You cancel, I dole out accountability
Hal Niedzviecki gets philosophical about his 2017 cancellation
Looking back on the 2017 “cultural appropriation” scandal that saw Hal Niedzviecki resign as the editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine, I have no doubt that it was an early and textbook case of cancellation, Canadian style. It came with a prolonged social media mobbing led by his peers, accompanied by slanted media coverage that takes discreetly or full-on the cancellers’ side; it resulted in apologies for expressed opinion (from the WUC and Hal himself) and a resignation (Hal), and had some unexpected ripples across the media industry, such as Jon Kay’s resignation from the Walrus. (Never has a mismatch been so mismatchy – but it made the Walrus actually readable for a while.)
But what makes cancellation different from, say, a case like Jian Ghomeshi’s is that 1) cancellation happens over a perfectly legal thing, 2) most often an opinion, expressed in person or in writing or a work of art, 3) which was, and this is crucial, until some indeterminate point in time, could be five minutes ago, perfectly sayable in public. Cancellation happens usually over words which have become, in mysterious ways these things work, suddenly unutterable and well outside the Overton Window.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the cancel culture lately - that is, even more than usual - perhaps because Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott of FIRE have a book out now called The Canceling of the American Mind and perhaps because a lot of the cancellers with jobs and sinecures in media, universities and non-profits have been finding themselves on the receiving end of the heat lately over expressions of support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel. Those have ranged from the openly pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism stances and philosophical pretzeling over whether Israel supporters should weaponize evidence of Hamas rapes, to screaming at and vandalizing Jewish-owned businesses in Toronto, to the more regular and mainstream pro-Palestinian positions and the recurring calls for ceasefire. (The pushback has come from the other side too: The Washington Post removed this anti-Hamas cartoon under pressure.)
Are “Sex is binary and immutable” and “We shouldn’t force any fiction writer to create characters of their ethnicity and sexual orientation only” and “Teachers should not be forced to lie to parents about their child’s neo-pronouns used in school” and “Land acknowledgements should not be mandatory whenever two ore more Canadians meet in public” of the same order as “October 7 was an act of magnificent resistance” or “We don’t really know who did what on Oct 7”, or “Evidence of Hamas rapes should not be used to shore up support for the destruction of Hamas” or “Go back to Poland, you whore” (famously, a contract faculty at a Montreal university to a pro-Israeli woman in the heat of clashing protests).
I just… don’t think that they are.
But that aside (for now), I wanted to meet Hal and ask him about the concept and practice of cancelling - what it is, what it isn’t, how he survived back in 2017, what has been lost, what perhaps gained. So we met a couple of weeks ago in a cafe not far from his home and the Broken Pencil magazine HQ to talk. I never reached out to him while the ordeal was happening - now I regularly reach out to people being cancelled or “just” piled on for expressed opinion, but back then I was green. So was he, he admits.
He had no idea that his words would lit up so many people and cause so much hostility because until very recently you could say such words, especially in a comedic tone, and keep your job in the arts. Writing across ethnic lines was part of the conversation. But that window had meanwhile closed.
“There have been three precedent-setting cancellations around that time,” he says. “Galloway, Boyden, and then Niedzviecki. I am proud to be one of them. This is what is going to happen to you if you don’t fall in line - and after that everyone fell in line. To see three people destroyed for no reason was enough.”
OK, I tell him, but these are fairly different cases, and Galloway’s wasn’t over anything he’d said or written. And while neither Galloway nor Boyden has published anything since their un-personing, Hal had a novel out in 2021, kudos to Cormorant Books - The Lost Expert, a Lynchian comedy-noir about a slacker waiter suddenly finding himself living the life of a MeToo’d Hollywood star. He is still the publisher of Broken Pencil and occasionally, rarely, writes journalistic pieces. “Yes, Broken Pencil lost some advertisers, and we’ve lost some writers. But it ends up being for the best.”
What are the degrees of cancelness? You sometimes hear people who don’t believe there is such a thing as cancel culture – it’s only accountability for one’s words, it’s akshually consequence culture, they insist - that this or that person is not cancelled if they’re still giving interviews to the media and being platformed. And they’re still, selfishly, breathing? While Galloway and Boyden haven’t published, Sky Gilbert has continued teaching without any issues after his spot of cancellation at the theatre that he’d co-founded, but his cancelling involved a livestream of a struggle session by the people who felt hurt by his words.
Further cancellations of authors in the UK come to mind, Kate Clenchy’s, Rachel Rooney’s, Gillian Philip’s, Jenny Lindsay’s, Milli Hill’s. Comedian James Dreyfus has not worked since coming out as gender critical and in support of Graham Linehan.
Hal’s sarcasm gets a little darker. “The most convenient thing for them would be if you killed yourself,” he says through a grin. “Or move to an island and are never heard from again. But in all seriousness, everyone I’ve talked to who’s been through this had a moment when they thought, maybe I should just kill myself. It is that painful in some moments. I don’t think I ever got to that point, but I understood those who did. Yeah, different degrees and different levels of cancelled. It’s a Rorschach: the person’s cancelled, the person’s not cancelled, depending on what you believe. In my mind, if you’re no longer able to access the things you were able to access before – opportunities close, doors close - you are cancelled.”
The goal of public cancellations is to make an example of someone, he says. “That’s the real problem; not so much the people who get caught in the net, though having been one of them, I have great sympathy for them. Cancelling is about silencing the others and creating a certain consensus in the culture. People quickly figure out, you can’t say that, and you can’t say that either.”
“I have a dog – well, my family has a dog which is somehow always my responsibility, but that’s another story – that I'm always walking around this neighbourhood. There are a lot of well known writers, editors and musicians who live around here and I have had in the double digits conversations with different people, all of whom privately deplore what the culture has become, and publicly tow the line. I’m sort of a magnet so people come to me for this - to tell me how they really feel because they know I feel the same way, I’m already outed, I'm on record as saying things like “concept of cultural appropriation as applied to works of imagination makes absolutely no sense”. Many writers have made this argument, Zadie Smith, recently Salman Rushdie too, but amazingly none of that moves the needle in the Canadian arts and culture world.”
We never know the reason why publishers pass on a novel, and he’s not dwelling too much on that, but he tells me that he’s lucky to have found the good people at Cormorant Books. Since the publication, however, there have been almost no reviews (I found a single one - by Alex Good in the CNQ - and one interview in a BC magazine). He doesn’t expect he’ll be shortlisted for anything ever again.
You’ve never been tempted to write about the 2017 scandal directly? “Maybe one day. My priority is fiction these days and fiction is a much slower process, which suits me. And I’m still writing about my twenties and I’m in my fifties!” But he did disappear there for a while, right after the thing exploded? “For a little bit. My general feeling was I didn't want to write more journalism and columns but focus on writing fiction. That’s where I was already going so the whole scandal pushed me to go in that direction. My nonfiction writing was arts and culture observation and there was no place for that anywhere any more.”
“I was worried about the magazine and my family and stuff so you try a little bit to control the damage but looking back even that apology was a mistake. Quitting was a mistake; I should have let them fire me, but it felt like you have the entire arts and literary culture against you, people who have worked with me and know me well all of a sudden turning around and posting things about me.”
Six years later, he can be philosophical about it. “In a way I'm glad it all worked out in the end; I found out some interesting things about… my community. You have a very clear-eyed view of things after such an event. I realized it’s embarrassing how weak some people are and how afraid of losing their $4000 grant. You realize you don’t want to be them and you move on with your life.”
Is it freeing, in a way, to be cancelled? “I think so. I’ve written a few things meanwhile that reflect on where we are (not so much about what happened) and I can say things that few people can say and I'll be taking a bit more advantage of that coming up. It’s all a matter of energy and what you want to put your life to. I don’t want to spend my life mocking identitarian progressives who have somehow ascended to the highest ranks of Canadian arts. It would be an easy thing to do, but that’s not what I want to do with my life. I want to write books. I’m free to do that at least. I can say what I want. I’ve seen the worst of it so whatever happens now, happens.”
Andrew Potter on his Substack about Gen-X youth culture, Nevermind, recently reissued Hal’s THIS magazine piece from the 1990s on how to keep “stupid jobs” while refusing to buy into the careerist mindset and continue with your creative pursuits. The piece became a slacker manifesto at the time – in a very different economy. How does he see this piece today in an insanely expensive Toronto, with journalism jobs bottoming out - and I mention to him this Ginia Bellefante piece after Elizabeth Wurtzel’s death which argues that the Gen-Xers trying to make it in media and arts have actually been downwardly mobile.
“Yes, it’s a different landscape today. When I'm writing that piece I'm living in a basement apartment with a roommate and paying $250 a month on rent. I'm driving a delivery van, $300 a week my rent is paid. The rest is beer money and time - time to write, time to develop your craft. I start pitching articles and people are saying sure I can pay you, people are paying 40-cent a word, 50-cent a word, a dollar a word, a few places paying buck-fifty a word… I did a piece for Playboy way back when, almost $2 a word. After I founded Broken Pencil, London Free Press got in touch with me to ask if I can write an article about “this thing called zines” and what that’s all about. Sure I said. They pay me $400, the piece was the entire page. All these great things were happening, could happen.”
Back then, he says, he thought the greatest threat to free thought, free speech and the ability to create were corporate pressures. “The slow tentacles of the corporate monopolies closing off opportunities and consuming anything alternative and regurgitating it as “alternative light”. Those were at that time the biggest threats. It would be hard to foresee what was coming down the line…”
What of the Gen-Xers who, like Meghan Daum, have never worked as hard as they work now in late forties, early fifties, just to stay in place. Or keep the creative side alive while also working part-time anchor jobs, some of which are blue-collar. As the narrator of Sam Shelstad The Cobra and the Key says, “Some writers teach; I work in Value Village.”
“Whatever you do, don’t teach!” he laughs.
Sure but some of us are becoming too old to keep applying for precarious (we don’t call them stupid by any means any more) jobs, contracts and anchor gigs in temping, ESL, tutoring, admin, PR. What’s the solution - a partner with money?
“That’s certainly the position that I've luckily found myself in,” he says. (Hal’s partner is a clinical psychologist.) “So much of it is luck… I’m about to say something that sounds like a cliche but it’s true: if you have the passion and the need, you will always find a way to get something out there. Always. That said, the combination of the financial pressures and the moral purity pressures are really creating a terrible situation for the Canadian arts and culture scene. And I know a lot of people who have given up.”
Publishing world changed too, he adds. When he published his first novel, it was with Random House, then as now the biggest house in the country. “I was writing weird experimental stuff. To get an advance to write that stuff - I knew they were investing in me, they couldn’t possibly think that Ditch would make big money. They probably thought, this guy down the road… he’s got something. It’s a completely different dynamic now, they’re only looking for the hit. And the money they’re offering is the money that the biggest small presses used to offer.”
He would never recommend to other writers to take up teaching full-time, though. But those jobs are highly coveted, I remind him. “Yes, but you’re guaranteed another kind of financial precarity there – and you will stop writing. I know a lot of writing instructors who have stopped writing. And it’s no surprise, given the amount of work. They got them on the treadmill, teaching a million classes, trying to squeeze every last cent out of them. It’s a cash grab. And I don’t know what you can possibly do with an MFA degree now.”
How about publishing contacts - the big houses open their doors more easily to people with MFAs from respectable schools, no? “Personally at this point, because of the moral and ideological restrictions on what you could say or write, I would not recommend it. I would run screaming from the hills rather than try to do any kind of meaningful work inside any Canadian institution of higher education.”
And with that, I close the recording app and we turn to the gossip part of the kaffeeklatsch.
You can get Hal’s The Lost Expert through the Cormorant Books Buy Local app; Amazon dot ca also has some availability and Indigo will ship too.
Broken Pencil is very much alive and kicking, and publishes a whole new generation of writers excited about alternative cultures.