In January, broadcaster, journalist, and author Peter Gzowski died at the age of 67. Gzowski’s publisher, McClelland & Stewart president Douglas M. Gibson, pays tribute to the national icon.


Peter Gzowski was first and last a writer. From his days as an editor at the University of Toronto’s Varsity newspaper in the 1950s through his time at Maclean’s all the way through his career he was a writer. While his presence on the radio made him a national icon, he liked to say that he was a writer who worked on the radio. It was an important distinction. For him the vital skill was not the mastery of the microphone but of the writer’s craft; he had learned to ask the right questions of the right people, to assimilate the knowledge thus produced and then to put it into clear, well-ordered prose. That, to him, was real achievement.

Robert Fulford has written of Peter’s dismissal of a young journalist of apparently impressive talents. He would never last, Peter said, “because he doesn’t know how hard it is.” Peter never forgot how hard it was to fill a blank sheet of paper, or a screen, with well-ordered words. As a result he respected the work of other writers, and delighted in celebrating their talents. What he achieved with his one radio program for the authors – and the booksellers and the readers – of Canada is almost beyond belief. Long before there was an Oprah there was Peter Gzowski. And long before there was an “Oprah effect” there was the “Morningside effect.”

“Immeasurable” was the word Jane Urquhart used at a Toronto tribute to describe the debt that she and other Canadian writers owed to Peter Gzowski. It may be hard for anyone who was not there in those days to understand just how important that program was to the creation of an audience for our own books and writers. Peter and his staff actively sought out young and unknown writers – even a young poet named Jane Urquhart – and gave them a public forum. If the interview took flight (and with writers of all sorts they often did) then the phones would start ringing in bookstores across the country. The impact on a book’s sales was so immediate and so strong that before the end of the 1980s booksellers were pleading with publishers to tell them when an author was going to be on Morningside so that they could order accordingly. And people in publishing will remember that in the peak years of the program a confirmed interview with Peter Gzowski – or in the case of Alice Munro, a series of interviews – was enough to send publicists whooping down the halls.

I have been trying hard to avoid becoming personal here. But I first met Peter in the 1960s and I have edited books of his such as the autobiography The Private Voice (1988). And I am proud that his last book, A Peter Gzowski Reader, bears the Douglas Gibson Books logo. I counted him as a friend. He was never easy to work with, if “easy” means automatic agreement with the publisher’s plans. We sparred over contracts when I was shocked to discover that he liked to get his own way, and he was a perfectionist over the book’s contents. He was, in other words, a pro, and I enjoyed working with him over the years and was distressed almost beyond speech when I first saw him with his walker and oxygen tank. Some of my McClelland & Stewart colleagues who had the misfortune to be taking a cigarette break that afternoon still recall my explosive return from Peter’s side.

My own interviews as a guest on Morningside were uniformly sad, dealing with the deaths of authors like Hugh MacLennan or Robertson Davies. But I was glad to go through the experience of a Peter Gzowski interview that many others have described: little eye contact, not much attempt at personal charm, all of the energy going into the questions. He was a keen-eared interviewer but never a keen-eyed one. At the private funeral at Frontier College, a family member spoke affectionately of a moment by the hospital bed near the end when he was drifting in and out of consciousness and his eyeglasses were put in place. They looked wrong, somehow, and one family member suggested that everyone should fix that by smearing the lenses with their thumbs.

His rumpled appearance (the famous comparison to “an unmade bed” on bad days was unkind to some beds I have known) was no surprise to the thousands of loyal fans who lined up to meet him at book signings. They were surprised, however, by his shyness, which was part of the man, and helped account for his failure on live TV. Yet he willingly undertook these tours because he was a pro who liked his books to do well, and because he relished “the Morningside effect” on his own books.

What do these books tell us about Peter Gzowski the writer? That he wrote well about his enthusiasms – hockey, or golf, or broadcasting. That he could turn his hand to an astonishing variety of subjects, from the perils of being dismasted in mid-Caribbean to the pleasures of family hopscotch; what proved to be his last book, A Peter Gzowski Reader, demonstrates the range of his skills, as journalist, essayist, narrator, and polemicist for Canada. That he was, first and last, a writer.

Sadly, his greatest book will never be written. He was at work in his final years on a book about the North, the last frontier, which he knew well and loved with a passion, and he and I often spoke excitedly about its prospects. In the end he lost the race to finish it, and we all lost a great book. At the private family funeral Susan Aglukark paid an unforgettable Northern tribute to him, her clear voice rising out over the Toronto rooftops as she sang “Amazing Grace” in Inuktitut.

I remember a crowded Saturday meeting at the University of Toronto where student literacy volunteers were gathered from across the country. Did Peter thank them and congratulate them? No. He ended his talk with the thought: “Aren’t we lucky – aren’t we lucky to be able to do important work like this that we love?” He would have said the same to all of us who work in the world of books. And I hope he would have said it of his own life and work.