Occupying John Street
Sutherland House attends a literary festival
This is the 299th edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, press the button—it’s free:
Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.
Introducing the Canadian Planner 2026!
We noticed last year that virtually every planner available in the Canadian market has generic or American holidays and content, so we made a new one. Welcome to The Canadian Planner 2026:
Plan your days on the world’s only uniquely Canadian planner! Stay Organized, informed, and Canadian every day of the year.
This elegant, thoughtfully designed planner is an indispensable companion for staying on top of your busy life and celebrating where you’re from. With two days per page, a clean layout, and generous space for appointments, notes, and to-dos, it keeps you focused and productive. Sprinkled throughout are:
key national observances
public holidays and civic reminders
famous birthdays and historical notes
major arts and culture and sports events
natural and astronomical occasions, weather highs and lows, and even bird migration and fruit seasons.
Beautifully packaged in faux leather with silver foil accents and a ribbon marker, the Canadian Planner is the perfect way to stay organized and connected to all things Canadian.
It’s 6x9 inches, 224 pages, and available in blue or black and sells for just $19.95. Order one here!
Publishing, like most businesses, has seasons, and the fall season tends to be busiest. Half of our annual list is released in the last four months of the year so we’re out several nights a week at launches and author events. These are also the most crowded months for book-industry gatherings, including awards galas and literary festivals.
Last weekend was Word on the Street in Toronto, an annual event that’s been running since 1990. Sutherland House had a booth for the first time. I wasn’t thrilled about it. At the best of times, I have a limited appetite for public-facing activities, and I didn’t feel up to two full days in David Pecaut Square (John & King streets) on top of everything we already had on the schedule. But we were kinda browbeaten into signing up by our intern, Mila, who attended Word on the Street a year or two ago and came away a Word-on-the-Street evangelist. She wasn’t going to let us rest unless we registered and she volunteered to do all the preparations. I’m always haranguing our staff on the importance of direct-to-consumer sales, which are far more profitable than sales through the regular retail channels, so I couldn’t really say no. We agreed to take a small booth and treat it as an experiment.
I’d only attended Word on the Street once in the early 1990s on behalf of Saturday Night magazine and it didn’t leave much of an impression, so I didn’t know what to expect, other than hordes. I’d read that 200,000 people turn out every year. I looked at pictures on the internet to get a better sense of what I was in for:
Mila arranged to get our banner printed and invited some of our recent/current authors who were in or around Toronto to come out, meet their publics, and sign books. Here’s two of Canada’s best political writers, Andrew Coyne, author of The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, and Justin Ling, author of The 51st State Votes, in front of the banner. If you don’t know them, Justin is to the right of Andrew. Ha.
My plan was to visit for an hour or so each day to show support for the initiative and our authors and otherwise leave things to Mila and the rest of our crew. I showed up Saturday around 1 pm, just as Ben Johnson arrived. A few minutes later Marc Côté from Cormorant Books stopped by. Out of sorts, I said to Marc, “Nice to meet you.” I’ve know him for years. I did gather myself sufficiently to snap a picture of him with Ben:
(If you look over to the left you’ll see Timo, our other intern, who famously started his career in our storage locker—see SHuSH 284.)
Ben Johnson, I should mention, isn’t a Sutherland House author. He’s the subject of our author Mary Ormsby’s fantastic book World’s Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson. He gave Mary good access when she was reporting and he now considers the book to be his. That’s fine by me and Mary. It’s his story, after all.
Mary was away last weekend. Ben agreed to stand in for her. He was only booked for an hour, but seemed to enjoy the crowds and stayed most of the afternoon.
In between snapping photos of many other people with Ben, we had time to catch up. He told me all about his chicken farm in Jamaica, the difference between laying and non-laying breeds of chicken, and how he does the killing and plucking himself. He’s also got a few goats and he’s minutes from the sea. Apart from the killing and plucking, he made chicken farming sound a lot more fun than book publishing. We also compared notes on raising daughters. And I heard about the streaming series that’s coming early in 2026, based on World’s Fastest Man*. It’s a comedy about Ben’s sprinting career created by some guy who wrote for The Office. It stars Shamier Anderson, Mr. Nobody in the John Wick film. I’m told it’s hilarious.
Mostly I watched Ben handle his public. He was superb at it. He noticed people standing off to the side who recognized him and were too shy to approach. He’d smile and motion them in. He patiently answered the same questions over and over again as though hearing them for the first time. I considered a few of the questions inelegant; Ben was unflappable. He posed for every photo and always asked a person’s name before signing their book.
Ben’s attitude improved my own. I began to notice things. The sun was shining. There were a lot of people out. They were having fun and they all liked books. There was genuine curiosity about what we had on display and an eagerness to engage with our writers. That eagerness was reciprocated by the writers, who were delighted, as writers generally are, to find people curious about their books. Sales were brisk.
There was a special moment late on Saturday afternoon when Victoria Hetherington, a fine novelist who has written her first non-fiction book—The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship—saw the finished product for the first time:
You can’t get a good look at the cover in that video so I’m going to put it here because it’s spectacular, as is the book:
I wound up staying nearly until closing on Saturday and was back for most of the day Sunday. The best part of Sunday was catching up with Kirsty Duncan, author of The Exclusion Effect. Despite dealing with some serious health issues, she has no less than three new book projects on the go, including a Scottish Gaelic poetry collection.
A lot of the time in publishing, you’re working in an office where books are boxes of inventory and columns of sales figures, and authors are emails to be returned and manuscripts needing attention. Even if you don’t enjoy crowds and you really need to spend as much time as you can attending to the business and the manuscripts, events like Word on the Street are a salutary reminder of why we do what we do.
The hope for any book you write or publish is that it will be meaningful to people. Maybe not to everyone. Maybe not even to a lot of people. But you want some people to find it worth their while, whether it entertains them or elevates their perspectives or validate their feelings or expands their knowledge. You want it to somehow connect. It’s a pleasure to see it happen in real time.
We’ll be back at Word on the Street next year with a bigger booth, more books, more authors, and more enthusiasm.
“Very Bleak Indeed”
We got a great response to last week’s newsletter (SHuSH 298: “Scott McIntyre’s precarious enterprise”) from our friend Howard White of Harbour Books. Howard is carrying on the legacy of Scott’s creation, Douglas & McIntyre. After his opening complaint about not getting an advance copy of Scott’s memoir—come on, ECW!—Howard provides some more background on how early Canadian publishers depended on distribution deals with foreign firms to get themselves off the ground, how those arrangements got blown up, and where that leaves us:
I wasn’t sent an advance copy of Scott’s book like you were so I haven’t read it yet but a crucial factor I find missing from the discussion of the fate of Canadian publishing is the national interest. Yes, it’s true the great, successful publishers we had in the heyday of Canadian publishing mainly funded their operations by selling foreign books. As a small country sharing a language and culture with giants like the US and the UK, it is just a fact of life most of the books in our stores will be from those powerhouses.
In the heyday, large Canadian publishers like McLelland and Stewart were able to thrive and develop strong Canadian-authored lists because large foreign publishers were required by law to market through a Canadian-owned supply chain—including distributors and booksellers. This created a revenue stream that dwarfed everything provided by governments today and funded a golden age in Canadian literature. Of course, the foreign publishers hated this restriction and lobbied tirelessly against it in Ottawa and in various trade forums such as the WTO and NAFTA, but Canada’s governments of the day resolutely declared culture was off the table. This grew out of a conviction, notably articulated by the Massey Royal Commission of 1951, that Canada’s national identity would always be under threat from its larger neighbours and legislative protection was essential if Canadian culture—and the country itself—were to thrive in the long term.
But that consensus weakened during the present century and a succession of federal governments allowed a situation to develop where now most of the big foreign publishers supply Canadian stores themselves from warehouses in the US and the online giant Amazon is laying waste to Canadian bookselling. The one remaining healthy sector, educational publishing, was decimated by Stephen Harper’s gutting of the Copyright Act in 2012.
I was able to rescue Scott’s excellent Douglas & McIntyre list out of bankruptcy in 2012 and keep it alive on a reduced scale, but without the legislative protection of yore. Today’s Canadian publishers retain less than 5% of their own country’s market and scramble to survive like mice trying to avoid being trampled by a herd of foreign elephants. As Scott has been known to say the future for Canadian books is very bleak indeed, and the kind of nationalist sentiment that fueled the heyday in Canadian literature is now largely absent from the national conversation despite the current “Buy Canadian” boomlet, which seems mainly restricted to vegetables.[Editor’s note: 😂]
I keep listening for Prime Minister Carney to mention the word “culture” in his avowals to build back a strong and independent Canada, but it does not seem to be in his vocabulary. But it needs to be said, despite the challenges, Canadian-owned publishers still play a vital role. They still publish over 70% of the books written by Canadian writers (excepting self-published books). They carry the main burden of publishing developing new writers and writers of poetry, drama and literature. They publish almost all of the regional books that are so important to local communities as well as under-served communities and almost all of the scholarly books that tackle all the big issues facing us. It is amazing what they accomplish given the obstacles, and it is crucial to Canadian nationhood that they be enabled to continue.
New from Sutherland House this week!
After a surprising conversation with young Canadians who didn’t recognize the name Lester B. Pearson—Nobel Peace Prize winner and Canada’s fourteenth prime minister—author J.D.M. Stewart set out to bring the country’s political history to a new generation. The result is Canada’s Prime Ministers, a lively, accessible chronicle of Canada’s leaders, from Sir John A. Macdonald in 1867 to Mark Carney in 2025.
With engaging prose and fresh insights, Stewart captures the defining moments of each prime minister’s time in office, revealing how they managed relationships with Indigenous peoples, the environment, American presidents, and international powers. He also explores how their reputations have evolved—who has been forgotten, who remains controversial, and who has become a lasting part of Canada’s cultural fabric. Canada’s Prime Ministers is a necessary and important book, intended both for newcomers to Canadian history and those who have loved it for a long time.
Order your copy here!
Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)
Kwame Fraser’s Kwame Eff, “economic democracy, political economy of Canadian arts and culture, etc.”
Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.
The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.
The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”
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.
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
Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading
Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.
J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.
Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”
Now I finally know whatever became of Ben Johnson...
I was on that Arctic trip with Kirsty and am thrilled to discover that she has written about it at last. Thank you for publishing her.