Stephen Marche, author of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, moved from NYC to Toronto. In a widely blogged Star piece, Marche highlights the differences between CanLit and the writing life south of the border :

Brooklyn is so, so young and Toronto is so, so old: It felt like moving from a frenetic day care to an old folks' home.

...

Literature in Toronto is something your smartest aunt does once she's cozied up in her favourite sweater. And the work therefore is less exciting.

The popular novels here are generally ponderous, draped in sanctimony over suffering and history, melodramas in exotic settings. One thing you are not going to get out of a novel on the Giller list or indeed the best-seller list is a good laugh.

A set of bronze balls, especially for the part about Margaret Atwood. No one likes to say it, but our books do tend to smell like day-old porridge. It's something I've heard murmured a hundred times before, and I can't say I disagree.

When my unpublished manuscript was making the rounds at various Toronto publishing houses back in 2002, I was somewhat surprised to hear my writing described back to me by various publishing professionals as "innovative" and "edgy." In my own mind my sentences seemed much less amazing. They echoed in a clumsy freshman way at least a half dozen American writers whose fiction I'd been reading for years. Lorrie Moore, Christine Schutt, et al. I realize that editors are extremely busy people who spend nearly all of their horrifically understaffed waking hours reading reams of print-out sent by people like me. People in publishing do not have the time to curl up with novels very often. But A.M. Homes? George Saunders? Almost no one I spoke to had read these books or even, in some cases, seemed aware of their authors. It felt like a giant chasm to bridge, this lack of shared language between the grotto and Toronto, like trying to sell a lemon meringue pie to someone who has never tasted a lemon. You have to hope they know a good pie when they smell one. I might be struck dead by lightning for writing that. I just hope it happens after my laptop arrives back from the shop, so I can erase all the bad things I've written about my sister.

At the bottom of Marche's argument is a divide between youth and establishment, up-and-comers versus Boomers. I've read it often enough, especially out here in realty-crazy Vancouver, where the gap tends to magnify in socio-economic terms. If Vancouver's artists and young talent flee the city for greener pastures, what will the landscape look like by the time the Olympics arrive? Since 2000, the overwhelming majority of my graduate creative writing class has fled to the suburbs, to other towns and provinces. I love Vancity, but next year, I'm going, too. What if our national literary scene worked the same way?

So, so old. What does that mean? I'm an emerging writer with greying hair, a cracked front tooth and a medicine chest full of anti-wrinkle products. Marche mentions other "young" writers Heather O'Neill, David Bezmozgis and Yann Martel (who by now must be over forty). I'm guessing old, as Marche means it, has nothing to do with age but with sensibility, a certain ossified settling. A lack of interest in the new, the foreign, in the exploration of uncomfortable territory. I read it somewhere that writers are like sharks, eating up the world all the time. We stop swimming and devouring, and we die. When my hard drive returns I'll find out who said that. I have this feeling it was an American.

(Via Q & Q)