In their words

“The other thing we have going for us is one of the last big independent stores, McNally Robinson. We prefer to sell paper books – we have ebooks available, but most ebooks that are sold are genre books, so that’s the equivalent of mass market, which we never did. You’ve gotta have a brick-and-mortar store, and we’re lucky here in Manitoba that McNally Robinson is still going and they really tend to put Manitoba writers and publishers front and centre in their store.” – Gregg Shilliday, founder and publisher of Great Plains Publications

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 “I’m never clear on the Prairie sensibility when somebody tries to make it explicit, but it just comes out in various ways in conversation. It might come out, say, in a discussion about something as simple as weather. It’s certainly believed that on the Prairie, the main reason for people on the west coast to exist is to annoy people on the Prairie with their weather. Or it may come out in a maverick politics, where identity is measured in terms of the atrocities from, or distance from, Ottawa. Or it shows in some sports where you realize – although this is a dumbass thing to want – you want your team to win against any big city, like Vancouver or Montreal or Toronto. And then you realize you live in a region as well as a country.” – David Carpenter, author and editor of The Literary History of Saskatchewan, vols. 1 & 2

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“I don’t feel any sort of ghettoization. I don’t know what it’s like on the fiction side of the equation, but this is a place where [you find] Sharon Butala, Sandra Birdsell, Guy Vanderhaeghe, David Bergen – these people are authors with a national profile. There’s such great writing happening here. It may be hard for the fiction authors and poets and so on to break out, but I think they say that everywhere.” – Bruce Walsh, publisher, University of Regina Press

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“Whenever we’re in Toronto, [we try] to have the opportunity to meet with people – not to throw 50 books at them, but just to establish a rapport with someone. That’s going to be made more difficult because beginning next year, Canadian Heritage funds will not be available to help people travel to [professional development] events. I personally am very concerned about that. Because, if you’re outside the metropolitan areas of Toronto or Vancouver, how are you ever going to get to those events and how are you going to network?” – Linda Cameron, director of the University of Alberta Press

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“People need to see you as being not only viable, but vital. They want to know that they’re not somehow just being plugged into a hole and that’s it. What we’re trying to do is make sure that it’s not a wasted effort. Because publishing can be a wasted effort pretty quickly.” – Al Forrie, publisher and editor at Thistledown Press

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“My heart is set in this small area of southern Saskatchewan. Not that I like everything about it, or anything like that. I didn’t spend my childhood here, but I came back every summer, and somehow that pattern of returning here has made the place … it’s just in my being. It’s my territory. And I believe that when I write from this place, the images are real and they do resonate. That’s the point about writing about place: it lives within the writer. I’ve set short stories in Europe and other places in the world, but I wouldn’t set a novel in a place that didn’t really, really matter to me.” – Connie Gault, author of A Beauty

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“I’m not about to settle for living in Toronto.” – dee Hobsbawn-Smith, poet, fiction writer, and food writer

This feature appeared in the May 2015 print issue.