Freehand Books, the Calgary trade publisher that spun off from the academic press Broadview Books in 2007, has been sold. Glenn Rollans, a publishing veteran in Alberta and owner of the Edmonton higher-ed publisher Brush Education, bought Freehand from co-founder and former owner JoAnn McCaig. The change in ownership, which took effect Jan. 1, 2021, comes with no alteration to any of the publisher’s day-to-day operations, including in areas of staffing, distribution, and sales.
McCaig, who has owned Freehand since 2016, entered into an agreement to sell the imprint toward the end of last year, after purchasing the small Saskatoon literary publisher, Thistledown Press. McCaig told the Calgary Herald in November 2020 that she had found a buyer for Freehand who was committed to maintaining the editorial vision of the press. “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,” McCaig is quoted as saying.
“JoAnn had the vision to start the press and has been a phenomenal builder of the press,” says Rollans. “I appreciate the work she’s done and I appreciate her trust and confidence in me in passing it along.”
A former editor-in-chief at Lone Pine and former director of the University of Alberta Press, Rollans is also past president of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, a member at large on the board of the Association of Canadian Publishers, and a former board member of Access Copyright.
“I feel good about it. I feel really confident,” says Freehand managing editor Kelsey Attard about the change in ownership. “I know and like Glenn; I’ve worked with him for a decade with the Book Publishers Association and the ACP, and so I feel really confident in the future of Freehand.”
In its relatively brief life span, Freehand has had numerous successes, including right out of the gate, when Marina Endicott’s 2008 novel Good to a Fault was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Future Giller winner Ian Williams’s 2012 poetry collection Personals was shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize, and the 2018 memoir Homes: A Refugee Story, by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah and Winnie Yeung, was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award and was a finalist on Canada Reads.
“I’m a career publisher in Alberta and I’ve been around with colleagues in the Alberta industry around Freehand ever since it was created,” Rollans says. “It’s had just a fantastic record of publishing.”
Rollans also says that having Freehand operating in Alberta is significant. “My interest in western publishing started many years ago. I took my lead in many ways from Robert Kroetsch, who said that publishing in the west was a political decision,” Rollans says. “We’re not a huge community in Alberta, but the ecosystem is really important in lots of mutual ways. It’s very supportive and I think it’s really essential that Freehand continue in Alberta as an Albertan publishing house.”
In the short term, the main focus of the press will be on producing strong work at the same steady pace. “We have plans for the next two years,” says Attard. “The same kind of schedule: six books a year, something like that. So, no plans to change that. And we’ll see what happens after that.”
This spring, Freehand will publish The Bridge: Writing Across the Binary, a memoir by novelist and University of British Columbia professor Keith Maillard, the essay collection Big Reader by Susan Olding, and The Lover, the Lake, a novel by Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau, translated by Susan Ouriou.