Monthly Archives: October 2011

Praise for Stories About Storytellers in the Edmonton Journal

by JK

This Sunday, the Edmonton Journal published a very fine review of Stories About Storytellers. Reviewer Robert Wiersema writes,

“For Gibson, in life and in this book, it all comes back to the writers. The writers and their books are central to Stories about Storytellers, and Gibson shows them to their best advantage, as he has been doing for 50 years. Every writer should be so blessed as to have an editor like Gibson in their corner; every reader should spend some time with his stories.”

Read the full review here.

The Zen of Authordom

by JK

I was pleased to see that this Sunday’s Toronto Star ran an excerpt from my Epilogue, which consists of Awful Warnings to new authors about the terrible things that will happen to them when their book is published. My piece is very cynical, and outsiders to the book world find it very funny, and totally unrealistic. Interestingly, the Star’s Insight Editor takes a different view. Under the title “Authors, be warned . . .” his subtitle runs “Book publisher covers a glorious CanLit career in a new memoir, including bang-on author advice.”

“Bang-on”? My cynical description of all of the possible review horrors seems to Dan Smith to be “bang-on”? And Dan was the Star’s Book Review editor for over a decade. Very interesting.

One of the good things in an author’s life is that, if you are very lucky, your book may produce fascinating new information from readers. For example, Ralph Hancox, who worked with Robertson Davies at the Peterborough Examiner, elaborates on my line about the great leap forward in Davies’ work to Fifth Business:

“I asked him,” writes Ralph from Victoria, “what had brought about the change . . . his study of the works of Freud, Jung?”
“No,” he said. “I could not have written such material before my mother and my father had died. I would have been a sorry outcast to them both.”

We all shake our head at the thought of Davies, aged 57 when the book came out, until that point being constrained by what his parents would think.  And then I realize that at 67, I (as my W.O. Mitchell chapter reveals) am still subject to what my 98-year-old mother will say when she encounters “bad language” in my book.

So you’ll find me chickening out of a Bill Mitchell line by saying “. . . well, let’s just say the term Bill used resembled ‘sock-kickers.’” There’s room for a really useful Ph.D. Thesis here. And what, dear reader, would you do?

One of the bad things in an author’s life is that eagerly-awaited reviews don’t appear because book review editors plead that they don’t have enough space to run all the reviews they have. This produces unworthy thoughts in unworthy authors. Thus my first reaction, on hearing that the authorized biography of Steve Jobs has been rushed through to come out late in October, was to lament the fact that the line-up for review space had just got more crowded, dammit. I will have to try for a more zen-like approach to this author business.

— Doug Gibson

An excerpt on Pierre Trudeau on the Canadian Encyclopedia blog

by JK

It’s Friday, and with it comes another excerpt of Stories About Storytellers on the Canadian Encyclopedia blog. This week, find out how Doug was tested by Pierre Trudeau. To read the excerpt, head over to the Canadian Encyclopedia.

(Have you missed the previous excerpts? You can still read the selections on Alistair MacLeod, Stephen Leacock and Alice Munro.)

Being an Author Is Hard

by Douglas Gibson

For a new, first-time author sentences  like “I love you and want to bear your children” or “Congratulations, this is the Lotto Corporation calling to tell you that you have just won a million dollars!” pale into insignificance compared with the magic words “Hey, Doug, I’m really enjoying your book!”

That was the greeting I received from Ron Graham (the well-known author, and, obviously, highly intelligent and discerning reader) as I entered Massey College at the U of T yesterday.

Thrilled, I went on to confide to him my shy first steps as an author, doing things like trying my hand at autographing books in the store (which, by the way, I have now done by invitation). He told me of his first visit to a bookstore to see a pile of his just-published first book, lying there throbbing. He hung around, sensing that something was bound to happen.

Sure enough, a young man, browsing through the store, came to his book and picked it up. He leafed through it, read a couple of passages, and then, to Ron’s almost audible horror, put the book down and walked away.

A minute later he came back, and started to leaf through it again. Ron, quivering with excitement and unable to stand the suspense, was on the point of going up to him and offering to buy the book for him. Before he could do that, however, the young man looked around, slipped the book into his bag, and walked briskly out of the store.

Ron, left standing there with his mouth open, is still not sure what he should have done.

Being an author is hard.

— Douglas Gibson

Winnipeg Free Press praises the “Delighftul” Stories About Storytellers

by JK

Winnipeg Free Press Books reviewer Morley Walker praised Stories About Storytellers this past weekend, noting,

Here’s the thing about Douglas Gibson, Scottish immigrant and Toronto publisher extraordinaire. He has a greater appreciation of regional Canada than 99 per cent of those of us born here.

This genial memoir of his 40 years in the publishing racket, including 16 years at the helm of the country’s top literary house, McClelland & Stewart, takes readers from coast to coast and everywhere in between. . . .

Gibson joins such American giants as Michael Korda and Bennett Cerf in penning a gossipy memoir of his publishing life and times.

His delightful volume enriches the Canadian shelf beside Jack McClelland’s more selective letters, Imagining Canadian Literature (1998), and Roy MacSkimming’s stuffily comprehensive history, The Perilous Trade (2003). Anyone interested in CanLit will find much to enjoy here.

Read the full review here.