Manuscript Collection MS Coll. 00036A - Jay MillAr Papers

Jay MillAr, born John Elliott Millar, is a poet, editor, publisher and bookseller involved in the Canadian experimental poetry community. He was born in Edmonton, Alberta and grew up in London, Ontario. He began his undergraduate degree at Western University before transferring to York University and moving to Toronto in 1992. He later received graduate degrees from York University (Master’s in English) and the University of Toronto (Master of Information). In 1992, he founded his own publishing company, Boondoggle Books, which according to MillAr was “mostly to publish my own terrible early work, but I published a few other writers as well.” According to an interview in 2006, MillAr stated that he found the term Boondoggle in a dictionary as “a military term that means to carry out useless and trivial actions with the appearance of doing something important.” MillAr produced two small magazines through Boondoggle, “B” after “C” and HIJ. In 1997, he transformed Boondoggle Books into BookThug. MillAr has published widely through his own presses, as well as several other publishing houses, most notably including: The Ghosts of Jay MillAr. (Coach House Books, 2000), Mycological Studies, (Coach House Books, 2002), False Maps for Other Creatures. (Blewointment press, 2005), Double Helix (with Stephen Cain, Mercury Press, 2006), The Small Blue (Snare Books, 2007) and Timely Irreverence (Nightwood Editions, 2013). MillAr is the proprietor of Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, “a virtual bookstore that specializes in the books that no one wants to buy.” MillAr is the co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing and also teaches creative writing and poetics at George Brown College.