Inspiring stories behind the region’s many successes

By Katie Ingram

For many Atlantic Canadian authors and publishers, longevity is about finding a niche.

For Donna Morrissey, that niche is showing readers that stories set in Newfoundland aren’t just for Newfoundlanders or Atlantic Canadians.

“I write from the cradle of my culture,” says Morrissey, the author of several adult books including her debut Kit’s Law from 1999 and Rage the Night from 2023. “So, everything comes through that cradle, but I also know that I write of the human condition and the emotional language of my characters, and we all know that emotion is a universal language.”

For Lesley Choyce, the niche has often changed, at least on the writing side. Choyce, author of such titles as The Republic of Nothing, Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea, and The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil, has been an author for over 40 years and written fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s titles, and young adult books.

“I had a very good, long run at writing young adult fiction; there was a time when YA lit just exploded,” says Choyce. “If you went way back to the ‘70s and ‘80s, you couldn’t write about difficult topics, or you were afraid to write about sensitive topics, and then it just kind of opened up.”

The same idea applies to his publishing company, Pottersfield Press, which was founded in 1978. The idea grew out of seeing something that others didn’t. Originally, Pottersfield was a name tied to the Pottersfield Portfolio, an annual anthology Choyce published, but also allowed “me to get things going,” he says.

“I was doing small projects, starting out with poetry, and then an anthology of science fiction; I picked the two areas that probably were the hardest to sell, at least from a small regional publisher, and then just kind of built up things from there,” says Choyce.

Choyce isn’t the only long-standing publisher in the region. Errol Sharpe of Fernwood Publishing started his career in sales and marketing at Fernwood Books (later Brunswick Books) in 1978. However, he noticed that many ideas were being ignored.

“In three years, I brought a number of projects (to a publisher) and they didn’t publish many of them,” says Sharpe. “Someone had to, so we started publishing, but we didn’t intend to be a publisher.”

These early books would be scholarly and academic books he felt had an audience, so Fernwood Publishing was founded in 1991 and now also includes Roseway, its fiction imprint.

“We filled a need,” he says.

Morrissey says she was “lucky” to start publishing when she did as the types of books publishers are looking for can change with trends and expanding audiences.

The publishing sector has ups and downs, says Choyce, in things like reader trends, grant cuts, and other roadblocks. In the 1980s, for example, he says there was more government interest in publishing across the country, so “this small, literary independent press was a good thing for everybody.”

“The shifts have been great and dramatic. There’s only a handful of big publishers in the country, and there’s all the rest of us little guys, still chugging along, but I guess the fact that we’re still standing is saying quite a lot,” he says.

On the author side, Morrissey’s noticed shifts which make publishing much different from when she started. Published first through Penguin and now Penguin Random House, Morrisey finds there’s a loss of community.

“Penguin’s been really good to me, so I appreciate them,” says Morrisey “(But), you used to know the print person, your publicist, your editors, two or three different editors, your story editor, and your line editor. You knew them all. It’s just not so anymore.”

She says this because of how big publishers are growing, as Penguin absorbed Random House in 2013. This change also has to do with how people communicate.

“It’s online relationships mostly. It was always online, but there would be more frequent trips back and forth to a big city,” she says. “Now Zoom just takes care of all of that, so that old sense of community and feeling that you’re part of a house, a publishing house, I don’t feel that anymore.”

Morrissey says at smaller presses this might be different.

“I would certainly advise anybody to go to your local publisher, go small,” she says. “They’re more accessible and personal, and you can have a lot more control, whereas in a big publishing house now, you just kind of get lost. It’s just so many people you just get lost.”

But even on a small, local level, Sharpe’s noticed similar changes with everything more or less virtual.

“I think the biggest thing from my point of view is that we are cutting out physical contact personal relationships” says Sharpe. “You no longer sit down and talk to people about what they’re working on, what kind of books they have.”

Changes and challenges aside, Choyce says publishers need to be true to themselves.

“I’ve seen other publishers in other parts of Canada that started out small, and their goal was to just get bigger and bigger all the time. Going back to the early 2000s or something like that, a number of those publishers ended up just failing completely, even some of the regional ones go too big,” he says. “It was maybe my father who said, ‘don’t get too big for your britches,’ so keep going, keep doing what you’re doing.”

KATIE INGRAM is a freelance writer, journalism instructor and author of  Breaking Disaster: Newspaper Stories of the Halifax Explosion. She lives in Halifax.