the green notebook,

, remembering Rick McNair (1942-2007), missing Jordan Abel + reading Cameron Anstee,

I was curious to find this reference to Christine’s late uncle, the playwright and theatre director Rick McNair (1942-2007) in Kevin Longfield’s From Fire to Flood: A History of Theatre in Manitoba (2001), including this passage around a certain period of turmoil at Winnipeg’s Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre:

His replacement, Rick McNair, fared little better. Ironically, Czarnecki mentions him in the same Canadian Theatre History essay as someone who had proved that Canadian playwrights could write for the regional theatres’ large stages. He had produced Sharon Pollack, John Murrell and W.O. Mitchell at Theatre Calgary. Unfortunately, he soon had MTC board members grumbling. Manitoba playwrights complained that they received commissions but not productions, and some questioned the wisdom of spending public money in this way when other theatres did a better job of putting local scripts on stage.

Once again, when the axe fell, MTC suffered a public relations disaster. Perhaps more embarrassing for it in this case, McNair stayed in town and often produced independent theatre.

Despite his lack of popular and artistic success at the theatre, McNair’s legacy is much more important than that of his predecessors, except for John Hirsch. For one thing, he instituted the practice of using local amateurs in touring productions, giving people outside Winnipeg an inside look at professional theatre, and making a stronger link to local audiences. While he did not win any gold stars for his use of local professional talent, he did them an important favour.

Monty Reid knew Rick, as did Robert Kroetsch. Rick adapted at least one Kroetsch novel into a play, and Christine has some of Rick’s Kroetsch volumes signed to him. We see one of Rick’s three grown children, only a couple of years my elder, quite regularly, as he and his family live in Ottawa’s east end.

I found a copy of From Fire to Flood: A History of Theatre in Manitoba while wandering our local thrift store with the young ladies, attempting to direct them to clothes they might like, and not distracted by further toys, further stuffed animals. Rose has her wardrobe of school uniform, so her shopping has shifted, and many of Aoife’s outfits are hand-me-down, still. I thought they might appreciate the agency. Given their enthusiasms across our Chichester jaunt, back in May.

I missed Rick by only a year or so, not meeting Christine until the summer of 2008. Numerous of the family have said that we would have gotten on, as they say. Like a house on fire.

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Apparently I’ve missed a new title by Jordan Abel, an oversight I should soon correct [note: I did find it, and I even wrote on it]. I’m still not finished my essay on Lydia Davis. Christine’s book should land any day now.

Next week I drive to Toronto for the sake of a small press fair at Harbourfront, as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors, as organized by Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa of Gap Riot Press. I am already thinking about what bookstores I might hit while I’m there (and perhaps this is my opportunity to pick up Abel’s novel). Type Books is always worth visiting. I’ve yet to get into Flying Books, an establishment both bookseller and publisher. I’ve been curious to see what they’re doing.

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In today’s mail, a copy of Ottawa poet, critic and publisher Cameron Anstee’s SOME SILENCES: Notes on Small Press (2024), a slim and sleek chapbook-length essay produced to acknowledge the fifteenth anniversary of his chapbook press, Apt. 9 Press:

Beyond the proportions of our immediate communities that can often feel fairly modest, readers of the small press also run up against the fact that the small press as a broader practice is both too voluminous and ultimately fleeting. There is simply too much of it to encounter, to collect, to hold in your brain at once. You can’t know everything that happened before you, nor can you read everything by everyone, nor can you remember every poet, or press, or reading series—in your country, in your city, in your neighbourhood, today and yesterday and tomorrow. These things exceed our capacity to encounter them, and then pass, inevitably and essentially. You pick your people and read them deeply, and you also try to read widely, all the while knowing that you can’t reach it all (or it can’t reach you).

Perhaps that is it, I am still trying to reach it all, somehow. Perpetually behind, perpetually overwhelmed. Is that all there is.

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Next week, Picton. Next week, Toronto for a small press fair. Today, the housecleaners come. We spend two days working to get things off the floor before they arrive. I can’t help but think of Marge Simpson, cleaning the house before their free housecleaners arrive, so they wouldn’t think she a bad housekeeper. What was the point, then.

Someone posts to social media:

Cathy was right. Ack.