A Roundtable on “A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing”
The event will be held on campus. Please note that attendance is by registration only. To accommodate planning and room allocation based on expected attendance, the location details will be shared in a confirmation email in the week of the event.
“A Precarious Enterprise has all of the DNA necessary for future historians to fully understand the joyous and unexpected rodeo that was CanLit 1.0. It was a cherished window in time, and Scott tells of it with love and the ultimate insider’s POV.”
— Douglas Coupland, author and artist
Scott McIntyre, co-founder and long-time president of the Canadian publishing house Douglas & McIntyre, will discuss his recent book, A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing (ECW Press 2025). It is a sobering and exciting book, offering a deep insider’s view of the perilous but idealistic world of Canadian publishing as it grew from next to nothing at the time of the Canadian centennial (1967) into a significant cultural industry and a vessel of Canadian identity in stormy political seas.
Scott will be joined by three publishing-world interlocutors: poet, typographer, and author Robert Bringhurst, author and journalist Marsha Lederman, and journalist and publisher Kenneth Whyte—each of whom will respond to the book. Join us for a lively evening focused on the past—and future—of the Canadian publishing industry.
To learn more about A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing, visit the publisher's website.
Scott McIntyre, CM, OBC, LLD (Hon) is best known as co-founder and retired publisher and CEO of the pre-eminent, Vancouver headquartered, Canadian publishing house Douglas & McIntyre. His company published over 2000 Canadian books from its founding in 1971 to his retirement in 2013. He also spent over 40 years engaged in industry/government relations. That included two decades involved in Canada’s international trade negotiations, and a role in the development and implementation of the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity, and time as the Canadian representative on the board of LOGOS: the Journal of the World Book Community, in London, England. Scott remains an active member of Canada’s cultural community. His recent Boards have included PEN Canada, the BC Achievement Foundation and, at UBC, Green College, the Global Reporting Centre, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Vancouver Institute. He delivered the 2019-20 JV Clyne lectures at Green College. His memoir, A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing, was published by ECW of Toronto in September 2025. Scott is a graduate of UBC, and holds an honorary Doctor of Laws from SFU. He is a member of both the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia. His significant contributions to Canadian publishing have been further recognized by the Queen’s Golden Jubilee and Diamond Jubilee medals.
Robert Bringhurst was born in California in 1946 but at age six moved with his parents to western Alberta. He studied architecture, physics, and linguistics at MIT and several universities, then worked for a time as a translator in Egypt, Israel, and Palestine. In 1973 he returned to Canada and began an intensive study of Native North American languages and oral literatures. For the past half century, he has made his home on the British Columbia coast.
Bringhurst has published more than twenty books of poetry, including Bergschrund (1975), The Beauty of the Weapons (1982), The Calling (1995), and The Ridge (2023). The Raven Steals the Light, a book of stories he coauthored with Haida sculptor Bill Reid, was first published in 1989 and reissued in 1996 with a preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss. His three-volume study of Haida oral literature, completed in 2001, was described by Margaret Atwood as “one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head—a profound meditation on the nature of oral poetry and myth, and on the habits of thought and feeling that inform them.” In 2004, this trilogy was awarded the Edward Sapir Prize by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and chosen by the Times of London as Literary Editor’s Book of the Year.
Bringhurst’s other profession is typography. His book The Elements of Typographic Style, first published in 1992, is now in its fourth edition. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is used as a standard reference by publishers around the world.
Marsha Lederman is an award-winning journalist and author. At The Globe and Mail, she was previously the Globe’s Western Arts Correspondent for 15 years, during which she wrote frequently about Canadian literature and publishing. Prior to that, she spent seven years with CBC Radio, including as its National Arts Reporter. She has published two books, the 2022 memoir Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed and more recently October 7th: Searching for the Humanitarian Middle, a collection of Globe writing. Born in Toronto, Marsha received Bachelor’s degrees from York University and what is now Toronto Metropolitan University. She has lived in Vancouver since 2007.
Kenneth Whyte is the owner and president of Sutherland House, Canada’s leading nonfiction book publisher. He is the former editor of Saturday Night, founding editor of the National Post, former editor and publisher of Maclean’s, and former president of Roger’s Publishing, Canada’s leading magazine publisher. His first book, The Uncrowned King, a biography of William Randolph Hearst, was a Washington Post and Los Angeles Times book of the year. His next, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent, The Sack of Detroit, was a finalist for the Hayek Prize. He has been a senior fellow of the CD Howe Institute for five years, a senior fellow at Massey College, and a member of the Advisory Panel for Pen Canada. He lives in Toronto.