Literary Aspirations |
For years, Alberta’s book publishing industry has ranked amongst Canada’s smallest, resulting in an exodus of writers and editors, let alone potential revenues. Now, an upstart Calgary publisher seeks to prove there really is no place like home
by Naomi K. Lewis
Freehand Books, Alberta’s newest literary publishing house, launched its first volumes last September before a full house at Pages Books in Calgary. Set up on the top floor of the Kensington Road store, editor Melanie Little introduced herself and the company, Montreal’s Saleema Nawaz read from her story collection, Mother Superior, and Edmonton’s Marina Endicott discussed her novel Good to a Fault. Audience members craned their necks from halfway down the stairs, trying to catch a glimpse. In a city founded on grain and famous for oil, Freehand was being welcomed like a rain shower in a long drought.
To get to this point, though, Little had worked a year of 70-hour weeks, tucked away in a downtown office in Calgary’s historic Grain Exchange, where she’d almost single-handedly acquired, edited and produced four books since the company started in the summer of 2007. The effort has paid off. In the months following that launch, Mother Superior, Good to a Fault, Susan Olding’s essay collection Pathologies, and Jeanette Lynes’ poetry collection, It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems, have received glowing reviews from across the country. One of the stories in Mother Superior won the 2008 Writer’s Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and the book was nominated for the McAuslan First Book Prize given by the Quebec Writers’ Federation. And the coup de grâce: Endicott’s Good to a Fault was shortlisted for the high-profile Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary award.
Though Endicott came up short, the Giller nomination boosted Freehand out of relative obscurity and into the big time on a national scale. Good to a Fault’s sales skyrocketed and the novel went into a third printing, a near-shocking feat for a book published by a small press in its first year of business. Meanwhile, Little and publishing assistant Shelley Sopher piled their acquisitions desk with a barrage of manuscripts from new and known writers. And, Sopher notes, it was suddenly a lot easier to get people to return her calls.
Freehand’s story is all the more remarkable considering the state of Alberta’s book publishing industry during the last decade. Ken Davis, marketing director of Edmonton-based Lone Pine Publishing, and who also hosts CKUA Radio’s Bookmark and serves on the Book Publishers Association of Alberta executive, explains that book publishing took some hard knocks during the Klein government’s decade. “When we say we were ‘bled out’ in terms of support, I’m not kidding,” says Davis. Alberta diverted funds away from the industry just as other provinces did the opposite. Stuck in the national playing field’s deepest gulley, respectable Alberta publishers “decided it was as good a time to get out as any and sold to out-of-province interests.”
But armed with a business plan simply to publish, in Little’s words, “well-supported and well-edited titles” from across Canada, and after generating unprecedented excitement, Freehand has industry insiders like Davis thinking the company is at the leading edge of a long-overdue trend. While Alberta writers and publishers once sought friendlier climes in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, there may be a good reason to stay put. And for the province, that opens the door to a national industry worth roughly $2 billion a year.
During the Klein years, few Albertan books came out to international acclaim. One that did was Thomas Wharton’s multiple award-winning Icefields, published by Edmonton’s NeWest Press in 1995. Wharton, however, confesses that his novel only found a budget for publicity once it was picked up by Washington Square Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, south of the border.
Alberta-raised Ian McGillis has a more typical story. He set his 2002 novel, A Tourist’s Guide to Glengarry, in Edmonton but published it with the Porcupine’s Quill in Ontario. In fact, McGillis, who grew up in the capital but now writes and edits in Montreal, never sent the manuscript to an Alberta press. And it never occurred to him to do so. He remembers being impressed by Wharton’s success, but it seemed exceptional, and he never thought the same thing could happen to him.
