TORONTO — Guernica Editions, a small, local publishing house, has been denied funding from the Ontario Arts Council block grant program.
Antonio D’Alfonso
Though serving the Italian community primarily – Guernica publishes many translations of Italian books along with original English works by Italo-Canadian authors – the publication also is home to a variety of ethnic wordsmiths, including a smattering of Jewish, award-winning authors and poets who are none-too-pleased by the provincial agency’s decision to reject this year’s grant application.
The council’s Guernica grant slid from approximately $11,000 to $8,000 over the last four years. Yet even with it, the small press was always on a shoestring budget, according to its publisher, Antonio D’Alfonso.
“This just puts a financial strain on us,” he said. “This isn’t a money-making job. Everyone who works with us works for peanuts.”
Karen Shenfeld, a Toronto poet and volunteer with the organization, told The CJN that over the past five years, it has published five Jewish woman poets: herself, Elana Wollf, Malca Litovitz, Merle Nudelman and Ruth Panofsky.
“Three of us have won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. This fall, Guernica Editions had also intended to publish another fine young Jewish woman poet, Baila Ellenbogen, in its First Poets Series,” she said, adding that Guernica is “deeply committed to publishing poetry that is not only written by poets who happen to be Jewish… but poetry that arises from, reflects and enhances Jewish culture and tradition. Which is why the loss of this press would be tragic for the Canadian Jewish literature.”
Though not lost yet – the small press still receives grant money from the Canadian Council for the Arts – Guernica is floundering financially, D’Alfonso said.
A native Montrealer, D’Alfonso had run Guernica out of his hometown – and with help from his own chequebook – publishing nearly 500 books over 25 years before funding opportunities dried up in Quebec and he moved the enterprise to Toronto about five years ago, in part to take advantage of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) grants program.
He accused the council of systematically attempting to stifle the promotion of multiculturalism in the province in favour of publications that are more “commercial” and profit-minded.
“Are books like shoes, ham or potatoes? We are a literary press. We produce books about ethnic culture, cultural pluralism. This is a slow process. When we started, ‘multicultural’ barely existed as a term. Guernica was one of the first presses to deal with such issues,” D’Alfonso said. “In Quebec and elsewhere in the world, Guernica is still known as the press to study these issues. It is only in English Canada, where these issues are not dealt with in a very serious manner, that we seem to hit a wall.”
The council feels otherwise.
At issue for OAC advisory panel members who analyzed Guernica’s 2009 grant application – five “publishing industry representatives [and] experts in the field,” according to the council, the identities of whom could not be revealed to D’Alfonso or his editors, according to council internal policy – is Guernica’s viability as a press.
John Brotman and John Degen, the OAC’s executive director and literature officer respectively, said Guernica had failed to demonstrate any moves toward securing other revenue streams over the last few years and were concerned about it stagnating that way.
In an interview earlier this month, both Brotman and Degen said they applauded the quality of the work Guernica put out, but referenced assessments by four different advisory panels since 2006 that noted Guernica’s diminishing “viability and impact.”
When asked to expand on this year’s judgment and cite specifics on how Guernica was not viable and did not make a significant impact on Ontarians, the OAC referred to the panel’s assessment about D’Alfonso’s lack of distribution channels, exposure, and particularly Guernica’s perceived lack of fiscal responsibility.
D’Alfonso scoffed at this and said, on the subject of exposure and promotion of his product, that his books are distributed by the University of Toronto Press and can be found at mainstream bookstores such as Chapters and Indigo, as well as in libraries around the province.
“Our books are everywhere. I am not interested in playing the U.S. game of printing 50,000 copies, invading the market for two weeks and then have 49,999 copies returned,” he said. “Cultural products sell slowly. This is not… Armani shoes.”
When asked how the OAC can conclude what it did about Guernica’s exposure to the public in light of D’Alfonso’s claims of widespread distribution, Brotman answered: “It’s not about the OAC doing the assessment. I would not know how to answer this question. Which is why we use panels of advisers who are drawn from the industry itself. In the last four years alone, there have been 20 experts [who have looked at Guernica], so if they have been saying that they have questions, issues and concerns about the public viability and availability of the publisher, we have to listen to them. It’s not about whether I like his books or not.”
Degen expanded on this, saying that the OAC panels base their assessments solely on information provided by the applicant and as such the panels need to be “convinced not just by the claims of the publisher, but by the numbers backing up those claims.”
Degen said the OAC had offered to “gladly” work with D’Alfonso to suggest ways to improve his operations and become a better candidate for a grant by the program’s March 2010 deadline.
D’Alfonso said he would not reapply for the OAC grant in 2010, citing mistrust and hopelessness at any chance of securing funds again from an organization that he believes has branded him a “cultural agitator.”
In August, Degen said he met with two of Guernica’s editors – Elana Wollf, a Jewish award-winning poet in her own right, and Julie Roorda – and discussed Guernica’s future and ways to move forward. D’Alfonso did not attend.
According to Roorda, the meeting with Degen was “a little frustrating” because the editors were met with “generalizations” instead of details about why the panels scored them so low.
Roorda said since the meeting, Guernica has hired a webmaster to “push forward with our online tools” to show they are more serious about becoming increasingly active on a marketing side, but that she’s unsure if this will be enough.
She said the editors would like to “talk some more” with D’Alfonso before ruling out reapplying for the OAC grant in 2010.
In the meantime, D’Alfonso said he’s considering returning his base of operations to Montreal out of frustration and hopes he can publish the books he had planned to this year.
Brotman had a last word of caution for Guernica and publications in the same financial straits seeking an OAC grant.
“We should never be considered the sole source of revenue for any of these organizations. If [a publisher] is so dependent on our grant that they will go in or out of business whether they get the $8,000 from us, that, in a way, is a reflection of their viability. They should have other sources of income, and I don’t just mean public funding.”
