I was pleased to see that the lead review in Sunday’s New York Times was a new collection of stories, Life Without Children, by Ireland’s Roddy Doyle. Roddy and I became friends after he toured Canada to promote an earlier book, and visited Calgary and Banff when I was hanging around, a friendly Publisher trying to be a helpful Canadian host. I often did things like this, once stepping in to help an under-manned Calgary Authors Festival event, where I got to introduce three authors, including the remarkable James Houston. He stole the show with his opening line from the stage, “I’m a REALLY old guy! And I’ve had a hell of an interesting life!” (In the general celebration afterwards, one young woman noticed how much fun I was having, as a Publisher. She asked a shrewd question; “How do I get to do what you do?” I hope she made it.)

In one of my books I tell the story of how Roddy’s visit to the Banff Festival coincided with rutting season for the elk who roamed around the Banff Centre for the Arts, where we were all staying. I had been there a few years previously, also at rutting time.

There had been an incident.

Guy Vanderhaeghe, the brilliant novelist from Saskatoon, had come out after breakfast in the cafeteria, to find a male elk blocking the way to his residence up the hill. The elk looked frisky, so Guy, a sensible man, decided to wait until the elk and his harem moved on. Unfortunately, a young woman came out of the cafeteria and headed straight up the hill. Guy, a polite man, not inclined to issue instructions to strangers , suggested that, um, it might be smart to wait until the elk drifted away.

The woman was not impressed. “I will walk wherever I please”, she said, and began to march up the hill.

In Guy’s words, “She ended up behind a tree”. She was now keenly aware that the huge elk’s antlers, and its sharp hooves, were dangerous weapons. As Guy tells it, in order to help he took out a white handkerchief and started to wave it at the elk. Shyly.

Enter Robert Kroetsch, in Banff as a poetry instructor. Surprisingly, his poetic skills gave him the confidence to stride straight at the elk, shooing it away. The trapped woman scuttled off, not pausing to thank Bob Kroetsch or Guy Vanderhaeghe, or his white hankie.

Now, years later, Roddy Doyle was in Banff in the Fall. Rutting time is accompanied by very serious annual warnings about the dangers. Like me Roddy was staying at the Banff Centre, and we made sure that he took the elk warnings seriously. Roddy, a small, neat man (whom I later saw on a visit to Dublin, along with Colm Toibin, whose 2021 novel, The Magician, I warmly recommend) was very surprised by this threat. This was new to him, he explained to his Banff Centre audience, in his North-Dublin accent. He was prepared for most of the hazards facing a touring author, but these had never before included “the danger of being focked by an elk.”

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Fifty years ago, in Spring 1972, I published a book about a young Indigenous boy, growing up in Canada “just before the coming of the white man”. It was intended to attract young readers, before the age of 12, and, at 79 illustrated pages, sold for $4.50.

Brave days!

And it was a brave book, because young Agouhanna was , as I recall from a phrase we used to promote the book, “the little Indian who was afraid”. He was terrified of the wild forest, its noise and its silences, and as a chief’s son, he was not naturally inclined to pass leadership tests with ease. Yet as a boy who would not eat meat out of respect for other living creatures he was determined to become a man without violence or warfare.

Of course, this was a book written about native life by a white man, which raises questions in our minds today . But it was written in French, a fact that gave me great pride, although I had little to do with the fine translator, Harvey Swados, or the illustrator, Julie Brinckloe. The author was the amazing Claude Aubry.

Claude was a proud Francophone. born in Morin Heights in the Laurentians in 1914. As a country boy he had to walk three kilometres through field and forest to get to school. He was a good scholar, and in due course got his B.A. from the University of Montreal. As a bilingual student with impressive knowledge of English he got his B.L.S. from McGill, and became a major figure in the Library world, eventually becoming the Director of the Ottawa Public Library and of the Eastern Ontario Regional Library System.

And he wrote! Two of his books, The King of the Thousand Islands and The Christmas Wolf, won major Canadian prizes. Meanwhile, besides Agouhanna, with its sympathetic look at another culture, he gave us all the remarkable book The Magic Fiddler and Other Legends of French Canada.

I knew him well. Somehow Claude and I developed such a friendship that distinguished publishing events would find their cocktail parties disturbed by the white-haired Claude and the long-haired Doug, sneaking around other guests, firing imaginary pistols at each other. We were both good at it, as I recall. And he was a delightful man. I’m happy to pay a tribute to him now.

Please see the link below, which reveals a long, and very unusual, interview with people in Edinburgh who run a site dedicated to publishing in Scotland. They conducted a very thorough interview with me, where I talk at some length about my Scottish background, and then my career in Canada.

By the way, Anthony Jenkins and I have just completed a new book, GREAT SCOTS: Major Canadian Author with Links to Scotland…….By Douglas Gibson, illustrated by Anthony Jenkins.

The search is now on for a Publisher to take on these 35 interesting writers, from Sir Alexander MacKenzie all the way through John Galt to John Buchan/Lord Tweedsmuir and Lucy Maud Montgomery and Alistair MacLeod all the way to Alice Munro, and beyond!

Publishing in Canada: Interview with Douglas Gibson

On Saturday, July 10, 2021, Alice Munro will turn 90. Since she is , so far, Canada’s only Nobel Prizewinner for Literature, this will be an occasion for the country to mark with pride.

In 1921 The Wingham Advance-Times announced the birth: “Laidlaw – In Wingham General Hospital on Friday, July 10th, to Mr. and Mrs. R.E. Laidlaw, a daughter, Alice Ann.” From that simple beginning in Huron County, Ontario, Alice Laidlaw went on to a career that involved meeting and marrying a man at Western named Jim Munro. In time he became a bookseller in Victoria, with his wife Alice working in the bookstore, while producing three fine daughters and, oh yes, writing short stories on the side.

Those short stories proved to be the beginning of a major literary career, so that one important magazine, The Atlantic, stated with confidence in 2001 that “Alice Munro is the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years’ time.”

Consider the list of books that she has produced over her career– all of them, please note, collections of short stories, although one of them, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971, was inaccurately presented as a novel, because of the publishing world’s belief in those days that “short stories don’t sell”. Alice Munro helped to change that.

In order of publication Alice Munro’s books are, Dance of the Happy Shades, Lives of Girls and Women, Something I’ve been Meaning to Tell You, Who Do You Think You Are? (published outside Canada with the inferior title The Beggar Maid), The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, Selected Stories, The Love of a Good Woman, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Runaway, and The View from Castle Rock. An astonishing record.

Now, sadly, Alice is not writing any new material. Instead she is living quietly at home in small town, Ontario, and is avoiding any further public engagements. But her stories live on, and her millions of admirers, like me, (and I was lucky enough to work with her from Who Do You Think You Are? onward until The View from Castle Rock) will wish to celebrate her long life.

My last blog about Jake McDonald taking me to  meet some bush pilots has attracted some interest. In ACROSS CANADA  BY STORY I gave the learned opinion that “every successful Canadian non-fiction book must involve stories about bears, wolves, hockey players, and bush pilots”.

Hugh MacLennan knew this. He won two Governor-General’s awards for his non-fiction (plus three for his books of fiction), and paid careful attention to Canada’s North, and to the bush pilots who fly the freezing skies there.

I quote the following story by Hugh:…..

“When winter comes to this region, it does not come slowly, it strikes with a crack. I met a veteran of many years on the Mackenzie who told me that he once escaped having to spend an entire long winter in Aklavik by a matter of a minute. His was the last plane out, and as he stood on one of the pontoons filling his tank with gas, he suddenly noted ice forming on the water. He threw the can away, jumped into the pilot’s seat without even taking the time to screw on the cap of the gas tank, gunned the plane, and took off. The thin ice was crackling about the pontoons before he became airborne, and as he made his circle to head south he saw the pack ice thrusting in, and the lagoon from which he had risen turn opaque as though the frost had cast a wand over it.”