An interview with Maclean’s editor-in-chief Ken Whyte about his new book on William Hearst

Of all the non-fiction titles I’ve read this year, few have surprised and delighted me more than Maclean’s editor-in-chief and publisher Ken Whyte’s new account of the rise of William Randolph Hearst, The Uncrowned King. While the book focuses on the struggle for marketplace dominance between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, it is, at heart, a history of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, densely packed with research, anecdote, and analysis. (It also offers a fantastic epigraph, worth repeating, from the inimitable Randall Jarrell: “The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”)

I spoke with Whyte last week, amidst a grim season for the print media in general, but before this week’s even grimmer news of the bankruptcy of the Tribune group and the New York Times’ new mortgage. As Whyte explains below, his critical reconsideration of Hearst’s early New York success has convinced him that a serious reimagining of what newspapers do is necessary should they hope to survive in the twenty-first century.

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You note that you first read about Hearst while preparing for the launch of the National Post, but that you didn’t see enough there to convince you that the stereotypes about him were inaccurate. What about your experience in newspapers made want to return to study him five years later?

When I returned to it, I still hadn’t changed my mind about Hearst. I’d always had suspicions that something wasn’t right in the way the story was told, because I didn’t believe that Hearst could go from such a low circulation to a high circulation in such a competitive market unless there was something interesting, compelling about his newspaper. So I suspected that people who had written about this episode were missing some of the qualities or appeal of it, otherwise he couldn’t have had that kind of success. (more…)

Taras Grescoe’s excellent book Bottomfeeder is now out in paperback, and recently won the prestigious Writers Trust Award for best non-fiction book of the year…

Taras Grescoe’s excellent book Bottomfeeder is now out in paperback, and recently won the prestigious Writers Trust Award for best non-fiction book of the year. I reviewed Taras’s book in our June issue. He was kind enough to answer my questions about fish, food writing, and fans.

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The book’s main argument—that we should stop eating large, predatory fish and instead consume the more sustainable bottomfeeders—requires an adjustment in our attitudes toward dinner. In researching and adopting the ideas in the book, what has been the single biggest adjustment you’ve made?

I’ve completely adjusted my eating habits when it comes to seafood.

Before I started researching and writing Bottomfeeder, I figured that getting my protein in the form of seafood, from the oceans, was smarter than getting it in the form of chicken, poultry, or beef, from industrial abbatoirs and factory farms. It was a fairly straightforward decision, one I made in the early 90s: fish was clearly more sustainable, and healthier, than meat. At the time, it seemed to me the oceans were inexhaustible as a food source. (more…)

As yesterday’s informal National Post poll showed, Joseph Boyden is the smart-money choice to win this year’s Giller Prize tonight. (Update: Huzzah! I was right.) And for good reason — his new novel, Through Black Spruce, is a methodical study of our relation to the land and each other, marked by Boyden’s characteristically beautiful prose and true, vivid characters. I spoke with Joseph a few weeks ago in Toronto.

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I read in the interview you did with your wife, Amanda, for the CBC, that you handed her a hundred pages of an early version of the novel that just wasn’t working. How did this story originally come to you? And what did you change from those early attempts to make it successful?

The story originally—I knew before I finished Three Day Road that I wanted to write at least one other book, and very possibly two, try and create a trilogy of the family. Each novel could be read on its own, but they don’t have to be read in any particular order, although reading them from first to third might make the most sense. I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and go back to the contemporary—my first story collection was contemporary short stories—and I wanted to explore that world again because I think there’s so much going on, it’s really kind of exciting. And then this whole idea, kind of from a Leonard Cohen song, “Suzanne takes you down” was fascinating to me, and the original title was She Takes You Down, referring to Suzanne, traveling down South and that. But the original title had too many negative connotations that I didn’t want to imply.

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To celebrate the publication of Josh Glenn and Mark Kingwell’s excellent small book, The Idler’s Glossary, I asked Mark to offer glosses on a few of his favourite entries. His response is below. I urge everyone to buy this book; there’ll be nothing more curious and delightful published this fall. (Nor many as beautiful—Seth’s design work is lovely.)

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Hi Jared,

Here is a small sampling of the richness packed into our little book, The Idler’s Glossary. As I say in my introduction, the glossary is the idlest of all textual forms: no narrative, no explicit argument, no structure save the alphabet. And always that insistent, kooky circular imperative to see another word, or compare an entry elsewhere. Thus, the perfect vehicle for insights about idling!

In fact there are mini-narratives and brilliant little arguments scattered liberally through the entries. Like McLuhan’s probes or Nietzsche’s aphorisms, these are little mind-bombs that go off almost randomly, as the reader dips here and there into the book. (more…)

Giller prize winner David Bergen’s new book, The Retreat, is among this fall’s very best novels. Instead of commenting on this myself, I’ll refer you to Danielle Groen’s review of the book from our October/November issue; she says most of what I have to say, and better than I could.

I spoke with David Bergen a few weeks ago in Toronto. He’ll return to town next week as a part of the International Festival of Authors, for a reading on October 31st and a roundtable hosted by The Walrus’s own Jeremy Keehn on November 1st. Click those links to buy tickets, or enter a contest to win some courtesy of IFOA and The Walrus here.

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I know that your last novel sat with you for quite a while before it came to shape. How did this one arrive?

I suppose it came more quickly. With The Time in Between I had written a non-fiction piece previous to the novel, and I used the non-fiction work to create the novel, because the non-fiction stuff just was not working. I discovered I’m not a non-fiction writer, not in the way I want to be—not like a Bruce Chatwin. If only I could write like that, which really isn’t non-fiction I suppose, he bends the truth very much. But you can bend the truth more with fiction, so I decided to write the novel. Because I see my job—I see it as a job, and I see it as work, it’s not something where I wait for inspiration—so in this instance, The Retreat came to me as an image of a family driving across the country, arriving in Kenora, going to this commune. I began the story with the second section, called “The Retreat,” and the first section, “The Island,” came later, when I found Raymond. And when I say ‘found’ Raymond, I think it’s important to say that some of these characters, like Nelson and like Raymond, they were found, or sort of walked into the door, and I said, “Oh wow, here’s Raymond, here’s Raymond delivering fish and chickens to the Retreat.” And of course the unconscious is at work when that happens, and you have to allow it to open up, to be found. So that’s how the novel began. (more…)

There was a time, years ago, when I was working towards a thesis on the little-known but truly brilliant Canadian poet George Johnston. One of the obstacles to doing work on Johnston was that his books were out of print except for the collected poems, which contained some revisions and prevented one from considering the individual editions as artifacts of a given moment. So I’d like to second my friend and colleague Sean Rogers’s excellent essay on university book sales, which were a great boon during those years (and many other years, with less specific purpose). Johnston, you see, was an academic— among other things, he taught literature and Norse myth at Ottawa’s Carleton university—and so much of his books’ meager sales were to fellows in the trade. Exactly, in other words, the sort of volumes that turn up at University book sales, where much of the stock is donated by those affiliated in some way with the academic community.

I must have bought and given away at least four or five copies of Johnston’s first book, a magnificent collection called The Cruising Auk, which Oxford UP released in 1959. (The picture above, actually, was not from a university sale, but rather from a copy of 1966’s Home Free, gift given to me years ago by the very same Sean Rogers, included here because Johnston was also one of the century’s great handwriters.) (more…)

This week marks the beginning of the 29th annual International Festival of Authors in Toronto, and it’s a particularly impressive lineup: 135 writers from fifteen different countries, events spanning ten days and virtually all genres, top-notch Canadian scribes and international heavyweights alike. Given the barrage of literary talent, I thought it would be helpful to make some recommendations. The following are my personal picks for must-see events at this year’s festival. The list is by no means exhaustive, nor meant to imply that anything not chosen isn’t worthwhile—just the lay of the land as I see it, and what I’m personally planning on attending.

For more on the IFOA, be sure to check out our featured page here, where you’ll find Walrus articles by and related to this year’s participants. And don’t miss Andrew Westoll’s official IFOA blog.

Thursday, October 23, 8pm, Fleck Dance Theatre

Reading: Nadeem Aslam, Hermenegilde Chiasson, Joe Dunthorne, and David Adams Richards

I cannot imagine two books more diametrically opposed than Nadeem Aslam’s brooding, poetic take on present-day Afghanistan and Joe Dunthorne’s rollicking, hilarious account of a late-nineties boyhood in Wales. To borrow an obsession from Dunthorne’s novel, will the Fleck Dance Theatre stage be able to handle such cognitive dissonance? (more…)

This week, Lee Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize, and deservedly so. It is a sprawling, brilliant, playful, heartbreaking, and eminently wise book that considers its world with unusual bravery and purpose. It’s easily one of the very best books I’ve read this year. I caught up with Lee Henderson last month, while he was in Toronto for the launch.

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This is your first novel, but unlike many first books it’s not obviously autobiographical. How did your ideas come together?

I think it still is autobiographical, but more symbolic autobiography. I’ve always been doing drawings, and I always thought it was somehow irreverent to draw naked men, and I’d be in writing classes and you’re supposed to write critiques on people’s stories or poems, and I’d just be drawing little naked men for them. It seemed counterintuitive at the time, so I’m always looking for how to draw stories out of very small obsessions like that. I knew that if it was going to take nine years, at least I’d be entertained while I worked on it. (more…)

Bloggers Jared and Sean begin an epic discussion of Stephen King’s The Stand
Above: Mike Perkins’ take on The Stand for the new Marvel Comics adaptation (left), versus Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations in the original book. Click to see larger image.

Last week marked the release of the first installment of a thirty-part comic book treatment of Stephen King’s The Stand, published by Marvel. Along with our new comics blogger, Sean Rogers, I’ll be reviewing each installment as it hits the shelves; hopefully our conversation will offer some sort of insight into the both the comic and the novel, and into the way in which our ideas about stories form and change. It’s a big undertaking, and we’re sure to be frequently late; forgive us.

The Stand: A Conversation will take place on The Shelf and Four-Colour Words, alternating between them with each monthly installment.

Before we begin the review in earnest with next week’s consideration of part one, we talked about our expectations. (more…)

Mary Novik’s Conceit, which was named one of the Globe and Mail’s best books of the 2007 and nominated for the Giller prize, is now out in paperback. I caught up with the Vancouver-based author recently over email to talk about her novel, why John Donne is sexier than Sir Philip Sidney, and what it’s like to live inside your characters.

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In a time when so many first novels are autobiographical, you chose to retreat into the past. What drew you to the historical novel as a form?

When I started to write fiction, about ten years ago, I figured that young writers were much better at getting the contemporary idiom right, so I should try something different. I enjoy reading older literature and came up with the idea for Conceit when reading John Donne’s poems and wondering what his kids would have thought of Dad’s erotica. (more…)

Years ago, when I first met Nick Mount, he was teaching me about Major John Richardson in a U of T course called Early Canadian Literature. As I got to know him over beers and in the classroom, I learned more about his disparate interests: graphic novels, aesthetic theory, John Travolta records. He is the best teacher I’ve ever had. (more…)

This past spring, Pasha Malla released his first book, The Withdrawal Method , a collection of stories that is high on my list of 2008 favourites. In addition to his short fiction (and, as you’ll read below, his upcoming long-form fiction), Malla’s also a humour writer, and as his piece in our September issue shows, a particularly good one. Recently, I asked Pasha about his book, his ha-has, and his upcoming projects.

A lot of the work you’ve done—like your Imaginings in our September issue and your pieces for McSweeney’s —is humour writing. How did you start writing humour, and why do you continue?

Well, I think whether or not my Imaginings piece or the McSweeney’s things are "humour" is totally subjective. I wrote them, obviously, trying to be funny, but other people finding my stuff funny—or not—is up to them. That’s the thing about humour: it’s completely individual and subjective, maybe more so than any other form. I can read a poem in a style or about something I don’t care for, but if it’s well-crafted (and I’m in a good mood) I can objectively say, "OK, I don’t like this, but it’s well done." With humour you can only succeed (making people laugh) or fail (not making people laugh). I’m sure some people will read my whisky tasting thing and think it’s just dumb, or boring, or pointless, or whatever—which is OK, because it comes with the territory. But hopefully some people will laugh—and then hopefully they’ll toilet paper the houses of the people who don’t. (more…)