A recent opinion piece by a local blogger, “Saint John Is Not The Renaissance City, And That’s Okay,” took as its putative focus the dubiousness of Saint John’s branding as The Renaissance City. Here’s how it begins: “New Brunswick is simultaneously a great place, and the worst place ever, to grow up as a creative person.” How is any thinking reader supposed to respond to such a claim? Worst place? Ever? Really? Consider for a moment how much of your purchase on history, to say nothing of current events, you’re being asked to abandon before you enter the argument that follows. I don’t know about you but, offhand, I can think of a hundred places, and times, in which creative persons surely suffer — and have suffered — more than the petty ills that, by this blogger’s account, have been inflicted upon New Brunswick’s hapless creative class.

So what are those ills? In the main the problem seems to be that creative types aren’t being supported to the degree to which they’re so manifestly entitled by this city’s, and this province’s, organs of patronage:

Because if we accept [Saint John’s branding as the Renaissance City] as true, and this is the Renaissance, why are so many talented local artists moving, financially struggling, or simply feeling uninspired and creating less? Why are governments slashing arts funding, instead of promoting the sort of patronage that made possible the masterworks of Da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo?

Here it should be noted that the paragraph from which the above is taken uses the word “Renaissance” three times. This merits mention because the only other use of the word “Renaissance” in the entire 1300-word piece arrives early: in the title. This isn’t to suggest that other challenges to the creative class aren’t touched upon in the course of the argument. Rather it’s to point out that the declared interest of the piece — the worth of the brand “Renaissance City” — is really only taken up directly once and it arrives in the form of an unflattering comparison to the Italian Renaissance, a period in which patronage is supposed to have made possible the creation of masterworks. In other words, the argument, so far as it’s concerned to touch upon the Renaissance, is that New Brunswick’s artists, unlike their sixteenth-century Italian counterparts, are “simply feeling uninspired and creating less” because the powers that be aren’t giving them enough money to feel inspired and create more.

If we’re going to take the comparison seriously, aren’t we obliged to recognize that patronage in the Italian Renaissance was very much a function of a narrow ruling class’s strenuous competition for personal fame and worldly prestige. The Medici clan that engaged the services of Botticelli was hardly a disinterested sponsor of art. No, they bought art the way that feckless billionaires in our day and age buy masterpieces: to impress their houseguests. Given that Botticelli’s patrons wouldn’t have understood, nor would they have approved, the notion of government sponsorship of art, how seriously can we take the Italian Renaissance as a model for New Brunswick to follow?

Leaving aside the worth of the comparison to the Italian Renaissance, it’s difficult to know how to respond to the claim that patronage is essential to creative inspiration or output. As a creative person, as a working artist (neither being a distinction to which I lay claim without considerable ambivalence), I think I know something about the nature and value of government support. I’ve received substantial writing grants from the Canada Council and NBArts, I regularly sit on any number of national and provincial arts juries, and all of the publishers of my books are supported, in least in part, by the Canadian government. No genuine student of culture — me included — should therefore question the fact that, in Canada, at least since the 70s, patronage has played a crucial in fostering art. But to make the leap from recognizing the role patronage plays in fostering art to venturing the claim that Saint John’s artists are “feeling uninspired and creating less” because government in these difficult times are cutting back on arts grants assumes a direct, if not necessary, connection between creative output and government patronage. I don’t know about other members of the creative class but my quotient of inspiration and output is only remotely tied to patronage. I make art when I make art because I need to make art.

It’s just too easy — as in reductive and facile — to blame the times, hard as they might be, for the lack of creative output this essay ascribes to New Brunswickers. Is New Brunswick producing less art than the rest of Canada? If so, it’s news to me. My view would be that New Brunswick artists — and Saint John artists in particular — have punched above their weight in the national arena for generations. And why the assumption that hard times are necessarily hard on creative output? The essay produces no evidence to support that claim. Personally, I see no meaningful correlation at all between modest material means and significant creative output. What the essay does argue, albeit inadvertantly, is a strong relation between modest creative output and the tendency to blame the times for it.
The argument also isn’t helped by the appeal to the example of writers like Pound who, like the vast preponderance of writers of consequence, overcame the parochialism of the places that fostered them (using the wildly successful Pound to illustrate what happens when you grow up in a backwater is akin to claiming Emily Dickinson would have written better had she gotten out of the house more often; writers overcome their circumstances, would-be writers complain to the government). For every (especially modern) artist born into privilege, even an indifferent student of western letters could name dozens who weren’t.

In sum, anyone looking for guidance on the merits of Saint John’s claim to be The Renaissance City will find little in the way of instruction in this blogger’s screed. However, if you’re currently seeking solace for what has lately proved your own lack of creative output, you will definitely find it here and in abundance. The essay won’t help you create more or better work “but you’ll at least have the comfort of knowing your silence and/or mediocrity isn’t really your fault. It’s because you were born in New Brunswick and the government hasn’t yet seen fit to play Medici to your inner Botticelli.

As a footnote — and following from Kathy Mac’s suggestion — I note that you mention no Saint John, New Brunswick, or even Canadian, author by name in an entire essay ostensibly devoted to the current state of writing in this (putatively misnamed) Renaissance City. Ezra Pound, Stephen King, and the legends of the Italian Renaissance are featured (the usual suspects), but apart from some dismissive and disparaging generalization about those hapless NB writers who’ve given into “tired regional tropes,” you’re entirely silent on the local/regional/provincial authors somehow thriving in the same field of exigencies, the same set of obstacles, you describe.

Listen to the terms of your advocacy for local authorship:

…we need to read and consume media of all types, ages, and provenances. Look in Victorian novels set on the windswept sea coast [sic], or at New York Times photo essays about drug addiction in rural Arkansas, or at Tolstoy’s peasant-run farms, or at the complicated families of Jeffrey Eugenides, to make New Brunswick come alive. Here and there, in great art, we catch little glimpses of our own vision of this place. We can collect these fragments and incorporate them into our own unique voice.

I gather, then, that there’s nothing for us here, that we’re stuck, that we need to ‘go down the road,’ at least imaginatively, to produce any writing of meri

Can’t you hear it? Don’t you see that this infatuation with ‘anywhere but here’ is an expression of the very parochialism and hostility to local creation you seem to decry? Is genuflecting before the preapproved, pre-sanctified WFA (Writer From Away) even while ignoring the accomplishments of those local writers who’ve actually managed to generate a national and international audience really the best approach to fostering the kind of local writing you claim to be so anxious to read?

I know! Let’s ask Ezra Pound, that reliable old WFA, who said, “A slave is someone who waits for someone to come and free him [sic?].”