S01 E02 - The Creation of 'CanLit'

[theme music - ambient indie/electronic by composer James Ellercamp]
Rebecca Diem: I’m Rebecca Diem, the Digital Strategy and Communications Manager for the Word on the Street, and this is Read the North - a podcast about CanLit, brought to you by your favourite neighbourhood book festival.
[inquisitive scoring begins]
CanLit, of course, is Canadian Literature. But CanLit wasn’t always a thing. Like, we haven’t always had an ecosystem that supported the publication, promotion, and sales of homegrown talent. It used to be a lot harder to seek out books by authors living in or writing about Canada. And to be an author? Except in the very odd case, you could pretty much forget about making it your livelihood.
And you would have found it difficult to run a literary festival like The W