Five Rivers Publishing Closes

Lorina Stephens today announced the closing of Five Rivers Publishing.

The press, unlike so many others, did not fail. It was in fact thriving, but family issues related to Lorina taking on eldercare made it impossible for her to continue Five Rivers Publishing. I am sad to see Five Rivers go, but Lorina’s reasons are altruistic and it was the right decision.

Lorina helped many authors launch their careers, and her belief in me made my career as a professional editor possible. It was an honour and a privilege for me to have been associated with Five Rivers for nearly a decade.

I hope that Lorina is able to continue her own writing. Her own books were, in my view, undervalued. I met Lorina (online) when I was one of the few reviewers to find and rave about her first novel, and it was through that contact that I became a beta reader on her second novel, then an Editor at Five Rivers, and then Senior Editor. I watched Lorina put more time into the press than into her own writing, and I know she always paid authors, editors, and artists before she took a dime herself.

She put her time, energy, and money into the press because she believed in the community of writers, editors, and artists that she gathered around her. She made it all work in spite of the turmoil in the publishing industry: Five Rivers survived and thrived when other independent presses around her were wiped out.

My hat is off to her vision, her stubborn survival in difficult times, and her promotion of Canadian voices in literature.

I will always be grateful to Lorina and to Five Rivers.

The Rose Guardian - A Review

The Rose Guardian
by Lorina Stephens
Five Rivers Publishing, 2019. 317 pp.

It starts with a funeral.

Una Cotter is dead, and her sixty-something daughter, Vi, is left to sort out her feelings about her mother, her family, her childhood, and her ambiguous inheritance. One cannot but grieve the passing of one’s mother, but when Una Cotter was your mom, it’s complicated.

This is a quiet, thoughtful book that will appeal to anyone working through the loss of a parent—or their own midlife crisis. Lorina Stephens paints a multi-layered canvas of loss and release, of denial and self-examination, of blame and understanding. The portraiture that emerges as each layer is laid down is a complex and nuanced examination of three generations of women, each the product of their era, but also slightly out of phase. Vi learns much that had been hidden when she inherits Una's diaries, but it's Vi's re-examination of her own childhood that provides the greatest insights into her family's dynamic, and the need to understand and come to terms with her own issues.

There is a lot of food for thought here, and what I liked most about the book was its undercurrent of resigned optimism. Life is what it is, you can't change the past, you can't change other people, but you can change your own perceptions and reactions. Looking back, and then letting go of who you were, might just be the best way forward.

Of course, any great book is about more than just the central theme. I loved the multifaceted character of Vi as a competent, compassionate, and creative woman. While those around her are starting to worry she may be losing it, we see that she is just now coming into her own as both an artist and a woman suddenly freed of a weight she has been carrying. I loved the intimate descriptions of the painter at her canvas, both for the technical descriptions and as a central metaphor. I loved the characterization of her relationship with her ex and her uncle, both worthy men. And best of all, I loved her characterization of the ghost (did I mention there's a ghost?), the mystery child who first appears at the funeral. Stephens gets inside the ghost-child's head to show us the true magic of childhood—which is to say, often very dark magic, a terrifying world of monsters with only the Rose Guardian between you and chaos. I recognized several of the nightmares from my own childhood, and glimpsed some of my daughter's still current fears, and if these scenes don't resonate with you, you must have had an exceptional childhood . . . or a selectively poor memory.

Stephens depicts people coping with their lives and each other as best they can, such that in the end, they are all sympathetically portrayed, even Una. This is the family next door, or down the block, or possibly people you recognize in your own extended family. I'm glad I've met them, glad Vi is doing okay . . . and I really like this new direction in Vi's paintings.

Leacock Medal

The longlist for the 2017 Leacock Medal (in alphabetical order by author surname) is:

• John Armstrong for A Series of Dogs, New Star Books.
• Mona Awad for 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Penguin Canada.
• Gary Barwin for Yiddish for Pirates, Random House Canada.
• Judy Batalion for White Walls, New American Library/Random House Canada.
• Lesley Crewe for Mary, Mary, Nimbus Publishing.
• C. P. Hoff for A Town Called Forget, Five Rivers Publishing.
• Marni Jackson for Don’t I Know You, Flatiron Books.
• Amy Jones for We’re All in This Together, McClelland & Stewart.
• Jack Knox for Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada, Heritage House Publishing.
• Noah Richler for The Candidate: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Doubleday Canada.
• Drew Hayden Taylor for Take Us to Your Chief And Other Stories, Douglas & McIntyre.

From the Stephen Leacock Associates Press Release:

This year’s longlist will be narrowed down to three Leacock Medal finalists, who will be announced in Orillia on Wednesday, May 3, 2017.

The final winner, who also receives a $15,000 prize supported by TD Bank Financial Group, is to be announced on Saturday, June 10, 2017, at a gala award dinner at Geneva Park Conference Centre, just outside Orillia, Ontario. The gala dinner is open to the public, and limited tickets are on sale exclusively through the Stephen Leacock Museum in Orillia.

In announcing the list, Taylor described the submissions this year as of exceptionally high quality. The judges and readers recommend all the longlisted books as entertaining Canadian works, worthy of consideration for this prestigious and unique literary humour award in Canada’s sesquicentennial year.

I'm thrilled to see C. P. Hoff's A Town Called Forget on the longlist.

The novel follows the adventures of a young girl, sent without explanation to live with the eccentric aunt she didn't even know she had. As she tries to solve the mystery of her banishment, she slowly comes to terms with her aunt's skewed view of the world, and the exceedingly odd townsfolk of Forget.

From the moment I saw the manuscript, I knew this novel was something special. I acquired the book for Five Rivers, Lorina did the substantive editing, and I followed up with a line/edit (and then there was a copy edit after).

This makes four books that have been shortlisted for national awards from Five Rivers Publishing. Fingers crossed for the win!

[Now, hoping Den Valdron's The Mermaid Tale gets shortlisted for the World Fantasy or Bram Stoker Awards]

When Words Collide 2016 GoH Speech

Dr. Robert Runté speaking at When Words Collide. [Photo:

The When Words Collide writers' conference (held each August in Calgary) has a podcast page on which they release Guest of Honour speeches, panel discussions, and interviews. These are generally well worth a listen.

My Guest of Honour speech August 2016 was just released: "WWC 2016 GOH speech finds the curmudgeonly, retired professor Robert Runté questioning English teachers and praising fan fiction."

Tigana vs Plested

My family came up to Calgary to pick me up from When Words Collide Convention, and I had arranged with Mike Plested to meet Tigana. Mike graciously dedicated his second Mik Murdoch novel The Power Within (which was launched that weekend) to Tigana. Tigana, of course, had no idea he had done that until he presented her with a signed copy in the lobby of the Carriage House Inn at the end of WWC. She was kind of impressed! The dedication reads:

For all those people who have supported Mik Murdoch: Boy Superhero and especially to Tigana Runté who told her dad Mik was worth publishing in the first place.

Of course, he then enlisted Tigana's promise to read his fantasy novel and pressure me to publish that too....

Aurora Award Nomination (2014)

My keynote address at Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy June 8, 2013: "Why I Read Canadian SF: The Social dimension of Reading" has been shortlisted for an Aurora Award. (an abstract is available at http://www.sfeditor.ca/Why.htm.)

Also pleased to see Susan MacGregor's The Tattooed Witch, a book I acquired and edited for Five Rivers Publishing, nominated for Best Novel! (Other novel nominees are Robert Sawyer, Gay Kay, Julie Czerneda and Chadwick Ginther, so one hell of an impressive crowd).

So that's the second year in a row that one of the books for which I was editor has made it to the Aurora ballot. (Mik Murdoch: Boy Superhero was nominated last year in the Young Adult Novel category, but lost out to YA giant, Charles DeLint.)

And although not one of the books I edited, I was also pleased to see another Five Rivers book on the Young Adult Novel short list: David Ladroute's Out of Time. And Susan Forest, another Five Rivers' author, is nominated for short story category. So four nominations in four categories for Five Rivers. Not a bad year at all (and that's only the SF line!)

Impending Retirement

I should probably mention here that I am taking early retirement from my position as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge, June 30, 2013. Partly this is due to my increasing interest in my other career as editor (for Five Rivers Publishing and as a freelancer at SFeditor.ca) and writer; partly it is thanks to the university's offer of an attractive retirement option (an incentive bonus plus a post-retirement contract that combined works out to about 80% of the salary for about 20% of the work for the next three years....); and partly reflects the fact I am, you know, getting old.

(Retirement incentive plans make a lot of economic sense for the university, because now that there is no mandatory retirement age, some of my colleagues are staying on well past age 65. Current collective agreement allows professors to collect standard raises for a total of 35 years, and merit increments as long as they are earning them, which often translates to quite significant salaries for these individuals. They could, for example, hire three assistant professors right out of the PhD program (i.e., young, current, and energetic) for the price of one of me, and probably four for the price of some of my older colleagues. So offering us a package to promise to go away, represents significant savings, especially if they just replace 2/3 of present tenured faculty.

In my case, I will officially retire and start getting my pension in July; and I will teach two courses a year for next two years, then one course the third year, to slowly taper off...this gives them time to find a replacement, and gives me time to get used to not being a professor. But I also love that it gives me time to transition into full-time editor/writer. Teaching was only 40% of my regular workload, the rest being committee work (20%) and research (40%). So teaching two courses a year frees up about 80% of my time for writing and editing, so I can continue to build that business into a living wage. I'm pretty happy about that.

Not entirely coincidentally, I have finally finished the first draft of my novel. I have explained to Mary that once I have edited the manuscript, publishers will beat a path to my door and I will thereby effectively double my retirement income, and that consequently she need have no fear about her now being the sole income for the family. Oddly, she does not seem reassured....

As it happens, today I got my assessment from my Dean on my last two years as a professor, and was pleased to find that I was rated as "Excellent" for teaching, and "Outstanding" for research. So, nice to end on a high note, rather than, say, waiting until they had to have security escort me out the door -- because I was no longer able to find the way myself.

Retreat Day 8

Keep to my cabin for most of the day, just coming out for lunch and dinner; take in the show at 10 PM. It’s the “comedy and vocal impressionist” Jason Neistadt, and I have to say, he is very funny. Fascinating to see him do impressions of people who have been dead for decades and get huge laughs from an audience that remembers them as if it were yesterday. Bit depressing that I seem to be one of them. Poor kids in the front row have no idea who he is supposed to be. So he tries Dr. Evil from Austin Powers, and gets blank stares from everyone except one pre-teen who cracks up. I am impressed with Neisadt’s repertoire because it is obvious he is reaching into a vast line up to pull out the ones he thinks will work for the Holland America crowd. If he tried this routine in LA, he’d get nowhere, as you have to be at least 60 to get any of it. But it’s a nice end of day wind down activity for me.

I make excellent progress on my report; break to do some more fiction editing. I finish the book I want to buy for Five Rivers: very pleased with it, better than I remembered. (It’s funny how wrong our memories get…one of the scenes I remembered the most distinctly isn’t actually there at all. I must have made it up out of whole cloth. And I had completely forgotten the two bits of business that are now my two favorite scenes. Such brilliant little touches of characterization, humor, that create an almost complete picture of village life in just a few sentences.) Such a nice little book, can’t understand how it has been allowed to languish out of print for decades.

I start the next book I am reading for Five Rivers. Actually another editor’s project, so I’m just reading it to give some quick general feedback--more free reading than assignment. Can’t put my finger on why exactly, but it reads more like European novelist than Canadian. Nice alien world though.

Retreat: Day 5

Finally connected with client over editing job, and manager apologized nicely for screwing up, but apparently had emailed me at the wrong address, and assigned the work elsewhere when I hadn't replied. Why the manager hadn't tried, oh I don't know, phoning me at the contact numbers they'd insisted on when she hadn't heard back, or why they hadn't responded to my correctly addressed emails to them is less clear. "Oh, we never got those emails!" The whole conversation has the same feel as when students insist that they have submitted their assignments on time, it must have gotten lost in email/ Moodle/ WebCT/ their dog somehow.... But whatever: it was pro bono work, and I'd much rather be working on other stuff during my retreat.

So actually go out and about in San Diego. The Westgate, where I'm staying, is on the edge of the Gaslight district, so walked around there for a couple of hours. Yesterday was pouring rain, nasty wind, too cold to walk very far, so I just went to downtown mall for some take away. Today was way better. Intermittent rain, but then really great sun when the clouds open up. Had the drinking chocolate at Ghirardelli's. Bought a few things for the kids at World Market. Enjoyed the architecture of San Diego (nice looking convention centre! Some nice towers. Even some of the smaller buildings colourfully painted etc.)

Above: Convention Center; below, just some colour

Thing that makes the strongest impression on me, however, are the number of homeless on the streets here. I count an average of three per block. I'm only approached by pan handlers a couple of times, and they're carefully low key, polite even, but every few yards there's someone sitting with a shopping cart, three to five large green garbage bags of possessions, and a resigned expression. In two cases, its families. And everybody else just walks by as if this is perfectly normal. I can't understand how average American can feel secure when so many of those around them are so obviously in desperate straits, though the other subliminal presence were armies of guys with "security" on the back of their jackets. One particular image burned into my brain is of an obviously homeless guy leaning against a parking meters, watching at a group of yuppies -- their clothes and smart phones and expensive sun glasses pushed back into their hair said 'brokers' or 'software moguls' to me -- yakking away in an sidewalk open air bar. The way he was starring at them -- though they were completely oblivious of him, three feet away -- I could see him thinking, "that's who I was four years ago". And I look back at the yuppies and think, one mis-step and it is a long way down....

No wonder the 'haves' are so focused on getting more. San Diego is a nice place to visit, but I don't think I could live somewhere where it is so literally every man for himself.

And all those guns.

Back to the hotel for productive day on various writing projects. Make excellent progress on my day-job Report. In between working on different sections of report, start negotiating a three book deal for Five Rivers while I still have reliable internet access. Author seems open to it. Another coup for Five Rivers, I think.

Work until supper time, eat at The Bandar. Unbelievably big portions, three times the size of anything ever served in equivalent Canadian restaurant. Again, can't help but think of homeless outside, conspicuous consumption inside. But would highly recommend Bandar to anyone who likes middle Eastern food. Superb meal. Had to wonder, though, how many of the customers realize that "Persian" means "Iranian"? (Aside from that group over at the next table who are themselves clearly Iranian and therefore, you know, potential terrorists. :-) Another productive writing session after supper. Things are starting to come together!

Interview on Editing

Interview with me on editing by Mike Plested on his regular Get Published podcast.

interview with me at Five Rivers

Interview with me by Lorina Stephens at Five Rivers Publishing blog today. Mostly about how I expect to fit in at Five Rivers, bit about my writing, and so on.

New Job

See announcement of my new positionwith Five Rivers (moonlighting of course; I'm still a professor for my day job) .

It's been an interesting journey: I started by reading and reviewing Lorina's first novel, Shadow Song, which is a brilliant example of why some great literature has to be self-published (in contrast to most self-publishing, which has been turned down for good reason.) That led to me discussing trends in publishing with Lorina and her role as a rapidly growing micropublisher (see earlier posts). The more we talked, the more I became convinced that she and others like her represent the future of SF publishing, And I've been looking for an oopertunity to get back into SF editing but all the other presses I was looking at kept missing what are for me the obvious trends of where things are going in the future. Lorina Stephens and Five Rivers seem to be positioning themselves at the cutting edge, right where I wanted to be.

I look forward to a long and fascinating association with Five Rivers.