Keith Maillard

Maillard left his native West Virginia in 1965 and moved to Boston where he lived for five years. He worked in the anti-Vietnam-war movement from 1968-1970 and contributed numerous articles to Boston underground newspapers and radio.[12] In 1970, disillusioned after the Kent State shootings, he emigrated to Canada.[13] He was not eligible for the draft and was a war resister rather than a draft dodger.

In the early 1970s, Maillard worked as a freelancer for CBC Radio, contributing pieces to This Country in the Morning, Five Nights, and Our Native Land.[12][10] He also contributed to periodicals, including Fusion, Body Politic, Malahat Review, Books in Canada, Canadian Literature, and newspapers.[10] He was in the Writers' Union of Canada, served on the National Council for two years,[14] and co-founded the Federation of BC Writers.[15][16] Maillard studied music at Vancouver Community College, played the Irish pipes, taught recorder and the rudiments of music for the Vancouver School Board and Vancouver Community College,[5][10] and played bass in the first band formed by Vancouver singer-songwriter, Ferron. In the late 1970s Maillard taught writing workshops in Vancouver's literary centre, The Literary Storefront, and participated in a number of readings and other events there.[17][18] In 1979 Maillard interviewed Canadian novelist Howard O’Hagan who explained to him his writing process; the interview appeared as a chapter in Margery Fee's Silence Made Visible: Howard O’Hagan and Tay John (1992).[19]

Maillard's first published novel, Two Strand River, appeared in 1976, published by Dave Godfrey's Press Porcépic. Most reviewers were confounded by this strange book with its cross-gendered protagonists and weird events, but Two Strand River soon acquired a cult following, came to be labeled a classic of Canadian magic realism,[20][21][22] and has been republished twice.

Maillard's second published novel was actually the first one he had begun; the book rejected by 26 publishers finally – after having passed through eight major rewrites – appeared in 1980 as Alex Driving South.[23][24] In this gritty, naturalistic tale, Maillard first introduced the fictional town of Raysburg, West Virginia, where most of his novels have been set. The Knife in My Hands, influenced by American writer Jack Kerouac,[5][20] followed in 1981, and its sequel, Cutting Through, in 1982. Then, with a fifth book half-completed, Maillard was afflicted with writer's block.

From 1985 through 1988 Maillard applied his writing skills to designing university and adult education courses for the Open Learning Agency and, from 1986–1989, he workshopped his screenplay, Two Strand River, with Patricia Gruben's Praxis Film Development Workshop (Simon Fraser University).[10][25]

Maillard's fifth novel, Motet, published in 1989, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.[26] Reviewer David Homel assured readers that despite the novel's sixteenth-century Dutch choral mystery and Vancouver setting, "power and madness made in the USA is still at the heart of Maillard's creativity."[27]

Having taught as a sessional lecturer at both the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University, Maillard was appointed in 1989 to a regular teaching position in UBC's Creative Writing Department, where he has taught every genre except stage writing.[5] He served as Advisory Editor of PRISM international for 10 years.

While at UBC, Maillard began what he considers his mature work – what has come to be known as the "Raysburg Series."[20][28][29][30][5] Called "a small masterpiece" by the Georgia Straight, Light in the Company of Women was published in 1993[31][32] and was runner-up for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.[26] It was followed in 1995 by Hazard Zones, which was included on the Toronto Star's list of the best Canadian books for that year and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.[33]

Maillard's novel, Gloria (1999), was well received in Canada,[34] short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction,[35] and brought him national attention in the United States.[36][37]

Maillard also returned to his first love, poetry, and published Dementia Americana, which won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada.[38] He became interested in the re-emergence of formal poetry in North America and commented about it in his oft-cited essay, "The New Formalism and the Return of Prosody."[39][40][41][42][43][44][45]

The last of the "Raysburg Series", The Clarinet Polka (2002), was well received in the United States, particularly by the Polish American community.[46][47][48][49][50] It received starred reviews from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus Reviews,[51] and was included in Booklist’s Editors’ Choice ’03. It won the Polish American Historical Association's Creative Arts Prize, and came to the attention of scholars in Poland.[52][53][54]

Maillard was one of 35 writers placed on the West Virginia Literary Map in 2004 and he was inducted that year into the Wheeling, West Virginia, Hall of Fame.[4]

In 2004, Maillard returned to the raw Bildungsroman[55] material first published in The Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through and rewrote and reshaped it into the Difficulty at the Beginning quartet, which appeared in four volumes between September 2005 and September 2006.[56] The Toronto The Globe and Mail selected Difficulty at the Beginning as one of the top books of 2006, calling it "a work of terrible beauty and grace, a masterpiece fit to contend with the best novels of the last century."[57][58] Reviewer Richard Helm describes the quartet as Maillard's "magnum opus and the keystone of a literary career that has flown largely under the Canadian radar." He characterizes Maillard as "probably the most famous Canadian novelist you've never heard of."[59]

In 2006, with eleven out of fourteen titles nominated for or winners of literary awards, Maillard won UBC's Dorothy Somerset Award for excellence in the creative arts.[60]

In its 80th anniversary edition in 2015, the Quill & Quire listed Maillard as one of Canada's "notable Canlit talent" along with other American-born anti-Vietnam-War authors, Philip Marchand, Jack Todd, Judith Merrill, Mark Frutkin, and William Gibson.[61]

In his novel Twin Studies (2018) -- set in Vancouver, Medicine Hat, and Los Angeles—Maillard returns to the topic of gender fluidity that he first explored in Two Strand River in 1976.[62][63] Apple's iBooks reviewed the novel and described it as " a fascinating exploration of wealth, class, and gender fluidity [that] reads like a 21st-century Canadian version of Dickens' London novels."[64] Steven Beattie, in the September 2018 issue of Quill & Quire, notes that Maillard's subject matter arises out of lived experience. "When the author began publishing, the language for describing gender-fluid approaches did not exist." As Maillard himself put it in his interview with Beattie, "You can't apply a term to yourself unless it is culturally available. I would now call myself non-binary."[65]

The Vancouver Sun summarized Twin Studies as "that rare work: a story that grapples with difficult intellectual issues without ever abandoning the novelist's primary duty -- compelling narrative."[66] Maillard’s novel challenges the idea of isolated nuclear families and envisions what he says is “ a fluid larger family, in which people come together for other reasons. I think it's essential that we start rethinking family, that we start rethinking our connections to each other.”[67]

Twin Studies won the Alberta Book of the Year Award from the Book Publishers Association of Alberta[68] and was shortlisted for the Relit Award.[69] In an interview with Quentin Mills-Fenn of Prairie books Now, Maillard explained that his book explores ”the impact of traumatic experiences,” and that he firmly believes that “[p]hysicians and therapists who work with children and adolescents are telling us that a gender-affirming point of view from parents and, if possible, from the surrounding culture, makes for healthy and happy kids."[70]

Maillard's first non-fiction book, Fatherless: A Memoir (2019), traces the life of the mysterious father he never knew, and was well received in Canada.[71][72][73][74] CBC Arts columnist and creative nonfiction author/editor Alicia Elliott writes that Maillard's memoir "gives us a model of not only self awareness and honesty but also, more importantly, healing."[75] Appalachian Review praises Fatherless as “a book that is sometimes heartbreaking, often lighthearted, and always honest,” noting that “Maillard manages to examine the roughest edges of his family history with harsh truth without begging for the reader’s sympathy.”[76]

Author and scholar Daniel Heath Justice praises Maillard’s second book of non-fiction, The Bridge: Writing Across the Binary (2021). “Through constellated fragments of memory, key moments in twentieth-century America, and the unfolding of an acclaimed literary life,” Justice writes, “The Bridge is the forthright, deeply moving memoir of a nonbinary writer coming of age and coming to self.”[77] Calling Keith Maillard “one of the finest English-language novelists in Canada today,” The Vancouver Sun writes that “Maillard understands his life through the lens of a lifelong struggle to know and accept his own identity off the simple-minded male/female binary.”[78] Rachel Giese, author of Boys: What It Means to Become a Man, views Maillard’s The Bridge as “a valuable addition to literature about the lives and histories of trans and non-binary people.”[79] Reviewer Margaret Goldik informs her readers that Maillard “recounts with impressive honesty not only his writing journey, but also his journey toward understanding his gender dysphoria.”[80]

Maillard’s fifteenth novel, In the Defense of Liberty (2023), “expertly captures the ethos of the mid-1960s and explores threads of gender and sexuality, while holding up a mirror to the roots of modern-day American polarization.”[81] Reviewer Thomas McLeod writes that a “large share of the book is concerned with questions about how people interpret history, both within their university setting and in the fiery political climate of the Civil Rights era. Though Maillard is not a historian, he offers parallels between the past and present, and asserts that the historical narratives each character tells are inherently political.”[82] Journalist Tom Sandborn, who has followed Maillard’s literary career for over thirty years, notes that Liberty “continues and deepens the meditation on American masculinity and its discontents that has informed so much of Maillard’s work.” Sandborn postulates that Maillard might have “the best claim to be the true voice of America in the 1960s.”[83] Author Lenore Rountree observes that “In the Defense of Liberty is not only untethered to its era, it is a fine example of a contemporary view from a historical perspective—the seeds we sowed then are the seeds we still sow now.”[84]

In an interview with Massy Books, Maillard emphasizes that “the liberty that my characters pursue is the freedom to be themselves—to be, wholly and authentically, who they are already.”[85] When asked what he would like readers to take away from his novel, he responds, “In the Defense of Liberty is being published at a time when LGBTQ2S+ people are being attacked in a concerted and vicious way…. An anti-queer position now appears to be essential to a conservative position, and that applies in Canada as well as in the States. I want In the Defense of Liberty to be saying to those fascists, no, you won’t.”[86]

Maillard is profiled by the West Virginia Humanities Council in their 2023 online celebration of West Virginia authors. His full interview with journalist Kate Long (storyteller) covers topics ranging from growing up in West Virginia and settling in British Columbia, to writing, music, and history.

Maillard's papers are currently held by the University of British Columbia's Rare Books and Special Collections.[87] A complete list of Maillard's publications can be found on his website.[88]