House of Anansi celebrates 40 years of groundbreaking Canadian literature

You’re a writer. You wake up at 5:30 in the morning and cherish those few hours of silent, solitary work. You spend months alone with the voices in your head, watching as the manuscript takes form. Finally, it’s done….

….and you’re torn from your home office, thrust into a frenzied, weeks-long, city-hopping book tour. You’re over-stimulated, frazzled, exhausted and the next manuscript in your two-book deal is due.

Lisa Moore was on tour with her collection of short stories, Open, and putting the finishing touches on her new novel, Alligator, between readings and airplanes. Then, a moment of synchronicity came to her rescue. “I ended up in a hotel with Sarah MacLachlan, the president of the House of Anansi,” says Moore. “She brought me all these beautiful presents — a scented candle, fancy biscuits, grapes, chocolate and locked me in. I spent three days in silence and freedom, with all those lovely cookies... it was one of the most pleasurable writing experiences of my life.”

Alligator went on to win the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award. It pays to pamper your authors, and the House of Anansi Press knows how to do it right.

Anansi has always been a writer’s press — which makes sense, since it was founded by two writers in 1967. Dave Godfrey and Dennis Lee, who would go on to win Governor General’s Awards in fiction and poetry, respectively, met at the University of Toronto in the mid-’60s. “I had a wretched manuscript of poetry called Kingdom of Absence that I showed to Dave, who said it was great and we should publish it,” Lee remembers. “At the last minute, we said, ‘Maybe we should make this look as if it’s from an actual publishing house,’ so we sat around trying to figure out what this non-existent publishing house would be called.” Godfrey had spent time in Ghana, where he’d heard of the African spider god, Anansi. “Dave hadn’t seen the word spelled, though, so the first printing of Kingdom of Absence came from the House of Ananse,” Lee laughs.

The first 300 copies of Kingdom of Absence sold out, and so the pair decided to make a real go of their ad hoc press. Godfrey was sitting on his own manuscript, a collection of short stories called Death Goes Better with Coca-Cola. “The big slogan at the time was ‘Things Go Better with Coca-Cola,’ so we got into a bit of hot water over that,” says Lee. That fall, Anansi released Godfrey’s collection alongside The Absolute Smile by George Jonas and a book of poetry by one of Lee’s undergraduate classmates, Margaret Atwood. “Margaret had just won the Governor General’s Award for The Circle Game,” says Lee. “We approached her for a re-release and, lo and behold, we had our fall list.”

It was a good time to publish Canadian work. Fresh from Expo ’67 and the Canadian centennial, the country was ready to celebrate its own. “The normal thing for someone who was serious about writing was to get the hell out of Canada and go to England,” says Lee. “The pattern changed, but nobody realized it was changing. People would leave for a bit, then say, ‘Dammit, I’m going to live in my own country.’ There was a lot of energy in Canadian writing, and the bigger houses hadn’t plugged into it yet. We could almost stand outside the big editorial houses and intercept rejected manuscripts. Most of them, of course, were rejected because they were lousy, but there was also some really interesting, trailblazing stuff that the big presses just weren’t comfortable with.”

Case in point: Graeme Gibson had been courting McClelland & Stewart with his manuscript of experimental fiction, Five Legs. When they dropped him, he knocked on Anansi’s door. “I think our main innovation, at that point, wasn’t publishing poetry, because there were already small poetry presses,” says Lee. “It was the more adventurous fiction.”

Almost without realizing it, Godfrey and Lee found themselves steering a successful small press. “It felt anything but romantic at the time,” says Lee. “We worked in this dank basement of a house that Dave rented, and we had no idea what we were doing. One day, someone said, ‘It’d be a lot easier to mail books out to stores if we got a postage machine.’ That seemed like about the most dramatic thing — were we selling out now, going into big business, becoming too corporate? But someone went over to the post office, loaded up a machine, and that was one of our huge advances. If we made it to the end of next week, it seemed like gold.”

Eventually, Godfrey drifted off to other endeavours — like founding the New Press — leaving Lee at the helm. “The burnout factor was fairly high, because of all the intensity. All your energy has to go into it, you’re not paying yourself, you’re trying to make your way artistically, and people’s personal lives get all tangled up. The life expectancy for something like that is about three or four years, but through a series of weird accidents, people kept crawling out of the woodwork who were willing to buckle down for another three or four years.”

After Lee’s departure in ’72, the weird accidents kept rolling out, and Anansi’s reputation continued to grow with publications like Atwood’s groundbreaking CanLit reader, Survival, and translations of Quebecois authors like Roch Carrier, Erin Mouré and Marie-Claire Blais. “I liked them because they were a young, dynamic house,” says Blais, “willing to take risks on poetry, fiction, essays, and able to survive through the years when the entire world of publishing was in trouble.”

The trouble, for Anansi, came along at one of its highest points. In 2002, it had just acquired the publication rights for the CBC’s Massey Lectures, and Open had garnered a Giller Prize nomination. That same year, Stoddart Publishing — which had acquired Anansi in 1988 — went bankrupt. Fortunately, Scott Griffin, the poetry-loving philanthropist who lends his name to the Griffin Poetry Prize, purchased the press in time to propel it into a new era of greatness, including two Giller nominations and six Governor General’s Award finalists in 2006.

Now, the House of Anansi is 40 years old and still going strong under the leadership of publisher Lynn Henry. To celebrate, it’s releasing The Anansi Reader, a 400-page anthology of its past, present and future, edited by Lynn Coady – who, in her introduction, stresses that Anansi is no longer a “small” press, but rather an “independent” press. “They won Bookseller of the Year in 2007,” says Coady, “which is a category normally reserved for big publishers like Random House or HarperCollins. That means they’re a player amongst multinational conglomerates, which has never been the case with any other independent Canadian press. They continue to redefine Canadian publishing. That’s what they did in 1967, and that’s what they’re doing in 2007.”