Why author and historian Mark Bourrie says he's done writing about Canadian history

Lawyer historian Mark Bourrie is done writing about Canadian history.

Bourrie loves Canadian history, and is the author of several books on Canadian subjects including Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, which won the final RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction writing.

While working on his latest book, Bourrie tweeted that "it was my last Canadian history book," because there is a lack of support for non-fiction writers in Canada. 

He spoke with Day 6 host Brent Bambury about why, and what has changed for Canadian writers.

Here is part of that conversation.

What is going on with Canadian history and non-fiction? What's the problem now?

Two problems. One is we don't have any readers anymore who are reading researched Canadian non-fiction. And the second problem is there is not a lot of support for it.

Let's look at that first problem, because there are readers, right? I mean, is it non-fiction or Canadian non-fiction that they don't want to buy?

It's Canadian non-fiction. Unlike other media, the book business is still doing really well. Even the non-fiction side of the book business is doing quite well.

But Canadian non-fiction, talking about memoirs, cookbooks, little kids books about dinosaurs, Canadian biographies, all that stuff accounts for less than five per cent of the Canadian book sales in Canada. And non-fiction is a little over 30 per cent.

So most of the non-fiction, almost all the non-fiction really that's sold in Canada, comes from ... other English-speaking countries.

Daily newspapers used to play a role in publishing because they reviewed books. They used to have books sections. How has that changed, and what's been the impact?

They're gone. They're just gone. Canadian newspapers just don't have book sections. Instead of looking at individual books, the papers that do still have a page or two will have stories like the 12 best non-fiction books coming out this summer [with] little cullings from book catalogues.

They really don't tell you much about the book or separate out the good non-fiction for the bad non-fiction.

It used to be that magazines like Saturday Night or Macleans, or now I suppose The Walrus, would offer space for heavily-researched work — long reads that might become a book after it's published. Is that still the case? Are there options there for someone who wants to do a piece of historical non-fiction?

There aren't too many. There is The Walrus, I would say maybe Chatelaine, maybe Macleans. Steve Maher wrote almost an entire issue of Macleans on how COVID got started in Canada. I mean, that's something Steve could have taken and made a book out of.

But there used to be these giant magazines that were in weekend newspapers, and Saturday night city magazines, Toronto Life. And that part of the media has withered along with other print media like newspapers.

So not only do you not have the articles that people sort of test drive on the public, that pool of magazine writers that were capable of doing that kind of research, they're not around either because there's no space for them to write. And what they get paid to write hasn't changed in 30 years either. So very few people can afford to do it.

It would take a good story, I guess, and a real belief that once the story is published that it had a chance of getting into the Canadian mainstream places and bookstores, decent media coverage, a chance to talk to people at book festivals.- Mark Bourrie on what it would take to write another Canadian history book

You won the [final] RBC Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction for Bush Runner in 2020.... And the people behind that prize said that literary non-fiction is a genre that is now developed into a major component of Canadian publishing, inferring that it's flourishing. Do they see something that you don't see or vice versa?

There are things that are flourishing and literary non-fiction, in the sense of memoir, is doing really well. The work of people like Desmond Cole and Jesse Thistle, a whole pile of other young memoir writers, they're doing great work. They're selling lots of books. It's the other stuff that has problems.

It's stories of Canadian regions. It's science writing. I keep coming back to science writing because I think that right now environmental writing is something that Canadians really should be doing a lot more of.

Say I wanted to write a book about what's happening in the Arctic and I have friends in the Arctic. They're all telling me that climate change is so obvious. It's just crazy up there.

For me to go up there and research that, dig through that story and write a book about it, would cost so much. And it's not clear whether or not it could be marketed in the Canadian market, whether it would get serious support from publishers, and that's because of some of the things we talked about with the systemic problems.

What would it take for you to write another Canadian history book?

It would take a good story, I guess, and a real belief that once the story is published that it had a chance of getting into the Canadian mainstream places and bookstores, decent media coverage, a chance to talk to people at book festivals, that sort of thing. It would take a lot to convince me that any book that I write would ever get that.

Written by Jason Vermes. Produced by Pedro Sanchez. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.