'John Metcalf often comes as close to the baffling, painful comedy of human experience as a writer can get.'

John Metcalf is one of Canada's most distinguished literary editors, writers, critics, and anthologists. He has helped shape the sensibility of an entire group of emerging writers through his work at the Porcupine's Quill press. Known for his strong views about literary standards, Metcalf has nurtured some of our most essential writers, including Leon Rooke, Russel Smith, Terry Griggs, Caroline Adderson, Annabel Lyon, Andrew Pyper, Steven Heighton, Jane Urquhart, Elise Levine, Clarke Blaise, Michael Winter, and Mary Swan, among dozens of other fine authors.John Metcalf is the Senior Editor of Porcupine's Quill. An accomplished writer, editor, and anthologist, he is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction including "Adult Entertainment, The Lady Who Sold Furniture", and "Kicking Against the Pricks: Essays".

John Metcalf's profile page

'Forde Abroad is a superb work. Its artistry arises exactly because of Metcalf's ability to mirror the ''realness of the world'', especially at its most bizarre, a skill he handles with an economy so masterful that, like the rejuvenated Forde, it leaves us sated yet desiring more.'

Quill and Quire

'Metcalf's relationship with Canadian literature since his arrival from Britain in 1962 has been one of both economy and expansiveness. His own creative work has been relatively sparse during the last couple of decades (the last collection of his new work, Adult Entertainment, appeared in 1986). But the Porcupine's Quill, where Metcalf is senior editor, has enriched Canadian literature with contributions from young writers such as Terry Griggs and Mike Barnes. Metcalf contends that literature's value should be based on aesthetics, not (as is often the case with Canadian writing) thematic content. Forde, no doubt Metcalf's proxy, tells his Slovenian prot?g?, ''art arises from the realness of the world. [It] encompasses ideas but it's not about ideas. It's more concerned with feeling. And you capture the feeling through things, through particularity.'' Any new book by Metcalf is to be welcomed, and Forde Abroad is no exception.'

Canadian Book Review Annual

'John Metcalf is the son of an English Methodist minister who spent a lifetime preaching the Word; Metcalf himself, in a classic case of generational revolt, shed religious concerns early, yet clearly inherited from his father a passion for the now-secularized, lower-case word. This observation may smack of ''amateur psychology'', but it can serve, I think, as a viable and meaningful literary-critical myth (in the best sense of that much-abused term). For Metcalf, words (up to and including the least conspicuous article), their order, positioning rhythm, interrelations, are invariably crucial to his effect. So are paragraphing, the use of italics, and punctuation (he lays emphasis on the semi-colon, which is why I inserted one -- correctly, I trust -- in my opening sentence).'

Books in Canada