Barry McKinnon — We Remember

Viv and I lost an old and good friend, Barry McKinnon, in October of this year. He was one of the founding faculty of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, and among those who hired me to teach there in 1972. I was immediately caught up in the whirlwind of his literary activities. He had a print room with equipment donated by PG’s number one and most notorious entrepreneur, Ben Ginter, and was publishing a student literary magazine as well as poetry booklets and broadsides for students and the readers that came to the college on his Canada-Council, public-readings program.

I brought a magazine (Seven Persons Repository) and small publishing enterprise (Repository Press) from Medicine Hat. I and my partner Bob Atkinson published Alban Goulden’s In the Wilderness in 1973 and Andy Suknaski’s Leaving in 1974. Andy was an old friend of Barry’s. Some Repository equipment went into Barry print room, and we began working on publishing projects together. I assisted with the readings program, helping with posters and broadsides and, occasionally, picking up readers at the airport. Over the next few years, I got to know a few of Barry’s literary friends, Brian Fawcett, Brett Enemark, John Pass, David Phillips, George Bowering, Ken Belford, Sid Marty, Cecil Giscombe, Sharon Thesen, Harvey Chometsky and Meryl Duprey, the latter two also students active in the writing-printing-publishing program.

Barry and I, with Harvey’s help, produced an anthology of local writing, The Pulp Mill (one volume of prose and one of poetry, 1977, 1980 and 1985), and a book by Belford (Sign Language, 1979). I published a couple of chapbooks by Barry, including The the (fragments, which a year later became a part of a book of the same title, published by Coach House Press in 1980. Harvey edited four issues of Repository for me. Numbers 21-22 included reviews, Barry’s of George Bowering’s The Catch and mine of Red Lane’s Letters from Geeksville / Red Lane to George Bowering / 1960-1964. Geeksville was printed by Barry and Harvey and is, I think, a rare and beautiful book that tells a great story. Meryl’s Tremen Town came out in 1983, and then, in 1985, with Viv’s assistance, Harvey’s Speaks a Human Tongue. Much of this early activity is documented by Barry in SFU’s Line magazine #2, a 40-page memoir entitled The Caledonia Writing Series.

Viv followed her passion for travel from her job as a medical lab technologist into travel writing. We went with Joy, Barry’s wife, to Cuba and Belize, touring around and collecting material for the guidebooks (Hunter Publications, Miami), and with Barry and Joy to Peru and Bolivia, for guidebooks about those countries and a history of Bolivia (Harbour, 2008). Barry published a book of poems about Bolivia and Peru (2004). I published two story books featuring Barry, Joy, Harvey and Vivien as characters: Small Rain (1989) and Other Art (1997).

Barry was not just a poet, but a talented memoirist and all-round chronicler of the literary scene. He corresponded for about 20 years with Robert Creeley, a major influence on him and the Vancouver scene, and wrote an unpublished account that includes some of the letters. Barry also wrote a memoir, also unpublished, about how he and Sid Marty, knowing about Irving Layton as the prominent Canadian poet of his time (and knowing that Creeley had pushed Layton onto the international scene by publishing two of his books), went to Montreal to learn how to write poetry. Barry continued with a memoir of his years in Creative Writing at UBC, and another of his career as a college instructor.

He was also a satirist, regularly converting his observations and experiences into satire. This was no surprise to those who knew him. He was the funniest man I, at least, have ever met, a source of endless jokes, witticisms and comic scenarios, many of which found their way into my stories. The adjacent article about Barry’s alter-egos deals with his satire and its origins. I was finishing it during the couple of months that Barry was getting ill, and Joy was running him regularly into emergency, where they thought he was having heart problems. It turned out to be multiple organ failure. During that time, Barry sent me the latest in his Jack Dawe series. Mainly he and Joy talked to Viv about his symptoms and assorted medical tests.

It was not a fun time, but Barry was working on his satires to the very end. The jokes kept piling up, and getting better.