A Great Cloud of Witnessing

“Everything reminds me of an arts column.”

For the last half century, the arts scene in New Brunswick has been rising to ever greater expressions of cultural flourishing. Since the late 1960s, Nancy Bauer has been a participant in this milieu and since 1980 she has been its primary chronicler.

A Great Cloud of Witnessing: Arts Journalism of Nancy Bauer, now provides a lively trip through almost four decades in which the New Brunswick arts scene has developed in a particularly creative way.

The literary heritage of this flourishing is unique in Canada, going back to the late 19th and early 20th century when three New Brunswick writers stood on the leading edge of Canadian poetry. The creative writing of Bliss Carman, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Francis Joseph Sherman gave rise to Fredericton being identified as “the Poet’s Corner” of Canada.

All three poets are buried in the city’s Forest Hill Cemetery, along with later New Brunswick writers who carried on both the poetic and critical literary traditions—Desmond Pacey, Fred Cogswell, Alfred Bailey, and Alden Nowlan. The Poet’s Corner of the cemetery is a sylvan retreat where contemporary poetry readings are occasionally held in honour this tradition.

Following on this heritage, Fiddlehead Poetry Books was established in 1954 and eventually became the celebrated Goose Lane Editions. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery opened in 1959, which was a significant addition to culture of the arts. The Fredericton Playhouse commenced operation in 1964, which had the same effect. And after a long history of training programs, a fully-fledged New Brunswick College of Craft and Design took shape in 1980.

Nancy and Bill Bauer came to Fredericton in 1965 where he had been hired to teach in the English Department of the University of New Brunswick (UNB). While raising 3 children, Nancy became active in the writing community, attending the fabled Tuesday Night group, a gathering of professors, students and local writers who met at McCord Hall, the refurbished 1851 ice house on the UNB Fredericton campus. She became the editor and publisher of the New Brunswick Chapbook series, which grew out of the “ice house gang.”

Nancy Bauer’s career as an arts journalist began in 1980 when Joseph Sherman, the editor of ArtsAtlantic, the “arts journal of record,” asked if she could be their New Brunswick-based writer. Over almost twenty years, she contributed 18 articles as well as reviews of books, plays, and art exhibits, as well as providing notes and updates from important happenings in the province, such as the foundational meetings of the New Brunswick Arts Board.

In 1993, Telegraph-Journal editor Neil Reynolds conceived of a new Saturday magazine insert for the paper, The New Brunswick Reader, focused on arts and crafts, and he invited Nancy to contribute profiles of artists and craftspeople living province-wide. Not only did she write 44 such profiles over a year and a half, but for the first year of its existence, she also supplied the photographs for the cover.

If that was the extent of her output, it would be an impressive body of work and a valuable contribution to the documentation of arts in the province, but in 2007, she signed on to write a weekly column, “State of the Art,” for the new Salon section of the Telegraph-Journal (which replaced The New Brunswick Reader).

Over the next 11 years, she wrote a total of 531 columns, 800 words per week. This column was a must-read for anyone interested in New Brunswick arts; it encapsulated what was happening in New Brunswick’s arts and culture scene. As it delivered the scoop on the present moment—book launches, gallery openings, theatre productions, award ceremonies, etc.—it also documented significant developments of the past, like the formation of Fredericton’s Gallery Connexion.

Filled with curiosity, passion, and insight, these columns grappled with pertinent issues of the day like arts funding and the rise of the e-reader; they paid homage to the people that were making things happen in New Brunswick’s arts and culture scene and commemorate significant figures on their passing. All of this makes her columns, and the body of work in whole, a necessary starting point for anyone who plans to research or write about New Brunswick arts and culture.

As a creative writer, Nancy Bauer was a participant-observer and an organizer in the arts. She was among the founders of the Maritime Writers’ Workshop, the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick, ArtsNB, the Gallery Connexion, and the Word Feast Literary Festival in Fredericton.

Ian LeTourneau, editor of this book, has skillfully compiled a selection of Nancy’s arts journalism brimming with people, places, and events. It collects only a fraction of the over 500,000 words she wrote during this time and the selection mostly focuses on the literary side of New Brunswick arts and culture.

Nancy has the skills of a great chronicler: she captures the moment with a mixture of personal and historical. As we learn about the events she attends or the subjects she contemplates, bit by bit we learn more about Nancy, her family, her creative practice, and her place at the centre of New Brunswick cultural life.

The title of this book comes from a line in Nancy’s keynote address at the 7th annual New Brunswick Book Awards, given on June 4, 2022:

We as writers are delighted when we have a book in our hands with our name under the title, but I have to believe that in the grand scheme of things that is not important. What is important is that a great cloud of witnesses has been pondering our human condition.

Nancy Bauer’s arts journalism does exactly that; it expertly, sensitively, and knowledgeably ponders the role the arts play in our human condition. A great cloud of witnessing, indeed.