Introducing Sutherland Quarterly

A new vehicle for timely essays by some of Canada's best writers

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Welcome to the 172nd edition of SHuSH, the official newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, hit the button:

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There used to be many places where a writer could publish long-form essays and journalism. When I was writing for a living, decades ago, it was routine to sell a piece of between 5,000 and 10,000 words to a weekly, monthly, or quarterly magazine, usually at a dollar a word. Newspapers had far more space than they do today and frequently published stories that spilled over multiple pages and multiple editions. They, too, paid reasonably well.

We were still commissioning ambitious long-form essays and journalism at Maclean’s during the aughts but I could feel the wind going out of the publishing industry during and after the financial crisis of 2008-2009, which hastened the migration of advertising from print to digital. Today, the long pieces and the $1/word rates have all but disappeared. Not through any lack of ambition on the part of editors and writers: the advertising-driven business model that supported ambitious pieces no longer exists.

As I’ve discussed in this space many times over the last three years, most recently here, many of the Canadian publishing houses that once supported nonfiction essays, investigations, and stories have also disappeared or turned their attention to other genres. (That’s one of the reasons we founded Sutherland House as a nonfiction publisher four years ago, and launched the Sutherland Prize as an encouragement to nonfiction writers last year).

Change is seldom all good or all bad. Some magazines, including Macleans, have managed to hang around and they continue to publish important long-form journalism. We now live in a world where talent can emerge on its own terms in a blog, a newsletter, a podcast, or some other digital format, usually with no limits as to length (that is both a blessing and a problem—limits on physical space imposed a certain discipline). Personal memoirs in book form have found massive audiences. Documentary films are being made in far greater numbers and to far higher standards than was possible in times past.

But I miss long-form essays and journalism. I don’t think it’s entirely nostalgic. From a reader’s perspective, there is something inherently satisfying about getting lost in an ambitious, deeply considered, well-researched narrative. More importantly, sustained investigation and argumentation are essential to a healthy culture and polity. There are some stories and ideas that can’t be fully communicated in 800 words, let alone 280 characters. Nuance and context get lost as we consume everything in brief.

I’m convinced an audience still exists for long-form writing, even as our attention spans contract and there is more competition than ever for our time. The regularity with which we are pitched book-length projects on current topics demonstrates that authors are still interested in long-form. What we’re missing are the business models that support it.

I don’t claim to have the answer for this particular sector of the literary economy. Any number of business models might work. It will require a lot of experimentation from different quarters to generate a long-form comeback. And it will take time. We need to train new generations of writers and editors who can work at length.  

In that spirit, Sutherland House is pleased to announce the launch of the Sutherland Quarterly, a new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s best writers. Each essay will be published as a standalone book and sold at retail in the usual manner; the essays will also be available (at a preferred price) by annual subscription.

SQ books will be short, about 25,000 words, meant to be devoured in an evening or two. They will be timely, topical, and highly readable. They will not come from one particular worldview or represent one style of writing. After the inaugural edition, each will contain responses to the previous essay to create a sort of rolling conversation from book to book.

We’re calling them essays but the degree to which each relies on argumentation, investigation, or story-telling will depend on the writer and the subject. While our first two authors are established journalists, we will also be publishing new voices, some of them journalists, others not. We are open to submissions.

The inaugural edition of SQ is Funeral for a Queen: Twelve Days in London, by former Globe & Mail correspondent John Fraser, who is also the founding president of the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada. From the promotional copy:

On September 8, 2022, an announcement was posted on the gates of Balmoral Castle in Scotland and Buckingham Palace in London that Queen Elizabeth II, the longest serving monarch in British history, had died. That set in motion a remarkable ten days of official mourning and ceremony unlike anything seen in any nation for decades. Members of the royal family gathered—the new King Charles III and his Queen Consort Camilla; the newly-minted Prince of Wales, William and his princess, Kate; Harry the Bolter and his celebrity wife Meghan; and even the bad boy himself, “Prince” Andrew—along with hundreds of royals and heads of states from around the world. Hordes of people, many from overseas, spent long hours lining up in the rain to pay tribute to the beloved monarch, a presence in their lives for seventy years. On the scene for these events, renowned journalist John Fraser takes the reader from inside St. James Palace where the new King was proclaimed to Queen Elizabeth’s final resting place at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, from deeply moving scenes to the occasional hilarious screw-up, capturing the magic of the occasion with trenchant observations and witty commentary informed by a lifetime’s experience and curiosity about all things monarchical and his own encounters with the royals.

The second edition of SQ, coming in March, will be An Emergency in Ottawa: The Story of the Convoy Commission, by former National Post and Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells, who has recently relaunched himself as a one-man media machine.

Each of the books will be excerpted in the Globe & Mail, our editorial partner for this venture. Single copies will sell for $22.95 (plus HST); the subscription price is $74.99 (including HST).

I wish we could say we invented the idea of selling books by quarterly subscription but that honour goes to our innovative friends at Black Ink Press in Australia, who have been publishing their own series, The Quarterly Essay, for more than a decade. With 9,000 subscribers and many thousands of individual copies sold each quarter at retail, it has been wildly successful.

Of course, even one wildly successful quarterly is not going to replace all the media outlets and publishers we’ve lost in recent years. But if we can contribute even in a small way to sustaining or rejuvenating long-form nonfiction writing, it will be worthwhile.

I hope you’ll consider subscribing. Also, I’m told by the Black Ink people that a significant portion of their readership comes from gift subscriptions. It happens that the holidays are approaching: give a thoughtful gift!

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Click here to visit the Sutherland House website and order one of our latest:

Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles: an eye on the monster.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

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