Douglas Gibson comes to MacEwan University
Douglas Gibson, former editor and publisher at McClelland & Stewart, writer of Stories About Storytellers. Photograph provided by Douglas Gibson.
By Aaron Taylor
EDMONTON — One of Canada’s most renowned editors will be bringing his one-man show to MacEwan’s John L. Haar Theatre on March 2 and transforming it into a landscape that spans multiple decades of Canadian literature.
Stories About Storytellers chronicles Gibson’s career as an editor and publisher. It also provides insight into the storytellers that he worked with, Gibson said.
The event has caused a stir, said Sherrell Steele, the manager of the school of communications at MacEwan.
“As soon as the invites went out I heard responses from people saying that they are very excited,” Steele said.
And with a career that has spanned decades, it is easy to see why Gibson’s presence garners excitement.
Gibson’s career began in Scotland, where he won essay prizes in high school and a creative writing prize at St. Andrew’s University. This led to a scholarship that allowed him to come to North America.
After arriving, Gibson traveled across the United States on a $99 Greyhound bus pass until he came to Seattle, where he boarded a ferry and crossed the border into Victoria.
From there, there was only one destination that made sense. “Toronto was the centre of the publishing, and the media, world in Canada. So that’s where I took the bus to,” Gibson said.
That is where Gibson got his first job in the publishing industry, as trainee editor at Doubleday Canada. Immediately he realized that the job matched his personality.
“You have to be really interested in the details of the words,” Gibson said. “You have to be able to spend weeks going through the words. At the same time you also have to be able to say, ‘OK, here’s how we’re going to sell this.’”
And sell he did. After working his way up through the ranks at Doubleday, he joined Macmillan of Canada and was ultimately offered the position of his dreams at McClelland & Stewart as the first imprint publisher in Canada.
As an imprint publisher Gibson was granted creative freedom to select and edit manuscripts, while seeing them through to their completion.
“Any time a book is born, you see the first copy and you hold it in your hands, it is like Christmas,” Gibson said. “No matter how big the publishing house. That’s the real excitement of the publishing world.”
That excitement was only amplified by the amount of time Gibson spent on each book. As an imprint editor, he would edit between five and 10 books per year, and oversee every aspect of the process.
This dedication eventually led to Gibson accepting a position as the publisher of McClelland & Stewart, a position that he held until 2004, when he retired.
Since Gibson left McClelland & Stewart hard economic times, coupled with a general decline in the publishing industry, caused them to be sold to Random House.
For Gibson, this has called into question the future of the publishing industry.
“There is obviously huge uncertainty about the future of publishing,” Gibson said. “On the other hand, the sad business of McClelland & Stewart being absorbed so that it is now just another imprint of Random House is part of a sad, slow descent over the last few years into the current company situation.”
And while this is a concern of Gibson’s, his main focus now is his own writing, something that he was not able to dedicate his time to while he was polishing others’ words.
“It was only after I retired that I said, ‘OK, now’s the time,’ so I started to write,” Gibson said.
But the transition from editing to writing was not as seamless as the transition from editor to publisher.
“It’s entirely different,” Gibson said. “Editing, even when you are really heavily involved, it’s so much easier. The structure is already there, you just have to climb aboard a structure that is already moving rather than build a new one.”
Even the experience he had as an editor didn’t make the process easy, Gibson said. “The page doesn’t care, it’s still blank, it’s just you versus the page.”
Gibson won the battle against the page though, and what emerged was Stories About Storytellers, an account of the characters that Gibson worked closely with during his tenure as an editor and publisher. And while this may not have been the most traditional road to publishing a debut book, Gibson said, that is just life.
“What happens in life is: [something] opens up, you give it a try and you don’t know how far it’s going to take you, or in which direction. You just go with the flow… you do the best you can.”
So what exactly can people expect from a one-man performance featuring some of the most notable names in Canadian literature?
“What you get is me, on stage, knocking out Ernest Hemingway,” Gibson said, referring to a famous incident involving a boxing match between one of his writers, Morley Callaghan, and Hemingway.
But what people will really get is a story that couldn’t be told by anyone else.
“Other people dress up as Mark Twain or Charles Dickens,” Gibson said. “I dress up as Douglas Gibson, and I was born to play the part.”
Gibson will be performing at 6:00 p.m. Mar 2 2012 at the John L Haar theatre on 10045 155 St.
