I love this photo of Tim William, but I’m sorry I don’t know who took it.
It’s been a tough year for the arts community in my province of Alberta.
Maybe it’s to be expected with an ageing population — people will die, artists will die, friends will die. And yet at some level we never get used to it and it never gets any easier to say good bye.
Early in the year, I was invited up to Edmonton to speak at a memorial for the wonderful actor John Wright at Theatre Network. I was fortunate to have had John in five of my plays and we had become close to one another over the years. (We were just a couple of Saskatchewan boys, after all.)
It’s possible you would have to write plays yourself to understand the relationship between playwrights and the actors who perform in our plays, who go out there night after night armed only with our imperfect words. Say it’s special and leave it at that. I can’t find the words.
It was certainly a Who’s Who at the Zoo of the Edmonton theatre community on the stage at the Roxy Theatre that evening, along with this interloper from Calgary. The tributes were sincere and meaningful from those of us who congregated to honour John that evening. There was also some levity. A life in the theatre would have to include a certain degree of absurdity, after all.
There was an even deeper sense of loss to grapple with that evening in Edmonton. Beloved actor Julian Arnold had died only a few months earlier. More recently, the patriarch of the Edmonton theatre world (and beyond) Jim DeFelice had passed away, leaving a void that would seem impossible to fill. Julian and Jim had been in the same play of mine, Jim had been the dramaturge on another.
Three giants of the Edmonton community, gone within a few months of each other. In the midst of life, and all that jazz . . .
Meanwhile, back in Calgary where I live, we’ve had losses of our own to deal with this year.
In April, the elder statesman of the Calgary theatre community Grant Reddick passed away. It wasn’t entirely unexpected — Grant was in his 90s. But it still comes as a shock and our sorrow at his passing was no less profound. I was fortunate to have had Grant in one of my plays. What a beautiful artist he was. He was also a consummate gentleman. That was the word we heard the most at his high Anglican funeral at the cathedral: gentleman. That’s a high tribute in a world basically gone mad.
As usual, on hearing about his death I was saddened that I hadn’t made more room for him in my life, visited a little more often, or even picked up the phone now and again.
“Too late!” we say. And yet we learn nothing.
In June, another luminary from our theatre world Kathi Kerbes passed away quite unexpectedly — as I heard again and again, “Too soon.” The stories of Kathi’s stewardship of Shadow Theatre at her memorial were touching and inspirational and often funny. She had worked with so many members of the Calgary theatre community, always with great verve and humour, that her death touched a lot of people deeply.
Most recently, we lost the man pictured above, Tim Williams. Not since the tragic death of Michael Green ten years ago has a death in our community sent such shock waves. Tim was recognized as one of the preeminent blues artists in the world, so his death was felt deeply in the local music community and well beyond. But he was also a bona fide member of the theatre community, having performed on stage and off in a number of productions, and by being married to Johanne Deleeuw, a highly respected member of Calgary’s theatre world.
It was when Johanne was artistic director at Lunchbox Theatre and produced a few of my plays (and directed one) that I first got to know Tim. As I recall, I gave him a Harmon Kardon amp that he took great delight in. From that time twenty-five years ago or so I heard Tim perform countless times — for a while it was as easy for me as walking a block to Mikey’s bar where he was doing a kind of happy hour set. It always amazed me that I could sit and listen to someone as talented as Tim for the price of a beer. He wasn’t hard to find, he played a lot of sets throughout the city up to the very end.
To sit and listen to Tim was, beyond the sheer appreciation of the music, to be schooled in the history of the blues. “Encyclopedic knowledge” I read and again in countless tributes to Tim since he passed. Appreciation for Tim went well beyond social media. City Councillor D. J Kelly, spoke to the city council to honour Tim’s legacy, by attending one blues venue this month — a fitting tribute to Tim’s legacy.
As was the case of all the wonderful people I have mentioned here, beyond being a truly gifted artist and great performer, Tim was a really great guy, someone you were only too happy to spend some time with. The last time we had the chance to talk, I walked into the bar and saw him sitting there waiting to play a set and his eyes lit up when he saw me and we sat and had a beer together and got caught up. He was one of those rare people who could make you feel like you were the most important person in the entire world. His death has left a real void in the Calgary community.
I miss him. I miss all these good folks. Honestly, my world is diminished without them.
Here in Alberta, we manage to live with a sketchy government that no one will admit to having voted for. That’s just politics and governments come and go (some not quickly enough). But saying good bye to our artist friends is never easy, they have all touched us in their own unique and indelible way. Our world is a little duller, a little dimmer, a little sadder without them. They will be missed by many.
I love this design by our friend Peter Moller, making one think of an ancient copy of King Lear, complete with finger smudges!
The publication of my play Queen Lear through Blurb.com.
I have written about the current reality of the publishing world on this blog before but at the risk of repeating myself, here are some thoughts about where I feel things stand right now. Right now being on a Sunday morning in mid-October. A mild autumn day in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
I should preface this post by repeating something I said in an earlier post, that if someone tells you they know what’s going on in the publishing world these days, turn and run the other way. They are lying to you. No one knows. All we know for sure is that things are in a state of flux.
I have also mentioned in an earlier post, but it bears repeating now, that I have four books published by, one could say, traditional publishing houses (Coteau, Red Deer College Press and Broadview). While I believe I was paid a reasonable amount from Coteau, as far as I can remember, I have only received one royalty cheque in my almost twenty years from Red Deer, and that was for $16.00. Broadview sends me royalty statements informing me that I am in a never-ending negative position with them. They figure I owe them some $160.00 after 12 years with two of my books in their catalog. Who am I to argue?
Of course, until now I have published only plays, and one could say that plays don’t really sell all that well. The greatest possible benefit for the author is that their publication increases the likelihood of more productions. What the benefit is for the publisher, I couldn’t really say.
But listen to this. My play, my old chestnut, Some Assembly Required, was published by Coteau Books in Regina, my home town, in 1995 and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. The book sold out its run, but they decided not to reprint it and declined the opportunity to publish subsequent plays of mine. It was like I had done something wrong.
Go figure.
So, you can well imagine that when my friend Michael J. Finner approached me with the idea of starting a publishing company of our own, I was all ears. What did I have to lose? On a cold day in early January, 2008 we met and created B House Publications, with the soon to be realized goal of having my play Writer’s Block as our first publication – for sale in the lobby on opening night.
It was never my intention to have B House serve as a vanity press for me, and so I have worked hard, more so in the early days, finding writers I admire and helping them bring their work to publication. I am proud to say we have published some of Calgary’s very finest authors, including Kirk Miles, Tyler Perry, Jude Dillon, Lindsay Burns, Neil Fleming and others; and dozens of others through two Caffè Beano poetry anthologies. (Another of these, a book of smart phone photographs, is planned for next year, edited my our in-house photo guru, Jude Dillon. It will be launched at Beano’s Stampede Breakfast next July.)
The problem that arose is that I am only one person and can only spread myself so thin. I love the process of meeting with fellow authors and even editing their work and helping get it into book form. After that, in terms of marketing and distribution, I admit I am essentially useless and have let all of these authors down. There just aren’t enough hours in a day.
Until now, we have had our books, usually designed by the amazing Peter Moller, printed with a local company, Blitz Print in Calgary. They do very fine work and are reasonably priced if you’re thinking of printing a book in Calgary.
Someone would then end up with boxes of books in his or her closet, the idea being to sell these, becoming rich and famous during the process. In the early days, we had high hopes that these books would be sold here and afar, but because we never had any marketing support (let alone a plan for distribution) the books and the big dreams only went so far.
Many a time I felt so overwhelmed that I just wanted to abandon the entire project. But then a poet or playwright would approach me with a book idea and I just couldn’t say no. And so we have limped on. I love books and the chance to bring a new book into the world has always been too compelling not to do it.
For the last few years, B House has essentially been an opportunity for self-publishing but with our logo on the cover. Our writers have kept 100% of the royalties. I have spent thousand of hours on B House business and would hate to calculate what that has worked out to as an hourly wage. Meager comes to mind.
Altruism? You bet.
But I’ve also been driven by the fact that because we don’t know the future of publishing, it wasn’t a bad idea to keep this thing alive. You just never know. I honestly don’t know what the future holds, where this might lead, if anywhere, but it just made sense to try against all odds to keep the enterprise afloat.
5 years ago, I wrote the play Queen Lear. B House published it, using our model of having a good design and then printing it locally, we me carting home the books from Blitz Print. I think we printed 100 copies. And then we ran out. (To put it in perspective, a wildly successful play in Canada would be lucky to sell 1,000 copies. We’re not talking huge numbers here.)
I’ve had orders for the book over the last few years, but I just couldn’t see the point of continuing on with our same model. I really didn’t want to order 100 copies, sell ten, and then have those remaining 90 copies taking up space in my office. Boxes of unsold books cause their own kind of anxiety, let me tell you, quite unlike anything else.
This summer I heard about Blurb.com, which I suppose one could best describe as a virtual publisher. They create your book only when an order is placed for it, from one to – well, the sky’s the limit, I suppose. The information on the book and the mechanism for ordering sits on their website (blurb.com or blurb.ca) and so I can promote it, in blogs like this for example, and any way I see fit. But I don’t really have to worry about it after that. This finally offered B House some relief on the distribution side of things.
And so, after some research and growing pains, we finally got the reprint of Queen Lear up and available through Blurb.
The big difference for B House in using Blurb is that we don’t have to make an initial costly purchase of our book, and then find ourselves on the hook to distribute it. It’s just there, on their website. You can order one copy, they will print and mail it to you. Or you can order 100 copies. (In fact, I wish you would!)
Through Blurb, I am able to establish my own royalty which I don’t share with a publishing company. I set it myself and know exactly what I will make per book. If the total exceeds $25.00 in a month, it is deposited in a Pay Pal account for me. Simple. And effective.
At the same time, I can order copies of my own book at cost price and sell these in bookstores that I promote, in this case Calgary’s Shelf Life Books. And any other that would bother to ask me.
My goal here is not to circumvent booksellers. Only publishers.
Is this the future of publishing? Could it the end of conventional publishing as we know it? We have seen the demise of newspapers – I lost a good job when the Calgary Herald was in danger of going into the dumpster a few years ago. Is there any reason to think the same thing won’t happen with publishing houses?
Time will tell, I suppose. Despite what it might seem, I don’t wish any of them any ill fortune. I’m guess I’m old school, but I believe we need books and readers of books to salvage and maintain what’s left of our faltering civilization. Hopefully there is room for all of us, big and small. Or, as we like to say at B House, not small but boutique.
I’ll tell you something. Things are changing and I embrace the change. I welcome it. And I’m curious to see where this all ends up.
Thanks for reading!
Here’s a performance by a man who wrote a great book, his autobiography. Amazing how he keeps going strong after all these years. . .
eugene stickland 