My Fonds

My ex- editor, the son of a Scottish-trained McGill doctor and contemporary of Dr Ewen Cameron, who claims to be acquainted with my "psychiatric history", was likely assigned to me in 1969 when he first approached me at a meeting of young student writers and later published my first book of poetry. This editor is now 82. CLG should subpoena him as a witness. I believe he has spent most of his life as a McGill associate surveilling and suppressing traces of the MKULTRA program including my family's files. I think he knows where my files and possibly others' are stored and hidden. I have known "Matthew"since 1969. He was my editor at Vehicule press /Signal Editions from 1977-95. In 1994 or 95 when he arranged for McGill to purchase 3 boxes of my journals, letters, mss, etc for which I was $14K. I thought at the time that this was "normal" and that McGill was acquiring papers for an archive of Quebec writers but it appears I am one of very few writers of my generation to have their own fonds at McGill. The other that I know of is Ken Norris. Leonard Cohen also has a small collection at McGill-- most of his papers are in Toronto. After McGill acquired my three boxes of paper - quite an honour - my writing career officially ended (as I realized only much later.) My editor "Matthew" and I gave poetry readings together in the 1990s at Bishops College School, Boston University, Smith's College MA, and elsewhere. He is connected to the UK and US literary world and is a respected editor with an honorary PhD from McGill. Over the years, while living on opposite sides of Montreal and inhabiting different social worlds, he and I had a distant friendship - I saw him rarely, always at public events. After his wife left him in the late 1980s he even proposed marriage to me - which I found baffling at the time. Despite the fact that we rarely interacted, over the years he has made refererences to my psychiatric history. These peculiar remarks always surfaced out of nowhere - he seemed to think the truth was self-evident but when questioned, he refused to give details. This was one reason I broke off our relationship years ago. Being a psych patient is not something you would overlook or forget. It's not a condition that slips your mind even if you are schizophrenic. The fact is, I am boringly sane. I have never had a psychiatric emergency, mental breakdown, psychotic episode, or emotional crisis requiring any intervention. To my conscious knowledge (excluding my time with Dr Cameron in a classified sub project for which CLG is now suing McGill and the Canadian government) I have never even seen a psychiatrist, either in childhood or adolescence or as an adult. But my father was a Cameron patient for 6 weeks in 1962-3 and our family was being targeted at that time, as I have recounted in books, blogs etc So yes, through my family who enrolled me in a gifted children's program at the Allan Memorial in 1956, I am an alleged victim of rogue psychiatry in a notorious project secretly funded by our government and the CIA. In 1969, when I met "Matthew", no one had yet heard of MKULTRA and few knew what Dr Cameron (who died in 1967) had been doing to patients at the Allan, except the patients themselves (if they could remember) and their close relatives. As far back as 1970 "Matthew", a self-described "elitist" who even used the term "Illuminati" to explain his background, has claimed I am "schizophrenic" (at the time, to me, this seemed like a figure of speech or his own private prejudice or delusion). I believe he still repeats this claim to this day, through his network. And he also believes this "fact" is in my medical files, which I have never even seen. Yes, he seems to have access to my missing files. Based on my own memory, diaries, letters etc etc, no psychiatrist has ever examined me let alone arrived at any assessment. I have never been admitted to hospital due to a mental crisis, I have no adult psychiatric history, and I have never been hospitalized since my tonsillectomy which I think occurred at the Montreal Children's Hospital in 1958 or 59. The only medical records I ever obtained from McGill (in 2007) were for a mild STD infection at age 20 and a fractured foot in 1984. I am in good health and rarely see doctors for anything as I dont suffer from any known ailments or medical conditions, and am not on medication. I dont even do aspirin. However my powerful former editor "Matthew" believes he knows better and I am schizophrenic. Perhaps out of curiosity, or to prove his theory, he set up a literary fonds for me at McGill in 1995 - which seems counterintuitive. Why promote the literary output of a lunatic? But i guess I'm a special type, a literary lunatic, and the real motive may be that I began publishing stories in the mid1980s based on my childhood memories including references to MKULTRA As the son of a McGill doctor he presumably had access to privileged sources and knew Cameron was experimenting on patients including children to create Manchurian Candidates or "functional schizophrenics" -- which is what he also called Leonard Cohen. So using false deductive reasoning: ● Cameron was creating child schizophrenics. ●Anne was a Cameron kid. ●Therefore Anne is schizophrenic... (On the other hand though: Ann is a writer and she might remember her programming Therefore McGill would pay real $$ for her unpublished writing which may one day help psychiatrists understand the longterm effects of Cameron's work I assume he negotiated 3 boxes at $5k each and kept a thousand for himself which is why I was paid $14k but hey. I dont speak to my former editor and have not seen him since 2000 when I left Montreal to be writer-in residence in Kamloops BC. By then he had been fired from his teaching job at Dawson for sexual harassment. I have had a continuous, moderately successful writing career which I have supported with part time jobs, occasional grants, and a modest (off-grid) lifestyle since basically the 1970s. Since university, I have worked as a temporary secretary, proofreader, social activist, freelance journalist, columnist at the Gazette, workshop leader, Creative Writing teacher including at two universities, and later as a self-published researcher and writer, blogger, caregiver to the elderly, podcast interviewee etc. Over 2-3 decades while we were on friendly terms, "Matthew" published three of my poetry collections. He "discovered" me in the early 70s while he was teaching English at Dawson College and running a special arts program for gifted students on the campus. I met his family at their house once in 1969. His father was a noted McGill hematologist, Scottish-trained, who served with the British Army Medical Corps in WW2. They were from Glasgow. The father was on the board of the Canadian Hemophilia Society in 1988 during the HIV "tainted blood" scandal. Here's where it gets interesting In 2007, I self-published MY COLD WAR based on detailed and vivid memories of my family's connection with the MKULTRA program in the 1950s and 60s. I gave my former editor a copy but didn't hear back. No Canadian editor got back to me and I began to realize my family story was off limits to publishers and could get me even more blacklisted than I already was - although no one mentioned it to me, ever. In the 1990s I had published award-winning fiction and memoirs in a similar story-telling style - but due to the controversial nature of the MKULTRA program and accusations of "conspiracy theory" I eventually decided to approach McGill for my childhood medical files dating back to 1955 when I was admitted to RVH for pneumonia at age 3. I had always remembered being taken in the ambulance and waking up in the children's ward and later hearing the story from my mother and a family friend. I expected to find my 1955 PNEUMONIA file but instead McGill records located a file for "something else" which they refused to discuss over the phone. When I showed up in person at RVH records they refused to talk to me until finally one secretary offered to show me my childhood file if I could guess what it was for. When I said "Pneumonia" she shook her head. So, after a pause, I guessed "PSYCHIATRY" A wild guess, based on a dream I had the night before in which a McGill doctor showed me my thick PSYCHIATRY file, the contents of which he had just removed and dumped in a waste basket. The secretary nodded, reached under the counter and pulled out an empty file folder with my name Anne McLean 1955 - labelled PSYCHIATRY, but said she was not allowed to hand it over. So here we are in 2026 and the Montreal Experiments are no longer a "conspiracy theory" while most of the original Cameron victims have died, except for the children of Subproject 68 (like me) who, if alive, are now in their 70s or 80s. Perhaps their files still exist somewhere at McGill. Lets ask "Matthew" where they were when he last saw them.