March 21 at The Explorer’s Club—A Discussion w/Canadian author Ken McGoogan on “Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery”

As a longtime editor and publisher of books about the Arctic and Canada, I’m excited to announce that I’ve been invited to moderate a discussion on Thursday, March 21 at The Explorer’s Club in Manhattan with Canadian writer Ken McGoogan, author of Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery (Douglas & McIntyre, April 9, 2024). The event is timely thanks to an exhibit “The Awe of the Arctic,” running at the NY Public Library (42nd St location) from March 15-July 13, where McGoogan will also be making a presentation on March 22.

It will be a ticketed event, $15 for Explorer’s Club members (a venerated institution, established in 1904), $30 for non-members. The evening will kick off with a reception and drinks from 6:00 – 7:00 pm. Our discussion will also be livestreamed. More details at the author’s website linked to here and the venue’s site here. In preparation for the event I’ve had occasion to write a bio that traverses my background as a bookseller, editor, publisher, and agent, and my career-long association with Canadian books and authors, which I’m pleased to share here.

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Philip Turner/my Canadian-adjacent bio

I have worked in the book business and publishing industry for more than four decades, often championing Canadian books and authors, as co-owner of Undercover Books, a family-run bookstore chain in Cleveland, Ohio, established in 1978; in-house acquiring editor, executive editor, and editor-in-chief for eight NY publishing companies from 1986-2009; and an independent book developer and literary agent the past fifteen years.

During my career as a retail bookseller I made a special effort to stock and sell work by Canadian authors, including books by Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Patrick Watson, Farley Mowat, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Pierre Berton; as an editor I published US editions of books by Richler, Mowat, Atwood, Berton, Romeo Dallaire, Paul Quarrington, Paul Anderson, Antonine Maillet, Jan Lars Jensen, Howard Engel, Gwynne Dyer, Elaine Dewar, Brian Fawcett, Carol Bruneau, Julian Sher, Joan Barfoot, George Elliott Clarke, and the aforementioned Ken McGoogan.

Ken McGoogan, in the Barren Lands.

In the early 2000s I published two of McGoogan’s books, including Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002), the ur-book for me and many readers in learning about the tangled fate of John Franklin and his doomed voyage, for which McGoogan won The Christopher Award, given to producers, directors, and writers of books, films and television specials that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.”

I’ve edited other tales of exploration, such as The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002) by Michael Punke, and republished polar classics from past decades, including: Alone, Admiral Richard Byrd’s unforgettable 1939 memoir of six-month solo sojourn near the South Pole, Afterword by David G. Campbell, author of Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica; Snow Man: John Hornby in the Barren Lands by Malcolm Waldron, Introduction by Lawrence Millman, chronicling a 1923 trek by a “Hermit of the North”; and Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, Introduction by Howard Frank Mosher, on the 1903 expedition of Leonidas Hubbard and Dillon Wallace, all published by me under the Kodansha Globe imprint in the 1990s.

As a literary agent, I represent such books as The Twenty-Ninth Day: How I Survived a Grizzly Attack on the Canadian Tundra (Blackstone Publishing, 2019, Minnesota Book Award finalist) by Alex Messenger; The Barrens: A Novel of Love and Death in the Canadian Arctic (Arcade Publishing, 2022, winner of the Minnesota Book Award) by Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson; and Toronto men’s style writer Pedro Mendes’ Ten Garments Every Man Should Own: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe (Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2021). Philip Turner Book Productions also represents Maya Miller, co-founder, drummer, and lyricist of the Canadian garage rock band, The Pack a.d., whose memoir we’ll be presenting to publishers in 2024.

Philip Turner Book Productions is a joint editorial consultancy and literary agency which I operate with my adult son Ewan Turner.

As a freelance music critic, I attended the NXNE music festival in Toronto numerous times as accredited press, and am a member of an informal fan community of music-lovers who follow Canadian indie bands (hashtag: #CANRock), a group that meets up from time to time online and at festivals and concert venues. I write about books, publishing, music, culture, and media on my two websites The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian. Ewan is a creative writer who publishes under the pen name M.G. Turner.

“Ten Garments Every Man Should Own,” coming in March 2021 from Dundurn Press

I’m pleased to let readers know that Toronto menswear writer’s book Ten Garments Every Man Should Own: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe will be published by Dundurn Press in March 2021. More details on my blog The Great Gray Bridge, with a screenshot of the post below.

 

Howard Engel, RIP

Howard Engel was a very good man, and a terrific writer. I had the privilege of publishing two of his Benny Cooperman detective novels in their US editions, Memory Book and East of Suez. While working with him in the mid-2000s, I visited Toronto from NYC. He had me over for tea and then we went to dinner at a great Hungarian restaurant on Bloor St. After our paprikash and schnitzel, we stopped in at the Book City nearby and he signed a few copies of his books they had on hand. He was very popular among the booksellers. Howard was delightful, so warm and interesting to spend time with. RIP Howard Engel, age 88. More info on Howard via this link

European Union & Privacy Matters

I don’t know how many readers I have that live in the EU, or are EU subjects, but I know that the international body is installing new requirements about safeguarding web users’ information, so whether you EU readers are one or many, this statement is for you, and really for anyone concerned about their privacy and personal information.

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I don’t have any data harvesting software that picks up people’s info, even when they don’t leave it deliberately.

II

If you choose to subscribe to my blog—which you can do by clicking through to “Sign up to get New Posts By Email” on the right-hand rail adjacent to this post—that just means you get an email announcing each new post I publish, but my referral system doesn’t do—and will never do anything—with your email address, other than to automatically send you the new posts.

III

If I ever were to email you directly and personally it might be to announce something major, like the creation of a wholly new blog, but not randomly or incessantly.

IV

If you happen to subscribe to this blog, or to my other site, The Great Gray Bridge, thanks for doing that. But whether you do,or not, I promise to keep your data away from any commercial users. Thanks most of all for reading The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian.

For more information, please visit this web page.

 

SCTV Documentary Coming Soon

If I had time, I could write a post about how it is that Canadian comedy has been leading the comic parade since the 1980s. Until then, here’s a video of one of my favorite sketches by SCTV, when he played Babe Ruth. Candy plays the skit in a Yankees uniform, visiting the hospital room of a supposedly mortally ill kid. Babe’s been told he’s supposed to try to make the kid feel better, even if only for an hour. So he promises the kid he’ll hit a home run for him. But the kid, played by a good kid actor, acts all entitled and selfish—”Gee, Babe will you hit two home runs for me?” Gee, Babe will you dance around on one foot with your hand on your cap and singing a song for me, Babe?” It’s a subversive little playlet.

Remembering a Favorite Canadian Novelist—Robertson Davies Visits a NY Hotel Room

Canadian novelist Robertson Davies (1913-95) in the Dorset Hotel, NY, 1988. From a NY Times story yesterday about the Ryerson Image Center in Toronto. Davies has since the 1980s been a favorite novelist of mine, when I sold hundreds of copies of his books at Undercover Books in Cleveland.

At the Great Gray Bridge I wrote about Davies in 2013 on the 100th anniversary of his birth, when CanadaPost made a stamp in his honor. With my web designer Harry Candelario, I later adapted the stamp into a motif for this blog.

Elsewhere, on Honourary Canadian, I shared several letters I received from Davies when I was selling his books, and marketing executives at his publisher, Viking Press, asked me to encourage other publishers to read and recommend his books. One of Davies’ letters was a response to my question for him after a visit I had made to London, which included a pilgrimage to a statue honoring the great thespian Henry Irving. Davies wrote to me on May 30, 1980:

“You will not find any magicians or jugglers under Henry Irving’s statue in London now because they have put flower beds around it, but at the time that Magnus Eisengrim [of The Deptford Trilogy] performed there it was flat pavement and street performers of all kinds gave their exhibitions there and on the outskirts there were always a number of pavement artists, who are also a vanishing breed. Unfortunately, life is becoming so heavily policed in our Welfare State that all these picturesque people are vanishing, but, when I saw them there when I was a young man, I always thought how pleased Irving would be that these humblest members of his profession were gathering, so to speak, under his cloak for protection.”  

I love Davies’ phrase “pavement artist” and the twinkle in his eye that appears in all these renderings of his audaciously bearded countenance!  #CANLit

“Dirty Windshields,” Grant Lawrence’s New Book on Touring with The Smugglers

Readers of this blog may recall how much I enjoyed Grant Lawrence’s first two books,  Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and other Stories from Desolation Sound, a memoir of his many summers spent in the environs of a family cabin on Desolation Sound in the wilds of British Columbia, and The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie, which chronicles his uneasy relationship with hockey. That’s why I’m delighted that yesterday I received a copy of Grant’s new book, Dirty Windshields: The Best and Worst of The Smugglers’ Tour Diaries, which chronicles the life of the band he was lead singer and frontman for in the 1990s, before he became a CBC broadcaster and music journalist. I began reading it right away, and was fascinated with the Prologue, which provides the origin story of The Smugglers. What I love about Grant’s books is how he blends hilarious laugh-out-loud tales you instantly want to share with your seat-mate, along with tug-on-the heart stories that leave you touched and a bit teary-eyed. Rock writer Ira Robbins, publisher of the Trouser Press Record Guide enjoyed Dirty Windshields: “Told with equal measures pride and shame, this uproarious chronicle of vans, violence, alcohol, cops, fires, floods, blizzards, wrong turns, crooked club owners, actual snakes, robbery, bodily fluids and calamities of all sorts is the perfect companion to the band’s mega-fun music.”

 

http://www.honourarycanadian.com/fridayreads-october-25-grant-lawrences-the-lonely-rink-confessions-reluctant-goalie/

Always Something New to Learn about Canada, like the Acadian Dialect Chiac, Vernacular for Author Antonine Maillet

I recently heard a fascinating radio episode on the public radio program The World about a dialect of French heard nowadays exclusively in the regions of Canada where people of Acadian descent live today, Nova Scotia (NS) and New Brunswick (NB). It’s called Chiac, a name derived from a nearby town, Shediac, NB, that calls itself “Lobster Capitol of the World.” The program had run a shorter version of this half-hour podcast on WNYC, and I’m listening to the full version while writing this post. I was particularly excited when at the end of the radio bit they played a song by the incomparable Lisa Leblanc, who I heard live and loved at the CMJ festival in 2014, shown here. As readers of this blog may recall, I’ve traveled a lot in Atlantic Canada, including through Acadian locales, including the scenic island of Cape Breton, NS, where I learned about the mass expulsion of 1755-1764 which the British Navy forced on French-speaking people who’d settled in the region. I’d never known the local dialect had a name.

Relatedly, as editor at Walker & Co in 1987, I published the US edition of a novel by one of New Brunswick’s most honored writers, Antonine Maillet (b. 1929) of Bouctouche, NB, a town just north of Shediac facing the Gulf of St Lawrence across from the southern shores of Prince Edward Island. The book had come out in Canada a few years earlier, and I acquired US rights from a doyenne of Canadian publishing, Louise Dennys, for many years with Random House and Knopf Canada who was then part of her own company, Lester & Orpen Dennys. Maillet’s book was a fantastical historical novel, featuring a female pirate named Crache à Pic (translates as ‘spit-in-your-eye), skipper of a ship called Sea-Cow. who while Prohibition prevails in the States is running whiskey to American smugglers’ boats in the north Atlantic. My flap copy read, “Immediately reminiscent of Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore and Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances, the Walker Adventure Series is pleased to publish The Devil is Loose! and Antonine Maillet, a storyteller of international reputation.”

Mackenzie’s 1947 novel was set during WWII, when a whisky-laden ship runs aground near the aptly-named Great Todday and Little Todday, Scottish islands whose ration  of spirits has run out, leaving locals high and dry, who must decide what to do with the contraband; it was adapted for the funny movie, Tight Little Island. Mosher’s Disappearances is a multi-generational romp featuring a family who sometimes go by the surname Goodman, and sometimes Bonhomme. They live in the mythical Northeast Kingdom, Vermont’s northernmost region, and run liquor across the very real Lake Memphremagog, a long body of fresh water that straddles the border with Canada. I used to quote the opening paragraph for customers who I thought would enjoy the novel. Mosher has since written many novels set in Kingdom County.

Maillet was by 1987 already the author of more than 25 novels and plays, rich work that draws on a centuries-long store of folklore and local knowledge, about which she’s a scholar. In ’87, she traveled to NYC from Montreal, where she divides time with Bouctouche, and gave a talk at the Americas Society on Park Ave. Her tour in the US was subsidized by the cultural ministry of Quebec. I’ll add, from the year I entered publishing as an editor, in 1986, Canadian authors I published in the US, including Lt Romeo Dallaire and Margaret Atwood, often received significant support from federal and provincial agencies, eager to promote Canadian writers, including authors freshly launched in their careers, like Steven Galloway, whose first adult novel Ascension I brought in 2002. This held true until a few years in to the reign of PM Stephen Harper, whose government shut off the funds for cultural exchange to the US. I’m hopeful the cultural outreach will be restored and reinvigorated under PM Justin Trudeau.

Maillet is a mighty woman of rather short stature, and quite striking in appearance. We found that the lectern reserved for her was too tall, and unaccountably the venue had no stool or riser for her to stand on. Fortunately, I found a big box holding many reams of photocopy paper and at this ultra white-shoe venue she stood atop it to read from her novel, and lecture in a forceful, accented English about the French vernacular in which she wrote the book, and much of her work. Though I don’t think she called it Chiac, she described the local tongue, and its grounding in the French spoken by arrivals in the new world beginning in the 16th century. She likened it to speaking the French of Rabelais, who I note died in 1555! She described the settlers’ remoteness from French in Europe, as France advanced in to the industrial revolution, an isolation that set the local language, as if trapped in amber. Maillet has also created theater characters like La Sagouine, a wise old woman who tells audiences stories and imparts lore, using the local vernacular. I feel like the live theatre piece must form the heart of Chiac. Maillet’s accomplishments are truly a marvel to be celebrated. I first learned of her when as a bookseller with Undercover Books in Cleveland, when in 1979, with an earlier novel—Pélagie-la-Charrette, or Return to the Homeland, an epic account of the Acadian expulsion, a diaspora that scattered them to other parts of North America, including Louisiana, where the Acadiennes, become Cajuns—she became the only North American writer, male or female, to win France’s most prestigious book prize, the Prix Goncourt.

I was aware that people of Acadian descent still maintain a kind of linguistic flavor now rare in the modern world, but was delighted to learn so much more about it in this excellent half-hour of radio. I love language stuff like this, all the better when it’s about one of my favorite countries, and one of my favorite regions in that country! Below is some detail from the podcast’s web page, which you can listen to in full here.