folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
Barry’s generosity found expression in his devotion to providing his students with the best education he could, to bringing to Prince George a hitherto unavailable sampling of the literary and artistic life, and to publishing, via such venues as his Caledonia Writing Series, writers applying widely different compositional strategies to contemporary literature. After Barry’s arrival in 1969 at the embryonic College of New Caledonia (“which consisted of two portable trailers and an office in an unused gym storage room at the local high school,” as he notes in The Caledonia Writing Series: A Chronicle), he says (again, in The Caledonia Writing Series: A Chronicle):
[p]art of my job was . . . , as a teacher, and particularly in creative writing, to involve the students in a way that made articulation of their experience reasonable and real (given the context of the skeptical attitudes about literature and poetry most of them grew up with). Loggers’ kids, pulp mill workers, housewives, country kids, local eccentrics, and ordinary citizens took the courses, wrote their first college essays, wrote poems and stories and talked ideas over countless beers at the bar in the Inn of the North hotel.
This work to validate his students’ experiences, and to encourage them to write about their lives, formed the core of his decades teaching at CNC (which, for his pains, fired him in January 1983, only reinstating him that May after an outcry both local and national).
Meantime, Barry never wavered in his efforts to bring to the city a succession of writers from elsewhere, offering the burg where he and Joy had settled the chance to experience ideas and artistic output supplementary (and, hopefully inspirational) to the local. Concurrently, a bibliography of his Caledonia Writing Series’ publications 1972-1980—broadsides, chapbooks, and full-length poetry collections—demonstrates the eclectic nature of Barry’s generosity. The press showcased representatives of a wide spectrum of literary approaches: John Newlove, Al Purdy, Lionel Kearns, Pat Lane, and Dorothy Livesay as well as Robert Creeley, Pierre Coupey, Robin Blaser, George Bowering, and George Stanley. Not to mention Virginia Marsolais’ anthology of Prince George children’s poetry, From the Minds of Children, or a satiric history of Prince George in play form, Lee MacKenzie’s Rearview.
Barry’s dark humor often left his peers howling with laughter, and I especially recall this aspect of him in fine form during provincially-mandated annual gatherings of BC post-secondary creative writing teachers, the so-called “articulation conferences,” during the 1990s. Besides presenting a comically detailed skewering of stupid decisions by his college’s administration, he offered a sidesplitting account of dueling with an archive that dismissed a publications trove he was attempting to donate in order to secure a tax receipt as “worthless hippie shit.”
One night over drinks after the conference plenary, with participants bemoaning college course loads as compared to university ones, Barry declared that the only hope for any of us college instructors to hold onto our mental and physical health in trying to function simultaneously as teachers and writers was to finagle an assessment of ourselves as eligible for Long Term Disability.
At his urging, he had all our tables chanting the desired panacea for the travails of our occupation: “L! T! D! L! T! D!”
The burst of shared laughter that followed is surely one rich way to remember so generous a soul. I can only echo Barry’s words in his elegy for his father, “/it cant be said”:
so I take the rain
/ my future
without you
“thanks for coming”
