Elbows up, p.1
Elbows Up!, page 1
Copyright © 2025 by McClelland & Stewart
“An Invitation to Contribute to an Important New Book” © Al Purdy and Mel Hurtig; “Introduction: The Sturdiness of an Unfinished Project” © Elamin Abdelmahmoud; “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy” © Margaret Atwood; “On ‘Backdrop Addresses Cowboy’” © Margaret Atwood; “Nakedly Transactional” © Omar El Akkad; “Canada Needs a Rewrite” © Jessica Johnson; “Like Moths to a Flame” © Carol Off; “Manifesting More Than Elbows Up” © Niigaan Sinclair; “Will: A Short Story” © Catherine Leroux, translation by Mélissa Bull; “Who We Really Are” © Jillian Horton; “Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass” © Margaret Laurence; “Too Wide to See and Too Long to Know” © Dave Bidini; “Canadian Style” © Jeanne Beker; “We Have Already Lived Through This” © Ivan Coyote; “A Clear and Present Danger” © Atom Egoyan; “The Things That Need to Be Said” (illustrated) © Catherine Hernandez; “Letter to My Son” © Farley Mowat Ltd.; “The Promises We Keep” © Jen Sookfong Lee; “No Romance of Self-Assertion” © Jay Baruchel; “That’s Not a One-Off” © Peter Mansbridge; “Elbows Up” © Ann-Marie MacDonald; “An Indian at the White House” © Jesse Wente; “The North American Pattern” © Mordecai Richler; “The Canadiafornian” © Paul Myers; “The Sky Is Falling…Again!” © Leslie Hurtig; “The Appointment: A Short Story” © Iain Reid; “Same Old, Same Old” © David A. Robertson; “The Work of Many Years” © David Moscrop; “And It’s Ours” © Tom Power; “Never Leave and the Leaving Is Easy” © Canisia Lubrin; “Canada Is Taking Trump Seriously and Personally” by Ken Dryden © The Atlantic Monthly Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Original trade paperback edition published 2025
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Contents
Introduction: The Sturdiness of an Unfinished Project
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD
Backdrop Addresses Cowboy
MARGARET ATWOOD
On “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy”
MARGARET ATWOOD
Nakedly Transactional
OMAR EL AKKAD
Canada Needs a Rewrite
JESSICA JOHNSON
Like Moths to a Flame
CAROL OFF
Manifesting More Than Elbows Up
NIIGAAN SINCLAIR
Will: A Short Story
CATHERINE LEROUX, TRANSLATION BY MÉLISSA BULL
Who We Really Are
JILLIAN HORTON
Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass
MARGARET LAURENCE
Too Wide to See and Too Long to Know
DAVE BIDINI
Canadian Style
JEANNE BEKER
We Have Already Lived Through This
IVAN COYOTE
A Clear and Present Danger
ATOM EGOYAN
The Things That Need to Be Said
CATHERINE HERNANDEZ
Letter to My Son
FARLEY MOWAT
The Promises We Keep
JEN SOOKFONG LEE
No Romance of Self-Assertion
JAY BARUCHEL
That’s Not a One-Off
PETER MANSBRIDGE
Elbows Up
ANN-MARIE MACDONALD
An Indian at the White House
JESSE WENTE
The North American Pattern
MORDECAI RICHLER
The Canadiafornian
PAUL MYERS
The Sky Is Falling…Again!
LESLIE HURTIG
The Appointment: A Short Story
IAIN REID
Same Old, Same Old
DAVID A. ROBERTSON
The Work of Many Years
DAVID MOSCROP
And It’s Ours
TOM POWER
Never Leave and the Leaving Is Easy
CANISIA LUBRIN
Canada Is Taking Trump Seriously and Personally
KEN DRYDEN
Credits
Contributor Biographies
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD
Introduction: The Sturdiness of an Unfinished Project
If Expo 67 in Montreal was the loud, chatty corner of Canada’s 100th birthday party in 1967, Edmonton’s Second Century Week was the quiet, intellectual circle. Students from more than fifty universities and colleges travelled across the country, pouring into Edmonton to reflect on the meaning of Canada. There were lectures and debates, there were literary salons, and there was, of course, folk music. At one of the folk music parties, amid the singalongs and the chatter about what Canada’s next 100 years might look like, the legendary publisher and activist Mel Hurtig and the prolific poet Al Purdy were huddled, conspiring.
Purdy griped to Hurtig about the way the United States treats Canada. And who could blame him? Purdy spent his career as something of an unofficial poet laureate of a nation reluctant to speak for itself, more than happy to defer to stories told by its neighbour. Purdy wanted to assemble Canadian opinions of the U.S. as a book. Hurtig listened. Three hours later, Hurtig says in his memoir, the pair was set on making the book a reality. They settled on the title The New Romans.
Purdy and Hurtig co-authored a fiery invitation to coax Canada’s literary luminaries into the project. “The editor and author believe that in swallowing-whole American values, American publications, movies and television, there is some danger of Canadian indigestion,” they wrote, indignant about the amount of space the U.S. takes up in the Canadian imagination. They were by no means intense nationalists, they told invitees, but this was no time to be timid—they “believe that Canada as a country still has much to lose during the next hundred years (like self-respect) if we can’t stand up on our hind legs and say what we think.” They had a hunch that this was a conversation that Canadians desperately needed.
Even before publication, Hurtig positioned the book as the exhale the country was looking for. He promised controversy and impolite talk, and he had the country’s literary heavyweights on his side—Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Farley Mowat were among the lot who had answered the call. Hurtig had bookmarks printed advertising The New Romans, calling it “one of the most controversial books ever published in Canada.” The subtitle was short and to the point: “Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S.”
As it turns out, their hunch was right. By July of 1968, two months before publication, The New Romans had already amassed an astonishing 20,000 advance orders. Here was a country at a turning point, ravenous for a window into itself.
Nearly sixty years later, as luck would have it, Mel Hurtig’s daughter Leslie, who runs the Vancouver Writers Festival, and McClelland & Stewart publisher Stephanie Sinclair were huddled, conspiring. The occasion hadn’t even changed much: the shadow of the United States had once again unsettled a quiet anxiety. Only this time, the threat was no longer implied. From the Oval Office, an American president repeatedly vowed to make Canada the 51st state; he called the sitting prime minister a “governor” to provoke a response. The book you’re holding now began with Hurtig and Sinclair both recognizing that this is our moment to stand on our hind legs and say what we think. So, what do we have to say?
Elbows Up! is on the whole, admittedly, more combative than The New Romans. What is in the pages to come will be measured contemplation, yes, but there will also be anger, hurt, betrayal, and frustration spilling out. As I spent time with these contributions, I wondered if we have become more combative in the intervening fifty-seven years. Or is it more likely the prodigious talent of the offending American president to draw out an intense response?
But then again, perhaps it has been too long since Canada considered some existential questions. That wasn’t the case fifty-seven years ago. Al Purdy and the gang had momentum on their side in 1968. The New Romans emerged in the middle of a rich era of Canada asking itself questions. Consider this: In 1965, the same year that Canada launched its new national flag, George Grant published his radical Lament for a Nation. Grant was dramatic in his framing—he subtitled it “The Defeat of Canadian Nation alism”—so perhaps he did not anticipate the delightful irony that his book would launch a kind of renaissance of Canadian identity contemplation. Expo 67 followed a couple of years later, showcasing the country to the world just as Canada turned 100.
This was fertile soil for The New Romans to arrive in. It also meant Purdy’s slate had the space of contemplation without the hanging threat of annexation in the air. Purdy and Hurtig’s invitation may have been fiery, but the contributions exhibited a range in tones. Indeed, Richler turned the invitation to reflect on the U.S. into a mirror, picking up on Canada’s “increasingly truculent, occasionally touching national pursuit of something or other we can be true to. A heritage. A tradition. Anything.”
We don’t have such luxury of cool distance from the hovering danger, and the Elbows Up! contributions reflect that. These essays are teeming with urgency and movement. Carol Off writes that she has become convinced that “Canada didn’t need an identity, it needed a shrink.” Omar El Akkad takes on the “many deranged currents in which the United States is presently caught,” while Jesse Wente warns from experience: “The new colonizer will seek to kill all the buffalo, whatever form that takes today.”
Peter Mansbridge wonders where our newfound anger will take us, an anger he has never seen before. Speaking of anger, “An elbow is a weapon,” writes Ann-Marie MacDonald. Some of that anger turns inwards, as Jay Baruchel rightly admonishes us for neglecting the advancement of our own stories in favour of American culture.
Still, the parallels between The New Romans and Elbows Up! are occasionally amusing. I was watching Justin Trudeau proclaim that “there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States” while reading Farley Mowat invert that exact sentiment in The New Romans: “I can no longer convince myself that we have even a snowball’s chance in hell of escaping ultimate ravishment at the hands of the Yankee succubus,” he writes. Mowat’s contains the serenity of a man who knows he cannot win a fight; Trudeau’s carries the hallmarks of a fight-or-flight response.
It’s also not lost on me that in the very act of bringing this book to life, we are contributing to what Richler calls “one of the few original Canadian enterprises, the What-Is-Our-Identity business.” But what would he have us do? Roll over? You can decide for yourself, as we have reprinted some of the most piercing pieces from The New Romans here.
Elbows Up!, then, is a work of necessity, a book that emerges out of multiple crises converging. It represents a collection of voices from across the country who have answered the call in an impossibly short timeframe, eager to enter a conversation that the country needs right now.
These contributions buck and protest under a recognition of an ordering reality: regardless of the political weather of the United States, our relationship with them cannot just be severed. Geography demands this, and industry backs up that demand. But what you will get from these pages is a sense of broadening possibility: that this relationship can be reconfigured, maybe even nudged out of the centre of Canada’s cultural imagination. Even if the U.S. were to elect another Manifest Destiny president, perhaps Canada could learn not to voluntarily hand over the country’s sense of itself.
Yet the works in this book also buck and protest under a coursing defeatism that sometimes rears its head in Canadian culture. I cannot convey how quickly my enthusiasm dimmed as I flipped the pages of The New Romans, surprised by how so many of our literary heroes assumed it was inevitable that Canada would become subsumed by the United States, either economically, culturally, or literally.
“A good definition of Canada,” Margaret Atwood once wrote, “might be that it is the only country that is being told repeatedly—from both inside and outside itself—that it doesn’t really exist.” At least for now, the voices from inside have quieted. Perhaps they’re looking around, perhaps for the first time, and taking in what they can see, and for once, letting it add up to a country.
At the height of the annexation threats, when the “51st state” rhetoric was nearly daily, I met with a group of up-and-coming Indigenous journalists, all of them women, all in their twenties. Our conversation drifted to the news cycle and the group traded jokes about how disorienting it was to hear the word “sovereignty” so often at the heart of a national conversation—up until now, they said, they’d only heard sovereignty talked about by older Indigenous adults. “It’s so crazy to see white people taking our word,” one said, and the room exploded in laughter.
There is something instructive here: how might Canada understand itself differently if more Canadians understood that these recent threats do not constitute a new kind of encroachment on the self-determination of people who live here, but rather a continuation of the old encroachments?
Elbows Up! was built with this frame at its centre. Where Purdy and Hurtig were provocative, Sinclair and I began our invitation letter by urging contributors not to lose sight of the fact that not everyone watching the news will be surprised by the realization that treaties can be broken, that allies can turn into enemies in an instant.
What I see in these contributions is a set of ideas that has absorbed this reminder. Perhaps it changes your approach to know that someone here, where you live, has had to answer these questions before. What emerges, then, is not a declarative nationalism but something quieter: a steady belief in the sturdiness of an unfinished project.
I confess to you that I find no crisis in an unfinished project. On the contrary, I find possibility—something expansive, something you can always add to. It’s tempting to look to the past for answers, but I am unconvinced that that’s the best use of history. Instead, I have begun to look to the past for questions, because the best way we have to measure progress is to see if we are still asking the same questions after time has passed.
The bad news is that too many of the questions that move through The New Romans still move through Elbows Up! The good news is that our inheritance is never the answers, only the questions, and so conversely, the very best we can do is bequeath a new set of questions to the future. What follows represents our best attempt. May your questions be sharper still.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud
June 2025
MARGARET ATWOOD
THE NEW ROMANS (1968)
Backdrop Addresses Cowboy
Star-spangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost-
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin, tugging a papier-mâché cactus
on wheels behind you with a string,
you are innocent as a bathtub
full of bullets.
Your righteous eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets
and you leave behind you a heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird -
skulls bleaching in the sunset.
I ought to be watching
from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting starts, hands clasped
in admiration,
but I am elsewhere.
Then what about me
what about the I confronting you on that border
you are always trying to cross?
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso
I am also what surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions.
I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy”
I wrote “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy” in or around 1966, as Canadian self-awareness was cranking itself up. I should say “again”—Canadians’ enthusiasm for themselves appears to be cyclical. In 1913, poet Pauline Johnson was revered, and her funeral was the largest Vancouver had ever seen. During the Great War, the Canadians were extolled—by themselves and others—when they captured Vimy Ridge; they never lost a battle after that. The Second World War was another high point, when Canadians fought up through Italy, and were then given the task of “clearing” the Netherlands. At the end of the war, Canada had the fourth-largest navy in the world.
