970s and 1980s, rather like Venus leaping out of her shell onto the beach. The power and appeal of Canadian writing has grown so swiftly internationally since then that it’s taken us from being widely seen as a largely colonial backwater to the centre of the world stage, with a globally valued national literature. I’ve been lucky enough to have witnessed it, and to play a small part in the battles.

Imagine it is 1996 and you are at the autumnal Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the fast-beating heart of international publishing. The annual fair has been in existence since the fourteenth century, and publishers from all countries meet there each year to do the business of publishing. It’s a bazaar, a souk—thousands of excited publishers buying and selling the country-rights to their authors’ works. It’s the largest trade fair in that city of year-long trade fairs, with the automotive industry in second place—which is notable. That year, I was there for one of the first great moments for Canadian new fiction. Knopf Canada had just published four remarkable first novels in a literary program, the New Face of Fiction, which I’d created to support new fictional voices. We were celebrating Gail Anderson Dargatz, who at that time worked and lived on a farm outside Millett, and was just taking the country by storm with her beautiful first novel, , while Ann-Marie MacDonald was being feted for winning the Commonwealth Prize for the best work of fiction for her first novel, , and Dionne Brand (who would become Toronto’s poet laureate) was being feted for her luminous first novel. In Canada, we all know the depth of our writing talent; but to see the excitement at Frankfurt that year for these unknowns from Canada was exhilarating. It was a scrum, with publishers from Japan to Sweden bidding for the rights of first-time novelists (though, it must be said, Yann Martel’s experimental first novel rather struggled to find publishers, but some did see in it the power of imagination that would soon produce ). Ten years later, when I returned to the Frankfurt Book Fair , publishers from thirty-six countries would gather to celebrate the simultaneous publication in all languages—a first in history—of one book, Margaret Atwood’s , which was being heralded by the as the most exciting retelling of Homer’s in generations; and later that week, I would find myself addressing another roomful of foreign publishers who had come together to celebrate Miriam Toews and the translations of her brilliant, dark, funny, endearing novel, . Much had changed in that one decade. Today, newspapers in all parts of the world headline the appeal and power of Canadian writers, and Alice Munro is the 2013 Nobel laureate, but you’d be hard pressed to find headlines quoting a Canadian politician or referencing a major trade deal or important international situation in which Canada had played a role.

The fact is, for the most part, Canada’s profile abroad is its culture. It’s an extraordinary success story. But it didn’t come about easily. It was only a short time ago that Canadian writers were struggling dismally to be recognized abroad. So it’s intriguing to look at why Canadian writers have found such a welcome internationally. Was it the priceless early investments in the arts, province by province and federally, now largely mourned and buried? Was it simply made possible by the newly developed strengths of publishing businesses in Canada? Was it the undoubted merit of the writing? It’s a combination of factors, of course, a partnership, in which the community, its citizens, its universities, its businesses, its politicians, have all played essential roles, many hands helping to nurture the shining results we see today in the books we read and love. Anybody who thinks that what has happened in Canadian publishing is the result of a handful of good writers appearing all of a sudden, out of the blue, has completely missed the investments of the last forty years.

In 1972, when I was fortunate enough to come to Canada, publishing—books and magazines—was a small industry. Canada was still a cultural colony as far as England was concerned, and a slightly backward northern state as far as the United States was concerned. I mean that literally. In international publishing contracts the English automatically claimed Canada as their territory, while the Americans simultaneously claimed us too. We were like a bone being fought over by two dogs. And they chose not to understand why Canadian publishers and writers found this irritating and stultifying for the development of our own ideas, our own businesses. A full two decades earlier, the lawyer-poet F.R. Scott, who understood the importance of giving the writers of the nation a voice, had struggled against this: Is Canada, he asked, to remain a hewer of wood and drawer of water for her richer and more powerful neighbours, first Britain and then America forever? In 1957, when the writer Dave Godfrey, the founder of the House of Anansi along with the great poet Dennis Lee, famously asked the University of Toronto when it would set up a course in Canadian Literature, he was told, Maybe in ten years—if the right people die. Well, some of the right people did die. But mostly, the writers wanted out, wanted their voices heard. In the decade following Canada’s Centennial year, when a surge of cultural, nationalist feeling swept the country, a few inspired, inspiring alternative small presses dedicated to Canadian literature sprang up, run by the rebellious writers themselves to give voice to those feelingsin Edmonton, radical NeWest Press with George Melnyk and Douglas Barbour and then Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch, and Aritha van Herk; Mel Hurtig, who later gave us our first national encyclopedia, went from bookseller to publisher; in BC, Talonbooks and Pulp Press; in Ontario, Coach House Press (whose proud motto was Printed in Canada by Mindless Acid Freaks), which first published Michael Ondaatje, bp Nichol, and then, in 1972, the House of Anansi published —which, to the astonishment of the twenty-three-year-old Margaret Atwood herself, became a major Canadian bestseller—a fierce, challenging, funny, activist essay that reflected the ferment of social and cultural ideas boiling up all around. These were the seedbeds of our new literary culture.:

But while what was happening was irrepressible in its creative strength, very few writers could make a living or even sustain themselves on their writing. In 1967, domestic sales of Canadian books were barely $200 million (by 1997, they would be over $2 billion; to put that in perspective, ten years later, that had more than doubled). There were very few large Canadian publishing houses—above all, McClelland and Stewart with the charismatic Jack at the helm, and Clarke Irwin with the teetotalling Clarkes and Irwins, and the indomitable Mrs. Clarke setting out to create a solid base for Canadian literature in schools.

It was a tough battle that amazing generation fought, defying the odds—that generation before mine. An exciting time—marked, it seems when you talk to the protagonists, as much by a great deal of alcohol, fraught love affairs, and broken marriages as by good writing or publishing.

But the books we loved, then as now, were those that showed us who we are, gave shape to our hearts, to the challenges and mysteries of life, and gave voice to the familiar places we call home: in Alberta, the incomparable and beloved W.O. Mitchell and Rudy Wiebe; in Ontario, Timothy Findley and Robertson Davies; in Quebec, Nicole Brossard and Marie-Claire Blais.

But through the sixties, seventies, and even the eighties, the creative ferment wasn’t making its way outside our borders. The problem largely was that the power structure was colonial. The British publishers, like the Americans, who sold their own books into Canada for gain, had no interest in taking home the colonial literature of Canada. But the big world market was the blood that many of our writers craved—and also needed in order to make a living. Rare exceptions—such as Lucy Maud Montgomery—had made it out of Canada in significant numbers. You could count on the fingers of one hand the writers whose books travelled: the young Margaret Laurence and younger Alice Munro; Mavis Gallant (living in Paris); Mordecai Richler (living in London then).

I’ve been truly lucky to work with some of our finest writers, men and women, including Michael Ondaatje, Miriam Toews, Margaret Atwood, or internationally, Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, P.D. James. But you can imagine a nerdy bookworm of twenty-two back then, as I was, arriving in the middle of all this fledgling cultural excitement. Growing up in England, I was completely unaware of Canadian writers, Oxford education notwithstanding. But I loved stories, and I took the first job I could get in a publishing house: Clarke Irwin. I began as a coffee girl and made the steep climb up the ladder to editorial assistant, and finally, just before I left, Bill Clarke made me an assistant editor. But at that age, movement is never fast enough. I wanted to publish the writers I liked, and to do it quickly. So I began my own small publishing house, with nothing to go on but the confidence of the innocent, a transcendent love of literature, a belief in the power of the book to help shape the world, and two brave authors who had failed to find a publisher and were both desperate enough and generous enough to sign up with a kid crammed into the dusty backroom of a second-hand bookstore.

I was lucky to arrive then because the tough battles to make a mark within Canada had already been fought by that first brilliant wave of publishers and writers. My aggravation was that the doors of the wider publishing world were closed against us—often literally closed in our faces. It was hard to get an appointment in New York or London, the centres of publishing then. It was dispiriting, sometimes humiliating. But youthful passion needs very little in the way of sustenance, and I believed then, as now, that we have not only a unique Canadian voice but a voice that speaks uniquely to the world.

One day I borrowed money from equally penniless but supportive friends to make the trip to New York—and went knocking on the doors of world publishing, clutching a manuscript by one of my two authors in the hope of finding a publisher for it there. I remember how terrified I was, when I actually stood in the doorway of the famous house of Alfred A. Knopf on Fifty-Fourth Street. I’d never even been to New York before, but—ironically, considering I ended up twenty years later founding Knopf in Canada—I’d decided I might as well start at the top. Of course I found out, having come all that way on borrowed funds, that the grand editor with whom I’d made an appointment had already cancelled it and passed me on to an underling. But I was lucky again. It was his young assistant’s first week too, and she saw my face—I was clearly about to burst into tears—and took pity on me: we went out and had many drinks in the Oyster Bar on her boss’s tab, and she went back clutching the manuscript and convinced the grand editor to read it, and shortly thereafter our Canadian-Czech writer Josef Škvorecký had an American deal for his novel , which would soon be acclaimed by the as the greatest jazz novel ever written.

That was a scene repeated a few months later in London, when the venerable house of the Hogarth Press—founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf—called on Christmas Day to accept a manuscript I’d dropped off by the poet Richard Outram. And so on. Early forays to open doors, the beginning of a concerted effort by a handful of determined young publishers and supportive writers, and by the early festivals such as the International Authors’ Festival at Harbourfront. Until, in 1984, when I led the first Canadian Publishing Trade Mission to London, the headline about the event, in the business section of the London read, to our great delight, The Brits had got the message.

Today, Canadian literature is published, sold, read, acclaimed, and taught around the world. I must be clear: most writers do not shine in the sun but work in obscurity and exist on poverty-level incomes. But never before have our domestic book sales had the potential to be so high, with our expectation for a major hardcover bestseller not being the 5,000 copies that it was just ten years ago, but more like 15,000 or 20,000 or even 60,000 or 80,000 in Canada. Internationally, Miriam Toews’s , for instance, has sold over half a million copies. Ann-Marie MacDonald’s is at well over two million, thanks to the power of Oprah. Yann Martel’s luminous , one of five Canadian novels to walk away with the Booker Prize, and has now sold almost 900,000 copies in Canada and over nine million around the world.

Our stories, our arts—that is largely what people think of when they think of Canada. People elsewhere see and understand Canada through our writers. We have a voice, an image, on the world’s stage that has broad benefits for our writers, our communities and cities, and unexpected political and business implications. When it comes time for Canada to buy or to negotiate, the attitude towards Canada and the kind of people we are has been determined to a surprising extent by the projection of our culture abroad. In the digital borderless world, it will be more important than ever to find ways to cherish and sustain that, and easier to project it.

So what is it in our society, in our values, that makes our writing—our fiction and our non-fiction—so appealing and sexy to the world at large? The answer, I think, lies somewhere off to the side.

The novelist and essayist Pico Iyer called Canada’s literature the most exciting in the English-speaking world, and he places the cause firmly in what he calls our mongrel society. He pointed out that many of the finest writers in English are now men and women with names like Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Rau Badami, M.G. Vassanji, Chimamanda Adichie, Jumpha Lahiri, and Michael Ondaatje. And that many of these writers come from Canada. The power of Anglo-Saxon literature has been taken over by a literature that springs from the old colonial margins.

There’s something about our marginal, mongrel status that forms a particular type of writer whose sense of social justice and injustice, of humanity and inhumanity is keen. You become a particularly capable, acute observer if you live long in the margins. Ours is now a literature written by people from many diverse cultures that have been distilled into the Canadian culture. To draw from a lovely phrase of Anne Michaels, our writers at their best put together shattered pieces to make a stained-glass whole. Or, as Rudy Wiebe said on receiving the Governor General’s Award for fiction, It is only the stories we tell each other that will make us a true Canadian people.

The historical lesson is plain: when we look at the greatness of Rome or Greece, or Alexandria, do we think of their business record? It is our writers, our artists, our scientists, and our philosophers—and sometimes their patrons—that make known the character of a nation. It is only the societies that have paid their dues to their arts that are remembered and glorified. But the rewards are not just in some far-off future. They begin in the present, when our own people as well as the world at large hears the voice of Canada through its writers and its artists, sits up, pays attention, and comes knocking on our doors. As they are knocking today.

If our writers are touching the centre of the world now, it is to some degree because we speak from knowledge of the margins—messy, intolerant, dominated and rebellious, confused and optimistic, as the margins are wont to be. As is much of the world today. And that understanding out of the margins, from the sidelines and the alleyways, brings us to the second story, because it is, I believe, the very thing that has been moving a certain aspect of women’s writing in a fascinating new direction.

Let me start with reading you a quote from that wise, tough-minded woman, Virginia Woolf, in her essay —we think we know everything about her and then, like Margaret Atwood, she becomes prophetic in unexpected ways.

Not quite one hundred years ago—1928—Virginia Woolf exhorted mothers to provide their daughters with money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. And what else could they do but write fiction? she asks, in that very cool, clever essay, since the only training that a woman had…was…in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting room. People’s feelings were impressed upon her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels (61). When Virginia looks around her: I find no noble sentiments about…influencing the world to higher ends.…Do not dream, she says wryly, of influencing other people (100). She hoped that women might attain that influence within a hundred years. For if we live another century or so and have five hundred [pounds] a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we can get out of the common sitting room, and have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we see human beings not always in relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we face the fact that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come.… It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps…it calls for confidence in oneself. (102, 31) Well, we’re there, and just ahead of her estimated century.

There’s still an argument about it, but those who argue are those who like flogging dead donkeys. In November 2008, (UK) titled a discussion piece about how there seems to be a lack of women non-fiction writers Julia Cheiffetz, a senior editor at HarperCollins, not a position of minor influence, in a 2008 piece in the called responded to the absence of women in Gladwell’s book : It’s hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas…or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn’t in our genetic makeup. But the tides of change have swept over her. While twenty, even fifteen years ago, the many manuscripts from women that crossed my desk were largely fiction. Even then much of the non-fiction was world-changing for readers in its power. From Rachel Carson to Jane Jacobs, a great Canadian whom I published and counted a friend, we’ve been blessed with great non-fiction women writers. Their books have been gigantic building blocks for all humankind. But still, fifteen years ago I received comparatively few manuscripts by women that embraced Big Ideas, tackled head-on society’s major concerns, politics, economics, human rights, strove to influence and change the world directly and overtly. But today many of the most passionately raised voices in the world are women’s voices, dealing with broad human issues with sensibility, empathy, and activism, speaking in much needed voices and with much needed ideas. Give a woman a room and the next thing you know she’s taken the world.…Toni Morrison, whom I publish, said so beautifully in her 1993 Nobel lecture, Tell us what it is to be a woman…what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. Our mongrel nation understands the margins.

In 1999, I published one of the early world-changing Canadian non-fiction Big Ideas books, Naomi Klein’s , which has sold in about forty-five languages. A brilliant, rabble-rousing work for a whole generation, it tore the branding consumer culture to shreds and took on the misconceptions of globalization; many of those who took to the streets in protest in Montreal and in Seattle, who camped outside the walls of Davos in Switzerland for the economic summits, the workers who demonstrated in the streets of Manila and Buenos Aires, carried that book as their bible. I was Naomi’s editor; she was just twenty-six at the time, and I know many people initially told her that she should move on, that she was inadequately trained to the task, that she would be ignored by the experts in the field, that the world would not pay attention to her. She followed with , also a #1 bestseller in many countries, and hailed by the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz as a book to be read by all economists who cared about the word they live in. Virginia Woolf is an odd great-grandmother for Naomi Klein, but she would not have disapproved of her desire to influence and shed light on reality, or, as Naomi said in her own succinct way in an online video on , When you read strong analysis, clear analysis, it makes you feel better equipped; it’s sort of ammo. As an opinion writer, as a columnist, that’s my goal: helping people get more of those clicks of understanding. Other books followed in my own working life—Stephanie Nolen’s groundbreaking book on AIDS, ; and Irshad Manji’s . As a young woman in her early twenties living in Toronto, Manji decided to speak up for the generous moderate Islam that she passionately advocates for in her book. A brave move—she lives under a fatwa—but her book is read and debated around the world, forging a path for tolerance.

Another woman who has moved out of the margins and pulled down a fatwa on her head in so doing is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She wrote in her bestselling of her flight from a forced marriage as a child to a much older man (living in Canada)—and in , her inspiring 2010 book, she tells the story of her continuing journey to escape and find a new life. She is articulate, astonishing, beautiful, and unbelievably courageous. She has taken on the cause of eradicating female genital mutilation and fully knows she is writing inflammatory work, but tells me, when I worry for her safety, that to inspire change on any level, she must be as staunch as possible. She sees the plight of women and radical Islam as the most urgent problem on the planet, one that affects us all: she is not a feminist, she says, but a human being. There is, she says, a horrific silence from the mainstream. And note there is no unified political perspective or women’s perspective. Ayaan and Naomi would not be political bedfellows, but they are nevertheless both critical important voices in the world debate.

In many parts of the world, however, a room of one’s own is still a secret room. Azar Nafisi, in her bestselling book , about teaching Western literature in secret to her students, wrote: For nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they came to my house, and almost every time, I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. When my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self. Our world, in that small room, with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below. (5–6)

I want to end by telling you of a personal story of a fight for the rights of one woman, which brings us into the powerful world of electronic communication. In July 2010, Heather Reisman, who runs the Indigo book chain, called me to say she had that morning read a plea from a twenty-two-year-old boy in Iran, begging the world to intervene to save his mother’s life, alleging her innocence. Forty-two-year-old Sakineh Ashtiani was in Tabriz prison and due to be executed that weekend by stoning for so-called adultery—buried up to her neck and then stoned to death by a gathered crowd. That day we created a small committee—women and men—Azar Nafisi, Irshad Manji, Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel-winning Iranian lawyer whose book I had published, lawyers, and advisors—and started emailing. Within twenty-four hours, we had a website up with a petition to the regime. Within five days, we had sent off three hundred thousand signed petitions. Sakineh’s stoning was delayed, as the regime regrouped. Eight hard-working people managed to bring this barbaric, cruel practice to the news of every country—all through the new digital world of social media. A publishing friend in Brazil created a brilliant social media campaign he called Lula Liga: Lula call. President Lula, being in the middle of an election and bombarded by thousands of Brazilians calling on him to call President Ahmadinejad in Iran, reluctantly called and offered Sakineh and her family a home in Brazil. Ahmadinejad told him, in so many words, that he was a fool. Brazil responded by imposing sanctions on Iran. Sarkozy in France became involved, and when the Iranian regime called his wife a prostitute, world politics changed yet again. Sakineh was not stoned to death and is still alive. Yet she is still in prison. Many more women wait on death row to be stoned, and the world continues to appeal to the regime for compassion and for the abolishment of stoning and of adultery as a capital punishment.

Transformative change is part of our legacy and our lifeblood in Canada. Canadian writers have moved from the colonial margins to the very centre of world literature; and women writers have taken their place in that centre, provoking change, as much as witnessing it. Our goal is to keep moving, to continue to address injustice, the meaning of life, and to celebrate its joys and sorrows. Whether that is pushing against racial, sexual, or political boundaries, whether it’s Naomi Klein raising her voice in the public forum or a group of women learning together in secret in a room of their own in Tehran, we move forward, we grow together through our need to participate in our own reality. As Canadians we know, just as writers in all fields know, that we must never stop struggling against those who would give us no for an answer or shut a door in our face, never stop struggling against the barriers that hinder our ability to dream aloud, to write, or paint, or make music, to challenge the darkness, and dream a humane society into being. And if we do it well, here in Canada, the world will listen.