Re. CanLit and Canada Reads 2020 -- when considering it here's an old-fashioned and unpopular concept: "writer" isn't a career category. It never used to be, when writers were brilliant and literature could be "classic". People used to write about their areas of expertise. Writing was a tool, and such luminous novelists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, the "Bloomsberries", early Canadian writers and countless others would have been puzzled by the concept of a university degree in "Creative Writing". Writing was what people did to explain what they already had a vocation in, or to get an idea across -- or it was imaginative storytelling. Storytelling was done in the "room of one's own" after the home was maintained, the family cared for, the income secured. Perhaps it was done around the fireplace on a winter's night before television hi-jacked imagination. Since anyone can do it, whether well or boringly, can storytelling properly be called a profession?
Apparently rapper, addict and refugee can be (if Canada Reads 2020 is anything to go by) and one can also be a professional queer, two-spirit, or aboriginal. There's nothing wrong with identifying as these things, but are they job categories? When did an identity become a career?
If we count as a profession anything you get paid to do, presumably these things are indeed professions now, because plenty of people get paid for talking about their identity. How does this affect professionalism as a concept? The word used to suggest high qualifications. Can we assume that it no longer does? Logically this would follow from the everyone's-a-writer proposition.
It used to be that only someone with something to impart wrote a book, that writing was a tool and a process. Young writers are less interesting than old because they have less experience and knowledge to write about, and too often end up writing about writing. They lack fuel, meaning subject matter. Life experience, expertise, research and scholarship create subject matter. Maybe the label "writer" should be reserved for people over forty. The top of the line practitioners are generally over sixty.
This is not about limiting free speech. Anyone of any age should scribble, practice constructing eloquent sentences, record memories, experiment with verse forms (ideally not "free verse", until they've learned the forms to get free of), but to be called a "writer" you need to be other things as well. You need something substantial to offer readers. You need emotional maturity and at least one body of information to be master of, and to pro-fess interestingly about.
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