Discover the power of alternative publishing
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the shape of leadership in a community these days.
With the collapse of the American dream, shattered into fragments of bitterness, violence and division, and an appalling leader, we to the North must get busy building up and strengthening an alternate society: civil, honest, frugal, respectful of Indigenous roots, deeply democratic and multi-cultural.
Much, much work to be done, many visions to dream, some sacrifice to endure. What kinds of leaders shall we follow, take cues from, emulate?
In a community such as Peterborough, there are the visible leaders: elected politicians, scarcely-known school trustees, highly-paid civil servants (administrators in health, education, and policing), companies and banks and business leaders.
But then there is another layer of almost invisible influencers: on-theground organizers such as Alan Slavin and Daphne Ingram; moral leaders such as Christian Harvey and Leo Coughlin, Elizabeth Rahman, Julie Stoneberg and Larry Gillman; NGO heads such as Brianna Salmon and Charmaine Magumbe; youth such as Kaia Douglas, Kristin Muskratt and Sneha Wadhwani; philanthropists such as Bill and Betty Morris, educators such as Joe Webster and Jacob Rodenberg , and writers such as Janette Platana and David Tough.
I salute them and their Canadian kind!
It all brings me to two people I consider powerhouses in the formation of conscience in this town: Ferne Cristall and Rob Clarke.
This column will focus on Rob. He grew up in Peterborough, went to Queen’s, and was an original member, in 1977, of the alternative publishing house Between the Lines, whose history he has just told in the graphic book, Books without Bosses: 40 Years of Reading Between the Lines.
Cristall and Clarke have been back in Peterborough since 1990; Rob, an editor and collective member of the “left wing” Toronto-based publishing house, Between the Lines; Ferne a teacher and long-time volunteer for the Reframe Film Festival.
Clarke’s new book is a colourful, 53-page graphic novel, 8 by 11 inches, with a cover based on the Beatles’ record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It tells, in comic book format, the story of Between the Lines. It is wittily written and robustly illustrated by artist Kara Sievewright of Haida Gwai.
In a joint project of two entities, the Development Education Centre of Toronto (DEC) and Dumont Press Graphix of Kitchener, “a worker-owned and controlled typesetting and printshop” in the heady days of progressive thought of the 1970s, Between the Lines took as its mandate to publish non-fiction books by mostly Canadian authors on social and cultural issues, with non-mainstream viewpoints. It operated out of a United Church, St Paul’s Avenue Rd, which also housed Greenpeace and the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of South Africa.
It was a gadfly, which persistently challenged readers to re-think the world around them, asking uncomfortable questions. It did make some people uncomfortable: in 1976, the RCMP reported on DEC in its surveillance report.
BTL had no boss, no owner. it was a collective and has published over 300 influential books, the first one being The Big Nickel: Inco at Home and Abroad by Jamie Swift. That book sold at $5; print runs were usually 2,000 copies.
Says Prof. Fiona Jeffries of the University of Ottawa: “BTL does vital, radical cultural work bringing hidden histories to the surface.” It has an unquenchable thirst for social change through the power of bookdom.
Authors have included Ursula
Franklin, Mary Jo Leddy, Charlie Angus, Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, and Vandana Shiva.
“This has been a fairly good year” says Rob. “Full-time staff is now at four people, including Peterborough’s Jenn Tiberio.”
Rob Clarke’s current project is writing Packed to the Doors: Peterborough’s Movie-Going History, a story that begins in 1897 in the Bradburn Opera House.
Should be an eye-opener.
Visit www.peterboroughmoviehistory.com. Rosemary Ganley is a writer, teacher and activist. Reach her at rganley2016@gmail.com