A note from Will about "Beyond Survival":

I offer the following as a cautionary tale to any other impressionable young writers out there on how not to meet a deadline. This is what happens when you attempt to pen something insightful at two in the morning after one too many beers.

Alison Gzowski at the Globe & Mail had asked me to contribute a short essay on Canadian culture post-Survival (as part of a larger "round table"). Seemed straightforward enough. I was on the road at the time, but hey, no problem, I could just email it in by Monday morning and everything would be fine.

I was in Halifax that weekend and on Sunday evening I was out with a group that included Montreal poet Carmine Starnino, a very gracious fellow who brushed aside my repeated protestations about having "a piece due tomorrow."

"I have to call it a night," I protested ( in vain). "I've got to get back to my room so I can start working."

"Relax," said Carmine."How many words do they want? Two to three hundred? That's easy. We'll help you write it, don't worry. So finish your beer so we can order supper." That sort of thing.

At the end of the night, Carmine staggered off to bed, his promise to help me ghost the Globe assignment having been long forgotten, and I ended up typing madly in the wee hours in one extended burst of desperation - a task made all the more difficult by the fact that I could no longer focus my eyes on the screen (whether this was due to a surfeit of alcohol or a lack of sleep or - as I suspect - a combination of both was hard to say). But I did get it in on time. Barely.

There, I have now used more words explaining the article than there are in it. (I'm actually happy with how the piece turned out, in spite of everything, and I even used some of it later on in How to be a Canadian.)

Beyound Survival: The Food Court vs. The Caravan

Thirty years after Margaret Atwood drew the link between Canadian culture and the survival ethic, The Globe and Mail asks young writers what the new Canadian paradigm might be. Here is author Will Ferguson's response.

Will Ferguson

If our history teaches us anything, it is this: Canada has always beaten the odds. We are a land of the lost cause and the dogged second chance.

But what began as a collection of leftovers and let-downs has evolved into something more, something better. Call it Big Tent Canada, an inclusive, confusing place, where everything is in flux and nothing is nailed down.

The image most often used to describe this strange new reality was that of the mosaic. Canada was presented as a grand tapestry of shards, arranged just so, the coloured glass fixed into place. It's an attractive image. It suggests a larger plan, a greater scheme, into which various, disparate pieces somehow fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or the panes in a stained-glass window.

But cultures do not exist in isolation. They clash. They collide. They jostle for position. They fall in love. They fall out of love. They feud. They fret. And they influence one another in subtle and profound ways.

A mosaic is just one step away from becoming a museum piece, and it is time we discarded this image. Just as we have moved beyond mere survival, we must also move beyond the brittle beauty of the mosaic. Canada is not a mosaic. It is an arena, a crossroads circus of jugglers and blindfolded tightrope-walkers that defies both gravity and common sense.

At its best moments, Canada is a market filled with caravan tents and jumbled stalls: chaotic, messy, alive.

At its worst, Canada is a food court. A climate-controlled, hermetically sealed, shopping-mall food court: clean and commodified, with the cultures of the world reduced to fast food.

All that remains to be seen is which version will ultimately emerge as our new national metaphor: the market or the food court; the circus or the shopping mall.

Globe and Mail
June 30, 2001