C all it the little house that could. Since its formation in 2013, the University of Regina Press has made a big splash in Canadian scholarly publishing, including six national best sellers. Bruce Walsh, the press’s energetic director, has worked in trade and academic houses for 30 years. He spoke with us about his background in activism and his goal to tell stories that have long been ignored and change the way Canadians think about their history.
What has your involvement in political activism brought to your work in publishing?
It’s my background as an anti-censorship activist that shaped my understanding of media and marketing. I started at Oxford University Press, which I resigned in protest when they censored a book, and I became a full-time free-speech activist for a number of years, and was involved in some pretty seminal court cases. We were dealing with a time when Canada Customs was censoring lesbian and gay material crossing the border into Canada. They were censoring safe-sex information during the height of the AIDS epidemic. So I started to try to get stories in the media around what was happening.
What’s URP’s vision as a press?
Our motto is “a voice for many peoples.” I’m very interested in what has been censored in this country. Our indigenous languages were literally beaten out of the children who spoke them at residential school. We’re working with a lot of different language groups and nations to publish material that helps to strengthen and revitalize and promote indigenous languages.
What underrepresented stories has the press pursued?
The first book we published, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, in many ways exploded contemporary Canadian history because it told the stories that historians in Canada knew about, but Canadians didn’t know anything about. [The book, by James Daschuk, described how disease and government policy combined to realize Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s vision of railroad-led white settlement in a western Canada cleared of indigenous peoples.]
In this special spring books issue, Peter Dougherty, stepping down from Princeton University Press’s directorship, says editorial imagination is the key to scholarly publishing’s future. Bruce Walsh, of the U. of Regina Press, explains how he plans to open Canadians’ eyes to their nation’s history. We profile Chris Lebron, whose new book contextualizes #BlackLivesMatter, and Yascha Mounk, whose theories about threats to liberal democracy have turned out to be more timely than he wished. Also featured are reviews of books on writing, social media’s effects on civic order, and capitalism’s contradictions. Then, just for fun, play Promotion, which combines strategic thrills and existential nausea for a one-of-a-kind gaming experience.
We took a book that many houses would have perceived as purely a scholarly title. I read it and I thought, “This is a big book.” We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that this book is read by as many people as possible. I think we’re now at 23,000 copies sold, which is a phenomenal number for Canadian academic publishing. Clearing was recently named [by Literary Review of Canada] one of the 25 most influential books in Canada of the last 25 years.
You have a recent book, Firewater ...
It was very much written for people in Treaty Six territory [an area of First Nations reserves in Alberta and Saskatchewan]. The author, Harold Johnson, is from Treaty Six. He really wanted his people to read this book. I said, “Yes, but we have to open it up to a broader audience because if we want a really low price on it — Treaty Six people don’t have a lot of money — then we need to print a lot of copies in order to justify that lower price.” I said, “I’m willing to lose money on it. But I don’t want to lose too much.” So he expanded the book slightly. The subtitle is How Alcohol Is Killing My People, and then, in brackets, (And Yours). That was key to making the book a national hit as opposed to a book that speaks just to the region.
One of your central plans for the press is buying the Canadian rights to books by Canadian scholars who are publishing with university presses in the United States.
I’m very interested in what has been censored in this country.
I can bring traction in Canada. I can get my authors on the leading media outlets. We can submit them for prizes that they otherwise wouldn’t be eligible for in the United States — for instance, the Canada Prize, the leading prize in the humanities. And also we can sell a lot more books.
Any new subject areas you’re hoping to break into at Regina?
We are launching Canada’s first black-studies list. Afua Cooper, from Dalhousie University, in Halifax, is taking on the role of series editor. I was really kind of shocked. There’s not a black-studies list in Canada? This will be an exciting new area for us. I’ve also been talking with some young writers in Toronto. We’re going to be doing a collection on the response from Canada’s many black communities to Black Lives Matter, and take the pulse of those communities at this time.
We have another book coming called American Refugees, and this is looking at the history of refugees coming to Canada, from the War of Independence to the Underground Railroad to Vietnam. American refugees have really shaped and made Canada and how we act as an outlet for Americans in peril during times of tyranny.
What is the biggest challenge these days in scholarly publishing?
What we need to do is actually act like publishers as opposed to directors of departments within universities. That’s more of a problem in Canada than it is in the United States. In American academic publishing, there’s a lot of really great scholarly works that are published for a broader audience, and therefore you get a much broader range of ideas into the public sphere. In Canada, the challenge is that the main funding body for academic publishing won’t fund books that they think can sell.
They won’t fund books that they think can sell?
Yeah, they’ll fund books that are worthy scholarship, which is absolutely essential, but, you know, don’t have a big audience. So the good scholarship is actually published; but whether or not it’s read and consumed and makes a difference is another thing. That type of scholarship needs to happen, and I have no problem with that. But what is happening is that there’s no incentive to publish the books that really do have a broader audience. So we are losing a whole type of analysis. This is why we’ve gone on for 150 years and we didn’t know that our first prime minister managed a famine to move indigenous people out of the way of white settlement.
I mean scholars all knew that, but we didn’t know that. So there’s a problem with our system in Canada. It discourages the type of academic publishing I’m trying to do.
Nina C. Ayoub is books editor at The Chronicle Review. This interview has been edited and condensed.
