Paper Trails - From the Backwoods to the Front Page, a Life in Stories

Informationen zum Autor Roy MacGregor Klappentext One of Canada's greatest journalists shares a half century of the stories behind the stories. From his vantage point harnessed to a tree overlooking the town of Huntsville (he tended to wander), a very young Roy MacGregor got in the habit of watching people—what they did, who they talked to, where they went. He has been getting to know his fellow Canadians and telling us all about them ever since.     From his early days in the pages of Maclean's , to stints at the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen , National Post and most famously from his perch on page two of the Globe and Mail , MacGregor was one of the country's must-read journalists. While news media were leaning increasingly right or left, he always leaned north, his curiosity trained by the deep woods and cold lakes of Algonquin Park to share stories from Canada's farthest reaches, even as he worked in the newsrooms of its southern capitols. From Parliament to the backyard rink, subarctic shores to prairie expanses, MacGregor shaped the way Canadians saw and thought about themselves—never entirely untethered from the land and its history.     When MacGregor was still a young editor at Maclean's , the 21-year-old chief of the Waskaganish (aka Rupert's House) Crees, Billy Diamond, found in Roy a willing listener as the chief was appealing desperately to newsrooms across Ottawa, trying to bring attention to the tainted-water emergency in his community. Where other journalists had shrugged off Diamond's appeals, MacGregor got on a tiny plane into northern Quebec. From there began a long friendship that would one day lead MacGregor to a Winnipeg secret location with Elijah Harper and his advisors, a host of the most influential Indigenous leaders in Canada, as the Manitoba MPP contemplated the Charlottetown Accord and a vote that could shatter what seemed at the time the country's last chance to save Confederation.      This was the sort of exclusive access to vital Canadian stories that Roy MacGregor always seemed to secure. And as his ardent fans will discover, the observant small-town boy turned pre-eminent journalist put his rare vantage point to exceptional use. Filled with reminiscences of an age when Canadian newsrooms were populated by outsized characters, outright rogues and passionate practitioners, the unputdownable Paper Trails is a must-read account of a life lived in stories. Leseprobe It was a long walk through the woods to the place I have loved more than any other—our grandparents' log cottage on Lake of Two Rivers in the heart of Ontario's vast Algonquin Park. My mother took me there from the little Red Cross outpost at Whitney when I was all of four days old, so this would have been the first of many, many trails. Lake of Two Rivers had to be the place, with the Madawaska River entering the lake on the west end and leaving at the east end, that led to a lifelong love of canoeing. Like the hand-carved Indigenous-boy doll in Bill Mason's wonderful 1966 film Paddle to the Sea , I could theoretically paddle all the way to the ocean—down the Madawaska, through the Ottawa Valley to the Ottawa River, down the Ottawa to the St. Lawrence River—paddling east until I reached the Atlantic. Theoretically, of course. Not something a four-day-old, let alone a seventy-four-year-old—the age at which I am typing this—would do. But you can dream of the possibility. Canoe tripping involves a lot of trails, some portages so long and difficult you wonder how the hell you ever came up with such a "vacation" plan. But I have always loved the bush and the Far North. The more off the beaten path the better. The other trails are all paper, whether newspapers, magazines, scripts or books. Millions upon millions of words, almost exclusively about this amazing country, Canada, and the people who live in it and love it. I lik...

Product details

• Authors: Roy MacGregor
• Publisher: Random House Canada
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.08.2023
• EAN: 9781039000735
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3900073-5
• No. of pages: 440
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 236 mm x 34 mm
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies