CALGARY HERALD | Books
The owner of Freehand Books is selling the acclaimed Calgary-based independent publisher after purchasing Saskatoon-based Thistledown Press.
JoAnn McCaig said she has found a buyer for Freehand, which she created as a literary imprint of Broadview Press in 2007 before purchasing it outright in 2016. She did not name the buyer but said the deal should go through before the end of 2020 and that Freehand Books will continue much as it has.
“The buyer is committed to continuing the vision,” said McCaig. “The thing with Freehand was that I achieved what I set out to do, which was to establish a really excellent literary press in Calgary.”
Since 2007, Freehand has built an eclectic and acclaimed list of literary fiction, creative non-fiction, graphic novels and poetry. One of the publishing house’s most recent successes was the memoir Homes: A Refugee Story by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah and Winnie Yeung. It was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. It was also the 2019 audience choice winner for Canada Reads.
But the Calgary-based company has long had a reputation for punching above its weight. One of its first publications was Marina Endicott’s 2008 sophomore novel Good to a Fault, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Canada and the Caribbean and helped launch the author’s career. Endicott has gone on to publish with Doubleday Canada. In 2011, Freehand published Ian Williams’ 2011 collection of experimental short stories, Not Anyone’s Anything, which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. It also published his 2012 poetry collection, Personals, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Williams’ first novel, Reproduction, was published by Random House Canada in 2019 and won the Giller Prize.
“The company was at last standing on its own two feet, financially, but also in more intangible ways of having a good reputation,” McCaig said. “I’m not a businesswoman. That isn’t the reason to do this. So I wanted to grab this moment where Freehand was in a really good position and find somebody who has the business acumen to really make the company sustainable.”
McCaig is co-owner of Calgary’s Shelf Life Books and spent 20 years teaching English literature at the University of Calgary. In 2019, Thistledown Press published her sophomore novel An Honest Woman.
Thistledown Press began 45 years ago in Saskatoon. Al Forrie, who became the sole owner of Thistledown in 2004, was looking to retire and sell the publishing house. He was told he should contact the owner of Freehand.
“Al said ‘Oh, we just published her novel! We know her,’ ” McCaig says with a laugh. “So he called me (last) November and I said ‘No, I’m thinking of getting out of the publishing business and I’ve put Freehand on the market.”
But early this year she learned that Coteau Books, a 45-year publisher based out of Regina, was filing for bankruptcy.
“Al had said to me that if they didn’t find a buyer for Thistledown they were just going to shut it down; that they had done their bit,” she says. “So I started thinking about Saskatchewan publishing. I’m a Saskatchewan girl. I was born in Moose Jaw. But, more importantly, the Saskatchewan writing community was really, really important to me as a writer. In the early ’90s, I started going to the Saskatchewan Writers Guild workshops and found a really welcoming environment there that I really value a lot. So I started thinking ‘OK, Coteau is gone. Thistledown is going too? If I’m in a position to prevent that from happening then I should probably do something.’ ”
McCaig said she will be an “arms-length” owner and that operations will remain in Saskatoon, albeit out of a new office. She has hired Saskatchewan publishing and book-selling veteran Caroline Walker, who has worked at McNally Robinson and Thistledown, as managing editor. Poet, novelist and editor Elizabeth Philips, who worked in the Banff Centre’s literary program, has been appointed acquisitions editor.
Thistledown has published more than 300 Canadian writers over the decades and will put out six titles in 2021. It will continue publishing literary fiction, creative non-fiction and the occasional book of poetry, she said. In past years, it has earned a reputation for publishing Young Adult novels and, through its New Leaf series, first-time authors. Manuscripts are accepted from throughout Canada, but the focus is on Western Canada, McCaig said.
“We do feel that Western Canadian writers tend to be marginalized a little bit in this country, so we’re going to provide them with a place to have their voices heard,” she said.