The Dominion - Amanda Jernigan

Engineering for a Small Planet

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:44:17 +0000

A Conversation with Kim Paradis

Children using laptops in a Rio Negro school. photo: Kim Paradis

Many people talk about leaving a well-heeled corporate job to do something less "soul-killing." Few people actually take that leap. Kim Paradis, a professional engineer from Ottawa, Ontario, managed to do it. I spoke with her recently, hoping to find out how.

Paradis graduated from the University of Waterloo in 1994, with a Master's degree in Systems Design Engineering. She was a stellar student, with a creative mind and wide-ranging interests, and was poised to land a good job in the booming high-tech industry. It was not long before she was hired by Nortel, doing work in wireless communications and later in long-haul optical networks. She travelled widely, and at one point took on an extended expatriate appointment in Paris, France.

Last summer, she returned to Waterloo — not from a high-profile expatriate appointment, but from six months spent living in Rio Negro, Honduras, volunteering for Enersol [www.enersol.org], a Boston-based NGO.

The village of Rio Negro is a coffee-growing community, located in the Parque Nacional Montanas de Comayagua, which was created to protect a tropical cloud forest. "It is an incredible setting," she says, "quite lush and beautiful." The rain that is responsible for the park's natural beauty has its disadvantages, however. Paper turns to a pulpy mess; one's clothes don't dry; the villagers are forced to sell their coffee wet, and are penalized financially for the extra weight per pound. The rain also means that the village is relatively inaccessible. Paradis describes a typical drive up the mountain: "[Rio Negro] is only accessible by dirt road, in a high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicle. During the rainy season, which is a good part of the year, it can take more than three hours to get there from Comayagua [the closest city, 20 km away], most of the trip spent slowly slogging up the hill, with 15 to 20 other people in the back of a pickup truck, at times pushing, at times walking when the 'road' becomes unpassable."

Cloud Forest near Rio Negro.

The community's size and its isolation mean that it has never been brought onto the electrical grid — and it's unlikely that it will be any time soon. "Enersol aims to serve such rural, off-the-grid communities by providing solar energy solutions to education and clean water problems," Paradis says. "In [Rio Negro], Enersol installed a small solar-panel system on the schoolhouse to provide lighting and to power two laptop computers.... I was there to provide training to the teachers and students in the use of computers and in their integration into the classroom."

Paradis had the technical skills required to operate and maintain the solar technology, and she had some experience teaching. (She'd spent three of her Waterloo summers working as a teaching assistant with Shad Valley — a university-based high school enrichment program — a position to which she would return in the summer of 2004.) But Rio Negro provided her with new challenges.

By the time most Canadian children encounter their first classroom-computer, they are familiar with a range of electronic technologies — telephones, video games, remote controls — if not with actual computers. Children in Rio Negro, by contrast, may never have seen a button or a switch, much less a keyboard. For Paradis, this meant a readjustment of her assumptions about what is a "given" in computer education.

Rio Negro forced Paradis to readjust her approach to the technology, as well. Solar energy is not to be had for the asking in a cloud forest. It can work, she says, but more solar panels are required. There is, however, "significant potential for pico-hydro" in Rio Negro. Paradis learned this in part from a townsperson who had set up a personal hydro plant in his home: "He offered me the use of his little hydro plant to charge my laptop when the school solar panels were unable to provide enough energy for my needs."

A computer won't dissolve the way paper will, but there are challenges to keeping a PC running in a high-humidity environment. "I learned that an optical mouse was perhaps a better choice than a mechanical one as it won't get gummed up," she says, and that "a laptop's mouse and keyboard will eventually break down, [so] it is better to use an external mouse and keyboard that can easily be replaced." Given cost and transportation issues, however, "it doesn't make sense to give people substandard equipment hand-me-downs." These require constant replacements and repairs, and so can be more trouble than they're worth.

These challenges notwithstanding, Paradis's Rio Negro sojourn had its rewards. "The children were captivated by the computers, not unlike kids here at home," she says. It is her hope that the novelty of the computers may furnish the children with some motivation to continue their education, beyond the six grades taught at Rio Negro's small school , when and if that's financially possible. "I was told firsthand that children managing to attend secondary school and coming from communities served by Enersol's EduSol projects had an advantage," she says. "They were already familiar with computers and had overcome any fears they might have had about the technology, allowing them to get ahead more quickly and develop useful skills that could lead to better than minimum-wage jobs."

Teachers in Rio Negro have very few books at their disposal. "Given the proper training and basic materials," Paradis says, they can use the computers to "produce workbooks for the students, computer-based tutorials, and evaluation tools that [are] culturally relevant and tailored to the national curriculum." For Paradis, this is an example of the concrete ways in which relatively low-tech information and communications systems can help solve educational problems in the developing world. Her thinking about this is the "real learning" she took from her time in Honduras, and she hopes to apply it to further projects. Since her return to Canada, she has volunteered with and supported another NGO, Acceso International [www.accesointernational.ca], which works to improve equality of access to education in Latin America and the Caribbean.

* * *

Paradis's trajectory, from Nortel to Rio Negro, may seem unlikely — but her interest in development work goes back to her undergraduate days. After gaining her B.Eng., she looked into a variety of volunteer placements, but most wanted at least a two-year commitment — difficult for a young person, with graduate school in the offing, to provide. Later on, in graduate school, she hosted "a series of talks on development activities undertaken by various people on and off campus, where they could discuss their successes and failures and perhaps motivate others to get involved." When her own studies came to an end, however, a "real job" seemed to be in order. She decided to shelve her interest in development work, for the time being, "and get back to it, perhaps in retirement or on short volunteer vacations."

There was a lot to like about the Nortel job, particularly in the early days. It gave Paradis a chance to make real use of her technical skills — and her interpersonal skills. "To fill the demand during the telecom heyday, Nortel had to recruit from all over the world," she says. "This created a unique working environment that I really enjoyed, and afforded the opportunity to work with people of a wide variety of backgrounds." As the years went on, however, the company declined, and the aspects of the job that she liked were overshadowed by the stress of constant layoffs. She left the company in 2002.

Ironically, her tenure at Nortel had made a volunteer placement seem more possible. For one thing, she now had the financial wherewithal to devote herself to an unpaid project. Secondly, all that experience working abroad, and working with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, would stand her in good stead. "Working with individuals of different cultures may initially pose challenges to communication," she says, "but it helps develop the ability to listen more carefully and to better understand and appreciate each person's unique contribution. In a setting where language and culture were both foreign to me, this skill made integration a little easier."

Paradis learned to speak Spanish, gave herself a crash-course in solar technologies, and then offered her services to Enersol. For Enersol, as for many NGOs, the problem lies not in finding volunteers so much as in finding skilled volunteers; they took Paradis on in a minute.

Paradis is an engineer at heart, as well as by profession. She delights in elegant design, and will discuss with equal fascination her new digital camera, and an oil-lamp in Rio Negro that was fashioned from a recycled maple-syrup can. She has an engineer's pragmatism. She speaks frankly about the difficulties of integrating one's principles with the practical circumstances of one's life; about trying to make oneself useful in a community to which one is an outsider; about the conflicts that can arise within non-profit organizations, or between those organizations and the communities they serve. Her response to these difficulties seems to be informed, on some level, by what an engineer might call the Systems Design approach (after the department at Waterloo where Paradis studied): define the problem, generate alternative solutions, evaluate and select the best solution, implement the solution — and continually refine the problem-definition and/or solution, as new information arrives or the system changes. This last step is particularly important to Paradis. In the context of development work, it involves "feeding the lessons learned from every project implemented back into every new project, further refining the model for project delivery."

* * *

In modern history, technology has been both hero and villain. Engineers Without Borders (EWB), another technology-oriented NGO, uses the industrial revolution as a case study. Engineers designed new technologies to address certain problems. These technologies created problems in turn, however: "populations were concentrated in cities, income disparities grew, people continued to be exploited and the natural landscape was decimated." EWB goes on, however: "Soon engineers were hard at work creating mass public transit systems, applying environmental standards and cleaning up factories." EWB is optimistic about the role of the engineer in society.

But there are some who would see in their example a terrible cycle, in which the problems we create may eventually outstrip our ability to deal with them. (Industrialization is one scenario to which this argument is readily applied; weaponization is another.) Is it possible to have positive technological development without unleashing the destructive potential of that same technology? Can engineering be a helping profession? "It can be and should be more so," Paradis says:

At times I have felt that too often we simply pursue technology for technology's sake and, as engineers, don't often look beyond the "cool" factor. True there is some merit to pushing the envelope, trying to see how far we can develop a technology, making it cheaper, faster, "better," but this is primarily driven by the competitive demands of the marketplace. Other important aspects of the design equation are often overlooked, such as basic accessibility of the technology (and not only for the wealthy, connected, first-world countries), recoverability and reusability of materials at the end of a product's life, the true cost of resources needed to manufacture, operate and dispose of a product over its lifetime. As well, many difficult and technically challenging problems are ignored or overlooked, because they don't fit a market-driven model. This is true of many of the challenges facing the developing economies around the world. It is a shame that so few of our brightest and well-educated engineering minds are devoted to tackling these challenges, as there is certainly demand for their services. It would be good to refocus, recognize and value that there are rewards for our work beyond just the monetary.

For Paradis, that refocusing and revaluation is an ongoing process. Six months immersed in development work can make one see the world with new eyes — but it can be difficult to maintain that perspective once one is re-immersed in one's home environment. Still, our home environment, here in Canada, is more deeply connected to the world's privations and injustices than we like to think. Paradis addresses this in relation to technological development: "I think [that] whether a technology will have a positive or negative impact on society and our environment depends a lot on what is driving the development of a given technology," she says — "and this mirrors the values that we as a society are promoting through our choices as consumers." She continues:

When efficiency for profit or technological novelty for competitive advantage are the rule, other unaccounted-for or invisible costs to the environment and to society are ignored. When the true cost of manufacture, operation and disposal of a product is valued in terms of its environmental footprint and its social cost, such as its dependence on workers in foreign countries where labour and environmental laws are lax, perhaps only then will we see technological advances that are on the whole positive, driven oddly enough by the same market forces. As long as these costs are out of sight, out of mind, people will readily accept cheaper, faster, better technology for lack of information and lack of choice. In the absence of information on true costs, what other criteria are at hand to judge the merits of one product over another?

Paradis's term as a volunteer with Enersol ended last summer. In January, she took on a new paid job with a not-for-profit organization in Ottawa, working to find technological solutions to clean energy access problems, in Canada and abroad. "Perhaps in a year we should do a follow-up," she suggests, "to see how well I've managed to apply the experience I gained in Rio Negro to the international work I am undertaking now." I recall the final step of Paradis's Systems Design approach: continually refine the problem-definition and/or solution, as new information arrives or the system changes. This is not the guise in which we're used to seeing it, but it seems to me that what we have here is a species of hope.

How, exactly, does one leave an established corporate job to do something less "soul killing"? Amanda Jernigan spoke to Kim Paradis to find out.

Lo Que Hemos Aprendido

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:15:31 +0000

The Right Whale Program of Peninsula Valdes

Each September, right whales gather off the coast of Peninsula Valdes in Argentina's Chubut province. Since 1971, researchers have gathered there, as well: an unlikely group of biologists, conservationists, and whale-lovers, engaged in one of the world's longest-running studies of a marine mammal population. This past September, photographer John Haney and I spent a week on Peninsula Valdes, and got a window into the history of this study, onshore and off.

Photographs by John Haney

Substitute camera for harpoon, and Iain Kerr is one part Ahab, one part Ishmael.

Vice-president of Ocean Alliance, a conservation organization based in Lincoln, Massachusetts, Kerr is Ishmael in that he is a brilliant raconteur. Over the course of this trip he has regaled us with tales of his courtship with his wife, of their adoption of a mongrel dog on the coast of Alaska, of his swimming with a sperm whale in the Indian Ocean, and of his coming upon a plane wreck in the Colombian Andes while adventuring with a frenchman named Jean-Paul. Now Kerr has taken us along on his evening's whale-watch, and his desire to get a good photograph is bringing out the Ahab in him. As we're motoring out into the belly of Golfo San Jose, he says to Diego Taboada, at the tiller, "All right. Now what I want is a whale breaching, while giving birth, backlit by the sunset." He is half-joking. "The fact remains," he says to me, "that if you want to capture people's hearts and souls about these animals, the best way to do that remains through photography." He adjusts the f-stop on his telephoto lens. "There!" he exclaims, spotting a fluke in the distance, and off we go.

All day we've been watching from land the group of right whales that congregates, May through December, in Golfo San Jose. Some five or six hundred creatures come to this peninsula to calve, mate, and raise their young. Far out, we'd see in silhouette a whale hurling its 40 tonnes into the air, then crashing down into the water. We'd watch the breach take place in eery silence; the sound of the impact would reach us several seconds later, like thunder, over the bay. Now, out in the zodiac, I am haunted by thoughts of what that crash-landing would do to this fifteen-foot boat. "Um, Iain," I say, as a nearby trio of whales dives, showing us their flukes one after another, "is there any way to tell when a whale is going to breach?"

"They tend to dive first," he says, digging in his camera bag for another roll of film. "Rather like that, actually." He gestures at the 'footprints' left by the submerged trio.

"Shouldn't we, um, get out of here?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "Once they go under, it's best not to move. If we stay still, they'll know where we are."

That's just what I'm afraid of.

"If they know where we are, they'll avoid us," he says.

Avoid us?

Kerr reassures me that, although there have been close calls, no scientist - or photographer - has ever, to his knowledge, been breached upon; in fact, there are stories of whales going to great lengths to keep from upsetting a boat.

Debbe Crandall, an environmentalist from Bolton, Ontario, came to Peninsula Valdes to see the right whales in 1991."'I was walking along the beach one night,'"she told me, "sort of stumbling." (The beach is made of polished pebbles, which can make for difficult walking, though Crandall confessed she'd had a glass or two of wine.) "I got thinking about it: here are these creatures, and we've harassed them and harpooned them, propellered and polluted them. We've practically hunted them to extinction, and yet they'll swim right up to the boat and treat it as gently as if it's their baby. They're so tolerant of us. I got a little maudlin," she admitted. "I was quite teary-eyed."

'Quite pie-eyed,' said her sister, whod been listening in.

Too old to hang out with their mothers but too young to mate, the adolescent right whales are the most avid people-watchers. They will sidle up next to the loitering zodiac and raise their heads out of the water to have a look at us. Mariano Sironi is in the final stages of a doctoral dissertation on the social development of these young whales. He's piloting the zodiac today, and he knows these creatures as if he had grown up with them - which, in some sense, he has. We are nervous observers of his careful dance with this 40-foot-long adolescent. Again and again, with slow deliberation, the whale approaches the boat. In the instant before he touches us, Sironi moves the boat away. The whale dips under, wheels around with surprising agility, and approaches us again. "Shall we let him touch us?" Sironi asks. "Let's take a vote." There is a chorus of abstentions. Sironi holds his ground. The whale approaches. "Ramming speed?" says one of us, half joking. We brace ourselves. The great head goes under, then gives us the gentlest poke.

"Did he touch us?"

"I don't know. Did you feel it?"

Satisfied, the young whale swims away.

It is a fact widely recognized but seldom discussed that the novelty of whale-watching is not so much the experience of watching the whales as it is the experience of being watched by them. The mutual curiosity that exists between an adolescent right whale and a boatful of human observers makes whale-watching an activity of an entirely different nature than, say, bird-watching - or even people-watching. Sarah Haney of the Canadian Whale Institute has been a supporter of the Right Whale Program for over a decade. The first time she came to Peninsula Valdes, a whale approached her zodiac. As he swam past the boat, he kept his gaze fixed on her. She still remembers the glimpse she caught of the white of his swivelled eye. "When you look at the eye of a fish or shark, it's slate-grey, dead-looking," she says. "Whales are different. When you look a whale in the eye it's like looking at a dog or another person. There's a feeling of connection."

Vicky Rowntree, director of the Right Whale Program, prefers to observe the whales from land. Almost every morning, she takes her backpack, stocked with notebook, spyglass, water and food, and makes the hike out from the research station, along the tawny cliff which lines the bay, to the 'cliff hut' - little more than a sheet-metal wind-break, constructed by scientist Roger Payne in the 1970s. If the weather is fair, she sits outside, often with her legs dangling over the precipice, the spyglass propped between her knees. She'll focus on a group of whales, and she'll watch -- for hours, sometimes. "The spyglass is great because it focuses you," she says. "It's like you've gone through this tunnel into the world of the whales. If you watch for long enough, you begin to anticipate what they will do."

Most often Rowntree fixes the spyglass on a mother-calf pair. The mothers seem to use the shallow waters of this bay to shield their calves from predators: orcas, sea lions. In five-metre water, the girth of a mother whale forms an effective blockade. In recent years, however, the mothers have proved unable to protect their calves from a new threat. An inflated population of gulls, nurtured on fish-processing waste from nearby Puerto Madryn, has discovered a new food supply: a gull will land on the back of a surfaced whale and rip at its flesh and blubber. The whale will thrash about, go under; the gull will circle around and wait for the whale to resurface, then attack again. Most of the whales that Rowntree spots from the cliffs these days bear open wounds along their backs.

The mother whales don't eat while they are in the nursery ground. They try to keep still, to conserve their resources of blubber and mother's milk. (The calves, on the other hand, love to cavort. A calf will hump up onto the back of the sleeping mother, breach onto her, cover her blowhole with his tail. All this she bears with extraordinary calm.) The real concern about the gull attacks is that, in evading the gulls, the mothers may be expending the energy they need to nurse their calves and to make the trip back to their summer feeding grounds.

By sea and by land the scientists make their observations. Then there is John Atkinson, who observes the whales by air. Each September he makes the trek by plane from Toronto to Buenos Aires, then from Buenos Aires to Trelew, and finally, by truck, from Trelew to the town of Piramides, where he rendezvouses with a crew of apprenticing pilots from the Argentine navy. He'll spend the next three days, if the weather co-operates, hanging from a harness out of an eight-seater navy plane, taking photographs of whales from an altitude of 300 feet.

Atkinson is a veteran traveller and a closet writer. He has four unpublished novels stashed away. He's published children's books in English and in Spanish. I ask him how he wound up working as an aerial photographer.

"My main qualification is that I don't get airsick," he says. "And I seem to take pretty good pictures."

Aerial surveys have been part of the research program at Peninsula Valdes for 32 years. Because the heads of right whales bear distinguishing patches of rough skin, called callosities, a good overhead view allows scientists to recognize an individual whale, year after year. The scientists on Peninsula Valdes have compiled a database of information on over 1800 individuals. In recent years, computer mapping has allowed them to quantify this visual data, and to compare it with data gathered on right whale populations in Brazil. Initial comparisons show that a few whales have moved back and forth between the two populations. In coming years, comparisons may be extended to the catalogues compiled by scientists working in South Africa and Australia.

Kerr, Rowntree, Sironi, Atkinson. I gradually come to know this population of researchers, which returns year after year to Peninsula Valdes in an ironic mirroring of the whales. The unlikely group that's present at the research station when I visit is rounded out by Luciano Valenzuela, a soft-spoken Argentinian who is beginning a study on the factors affecting group formation of whales in the nursery ground. I also meet Roxana and Diego Taboada, the husband-wife team that has been the driving force behind the formation of the Instituto de Conservacion de Ballenas, a Buenos-Aires-based organization which promotes whale conservation in Argentina. (Over the course of the past few years, the Taboadas have weathered their country's economic collapse, raised two small children, and still managed to turn the Right Whale Program from an American-driven, top-down research effort into a vital, grassroots organization which combines local expertise with international interest, environmental goals with economic demands, and academic research with conservation and education.) The final members of this right-whale team are Sarah Haney and Alan Calderwood of the Canadian Whale Institute (CWI).

Spend a week with these people, and you begin to realize that the behaviour patterns evident in the human population of Peninsula Valdes are as complicated as those evident in the whale population. There are politics upon politics. The property on which the research station is located belongs to the Argentine navy. It is leased to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which in turn permits the Right Whale Program to do its work. The Right Whale Program is affiliated with the Whale Conservation Institute (WCI), a branch of Ocean Alliance, and also with the Taboadas' Instituto de Conservacion de Ballenas (ICB). The program is funded in large part by the CWI, and is a member of the South American Marine Mammal Working Group (SAMMWG). This stew of acronyms has been a hotbed of competing interests and conflicting approaches, all complicated by the interests and approaches of outside groups: the whale-watching industry, fishermen, the Argentine government, and other groups of scientists, studying armadillos, guanacos, gulls. But Rowntree and the Taboadas have proved masters of diplomacy; perhaps their background in animal-behaviour research stands them in good stead. When I leave the peninsula, they are preparing for a conference which will bring together right whale researchers and conservationists from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile. Valenzuela is helping Rowntree translate her lecture from English into Spanish. Roxana Taboada is distributing educational posters to local whale-watching tourists and guides.

All week, I have been meaning to ask someone about the connection between research biology and conservation. At the end of the day, when all of the aerial surveys have been completed, the observations taken down, and the callosity patterns recorded and compared, are we really any closer to restoring this ocean? Any less likely to continue our oftentimes unwitting assault on the natural world? Are these whales better off for our efforts?

As a parting gift -- and as if in answer to my question -- Roxana Taboada gives us a copy of her poster. Printed in large script across the bottom of the poster is the motto of the ICB: Solo podemos amar lo que conocemos, conocer lo que entendemos y entender lo que hemos aprendido; We can only love that which we know, know that which we understand, and understand that which we have learned. I'm guessing that love does not get mentioned in Rowntree's research papers about the whales of Golfo San Jose, but it is implied in the quiet intensity with which she speaks about these whales, and with which she works on their behalf. There is, perhaps, an unstated prefix to the ICB motto: It is only that which we love that we desire to preserve.

* * *

Amanda Jernigan currently lives and writes in Sackville, New Brunswick. She is a contributing editor of The New Quarterly and of Canadian Notes & Queries.

John Haney's photographs have been exhibited in New Brunswick and Ontario. The images included here are part of a larger body of work examining human and animal life on Peninsula Valdes.

The Right Whale Program of Peninsula Valdes

An open letter to the National Magazine Awards Foundation

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:01:26 +0000

I am writing to express my disappointment at your decision to eliminate the poetry category in the National Magazine Awards. It seems to me that in doing so you are not only turning your back on the literary magazines that form an important part of your constituency, you are turning your back on journalistic tradition.

Poetry has appeared in the pages of our magazines and newspapers for as long as magazines and newspapers have appeared on our doorsteps and dining room tables. Poetry isn't just the province of the little literaries. Harper's and The New Yorker publish poems; likewise, poems appear in Canada's most intelligent general-interest magazines: Brick, for instance, and Maisonneuve. These poems are not literary sideshows, but rather
they form a necessary counterpoint to the narrative approach of essays and reviews. They court the world's complexities, they mine the history of the language. The best of them find their way into our heads and hearts and become part of our vocabularies, enabling us to speak to one another in an idiom enriched by shared literary experience.

Magazine-publication of poetry is critical not just for readers, but for poets. It can take a decade to compile a book-length manuscript of poems. If individual verses are to have a public life, they need more immediate venues. Magazines provide those venues, furnishing poets with audience and response. Without that support, the poet works in a vacuum, if she works at all.

The poetry category in the National Magazine Awards does an important service to our culture by recognizing the publication of fine poetry in journals large and small. For the sake of readers and of writers, please reconsider your decision.

Most sincerely,

Amanda Jernigan

Riding the Aesthetic Underground

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 07:18:42 +0000

There's nothing that makes the critics line up -- nothing that makes them side and spit -- like the publication of a new book of non-fiction by John Metcalf. In the Calgary weekly FFWD, Lee Shedden writes: 'The release ... should be a Canadian national holiday; there should be drunkenness, jubilation, public nudity, mariachi bands, streamers, confetti.' Meanwhile, in The Danforth Review, Gordon Phinn calls Metcalf a 'rabid bulldog', and threatens to do unsavoury things to his 'balls'.

John Metcalf: reviewers fuss over the man, not the work. photo by John Haney

Metcalf once wrote that 'CanLit suffers from terminal politeness.' There's certainly nothing polite about Gordon Phinn's review. Have Metcalf's provocative tactics worked, then? At first glance, it appears so, but a closer look at the reviews reveals that the critics are not fussing over the writing; they are fussing over the man.

This problem is exacerbated by the genre of An Aesthetic Underground. When a critic reviews a memoir, she's inevitably tempted not just to review the author's presentation of his life, but to re-present that life in her own terms. Thus Judy Stoffman of The Toronto Star casts Metcalf, in Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion, as both 'tireless worker' and 'vociferous complainer'. Shane Neilson of The Danforth Review presents him in imperial terms: 'He arrived ready to establish himself on these shores, such as he found them, and he mostly found them lacking.' And George Fetherling, in The Vancouver Sun, calls An Aesthetic Underground 'an immigration narrative, pure and simple'.

Not that the revisionist-biographer approach can't be helpful. Writing -- strangely -- in Toro, a new Toronto 'men's magazine', Jeet Heer puts Metcalf's literary pugilism into perspective:

The British literary culture of the 1950s [in which Metcalf came of age] was ... a contentious place. In order to win a hearing for controversial writers such as Eliot, the critics F. R. Leavis and William Empson and their contemporaries had developed a combative public presence.... Metcalf's literary mentors believed that literature thrives on debate and argument, a position he continues to hold to this day.

Still, it's a shame that Metcalf's person has obscured his prose, because his real skill lies not in throwing a punch but in turning a phrase.

Metcalf writes, 'I find that I often catch in fiction the essence of a place better than I do in exposition, probably because exposition is closer to reportage and fiction is a distillation.' If, as Walter Pater wrote, art 'aspires towards the condition of music', then memoir, for Metcalf, aspires towards the condition of fiction. Sometimes, Metcalf throws off the cloak of fact entirely and quotes from his published stories to illuminate an era in his life. But the best parts of An Aesthetic Underground come when he resists the temptation to defer to earlier efforts and hangs onto the thread of his narrative, pushing the writing, as he would put it, to perform.

These moments are brilliant -- and rare. An Aesthetic Underground reads more like a curated exhibit of a life than like a narration of one. But I suspect that's what Metcalf had in mind. Metcalf once wrote to me of the importance of having frameworks for my reading -- that the books I encountered wouldn't make real sense to me if I didn't understand the context from which they emerged. In An Aesthetic Underground, Metcalf is trying to give us a context for his own work -- not just his writing, but his editing, his anthologizing, and his correspondence.

Like any good curator, of course, he digresses, pausing to impart a bit of gossip or whimsy, spicing the historically significant with the genuinely weird. Thus we get the stories of Metcalf's four adopted children, of Al Purdy's drinking, of Alice Munro's opinions on the blues. But the real scoop in An Aesthetic Underground is not that Purdy slept with so-and-so or that Munro said such-and-such about Howlin' Wolf. It is that Metcalf is working on a new book of fiction, a collection of stories about Robert Forde. Metcalf writes that 'Forde is a novelist and quite a few people have assumed he's an alter ego. There's a germ of truth in that but these Forde stories are not autobiographical in the usual sense.' For my part, I have no doubt that the Forde stories are pure fiction -- fiction being where a writer is freed, to take his best run at the truth.

Amanda Jernigan is arts editor of The Dominion.