Edna Staebler’s lawn is pretty well-kept for a home that’s no longer lived in. In the summer months, her nephew Jim Hodgson swings by to mow the grass and shoot pool with friends. When no one’s around, the pool table hides under a tarp a few feet away from the shore. It’s a new development since Hodgson and his sister, Barbara Wurtele, took full ownership of the green cottage that once belonged to the late award-winning magazine writer. Staebler’s ashes were scattered across the lawn so that she would always be at Sunfish Lake—about 10 kilometres west of Waterloo, Ontario.

The sounds of schools of minnows and the splashing of bigger fish trying to catch them interrupt Kevin Thomason as he shows me around. He became Staebler’s next-door neighbour in his late twenties, remained there through the final decade of her life and still lives there today. He brought her mail, and Staebler made sure he always had fresh muffins. He became the grandson she never had.

When they met, Staebler was a small woman with horn-rimmed glasses and short, white hair, which she always cut herself. She had a small mouth with an overbite, noticeable when she smiled, which was often. She moved quickly and drove fast. Thomason could hear her car coming down bumpy, unpaved Cedar Grove Road at full speed. Though introverted, spending hours hunched over her typewriter, she loved people. Her writing, always focused on real characters, reflected this. “Edna influenced everyone she met,” says Thomason, “and everyone she met influenced her.”

From the deck of Thomason’s small log home, I can see Staebler’s cottage through the trees. He couldn’t decide on lunch, so he asked himself what Staebler would do: soup with tomato sandwiches. Everything is local. Thomason suggests we sit outside, “even though it’s snowing.” For a warm November day, this seems odd, but he’s referring to the pine needles that land in his soup. He eats them anyway, and I follow his lead. They add flavour.

Almost a decade after Staebler’s death at age 100 on September 12, 2006, the popularity of her cookbooks, including Food That Really Schmecks, and the influence of the annual Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction overshadow her pioneering magazine writing. Few people today are aware of the many eloquent pieces she wrote between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though she was not formally trained, her intuitive, immersive reporting deserves the same respect as the work of her journalistic peers Pierre Berton, Sylvia Fraser and Peter Gzowski.

Staebler was born Edna Louise Cress in Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, in 1906. She graduated from the University of Toronto with a bachelor of arts degree in 1929 and received her teaching certificate soon after. Her career in education was short-lived: just six months in, she was let go for taking students outside to do somersaults—an activity deemed unladylike. Her friends joke about the irony in the existence of Edna Staebler Public School, which opened in Waterloo in 2008, but Staebler inspired the school’s core values: compassion, writing and environmentalism. “She got fired and now has an entire school named after her,” says Thomason. “She would think it’s such a hoot.”

In 1933, she married Keith Staebler, whom she had dated throughout university. She often wrote in her diary about her love for Keith, but the marriage began to fall apart toward the end of the Great Depression—although they didn’t divorce until 1962. He became an emotionally abusive alcoholic who thought writing was a waste of time for a woman. He wasn’t alone. Her family also discouraged her dream of becoming a published writer. Staebler obeyed the naysayers for the first 40 years of her life, until a trip to Nova Scotia in August 1945 broke the spell.

She was driving through the east coast with friends, including one who had professed romantic intentions. Fed up with the advances, she asked her friends to pull over. Staebler got out and stood alone, unafraid, at the side of the road in Neil’s Harbour. She wandered into the fishing village, where there were few souls, one store, no hotel and no phone. She belatedly discovered her innate journalistic curiosity.

For many, being alone in the middle of nowhere would be terrifying, but for Staebler, it became a story opportunity. For the next three weeks, she immersed herself in the lives of the locals, mostly immigrants from Newfoundland (not yet Canada’s 10th province). She lived in their homes and ate their food, indulging in what Gay Talese later described as the fine art of hanging out. All the while, she wrote progressively longer, observation-filled letters to her husband and friends.

Staebler’s first inclination was to turn her copious notes into a novel. Eventually, unable to sell the story as fiction, she decided to polish it into a magazine feature. Once she finished, she drove to Toronto and marched into the Maclean’s office to hand-deliver her manuscript. She had no experience, but managing editor Pierre Berton saw potential in her writing. Maclean’s offered her $150 for a shortened version of the story about the fishing locals, and “Duelists of the Deep” appeared in the magazine in 1948.

Staebler’s writing is rich with detail. In one scene, she described meeting a swordfish:

A leviathan was stretched from the deck to the top of the fifteen-foot pole! I was seeing my first swordfish. It was stupendous! The body was round; the skin a dark purple-grey, rough one way, smooth the other like a cat’s tongue; the horny black fins stood out like scimitars, the tail like the handlebars of a giant bicycle; but the strangest thing was the straight, pointed, sharp-sided sword which was an extension of the head—an upper bill more than three feet long. As the rope was slowly released, the men guided the creature down to the dock.

She used simple comparisons, like linking the “ruddy-faced men” in the village to “broad-billed birds in their strange caps with wide visors six inches long,” to bring vivacity to the story. Numbers, such as the 634-pound swordfish carcass, lent precision. Dialogue—including bad grammar—made the characters authentic. And as she was a primary character in the story, her voice remained present.

Here’s her encounter with a child who offered her the sword-fish’s eyeball:

“Take it,” he said.
“You mean you’re giving it to me?” “Yes.” (Not yeah.)
I couldn’t spurn a gift; reluctantly I held out my hand. The boy placed the crystal gently on my palm. It felt cool and tender as a piece of very firm jelly or a gumdrop that has had the sugar licked off it.
“What should I do with it?”
“Take it ’ome and put in sun and it’ll turn roight ’ard. Be careful not to break ’un.” I held it almost reverently. It didn’t smell like fish either.

The stories that followed “Duelists” similarly put readers inside a subculture, a method familiar to anyone acquainted with Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism articles for Esquire and New York magazine in the mid-1960s. Fortunately, Berton and others knew talent when they read it. Staebler became a regular contributor to some of the biggest Canadian magazines of her day: Maclean’s, Saturday Night and Chatelaine.

Two years after “Duelists,” Berton assigned her to write about the Old Order Mennonites living in the Kitchener area. After visiting the general store to ask about a willing family, she lived with the “Martins,” (the name used to protect their privacy) and immersed herself in their lifestyle and traditions. “How to Live Without Wars and Wedding Rings” was as detailed as her first story.

Staebler’s participatory reporting made her a pioneer of what has come to be known as literary journalism. Her technique was to knock on a stranger’s door and ask to stay. In a 1952 Maclean’s story about Hutterites in Alberta, she jumped on a bus to Waterton Lakes with a plan to find a way into the community. En route, she met a woman from the Old Elm colony who said she could stay with her for a few days.

Staebler’s ability to make others feel comfortable was her ticket into the lives of perfect strangers. Bruce Gillespie, who published a 2015 academic study of Staebler’s magazine writing, says her approach made sense from a journalistic point of view, but for her it was simply the only way. Many of today’s reporters wouldn’t always think to live among their subjects for a week—a quick visit and maybe a few phone calls usually suffice. “It speaks to her character,” says Gillespie, “that these people who took active interest in not showing their community life to outsiders kept saying sure.”

Close friends agree. Her personality played a crucial role in securing access. “She was so interested that they opened up to her and told her all she wanted to know,” says cookbook writer Rose Murray. “That’s how she got her stories.”

But what set her work apart was her subjects. She took an interest in ordinary people from different cultures and ethnicities living in isolated areas—Italian immigrants in Toronto, descendants of slaves living in Nova Scotia, a miner’s family in northern Ontario. Her stories showed Canada’s diversity, something most writers at the time weren’t doing.

To Gillespie, who teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University, finding these magazine features in the archives at the University of Guelph was a revelation. Her magazine work isn’t as easily retrieved as her cookbooks, and it’s understandable why the latter became so well-loved. Her first, Food That Really Schmecks, published in 1968, sold tens of thousands of copies and turned into a series, including Schmecks Appeal and More Food That Really Schmecks. Her cookbook writing wasn’t far removed from her literary journalism. The storytelling involved real-life characters and included anecdotes from her time living among the Mennonites in the 1950s. She borrowed recipes from an Old Order Mennonite friend, Bevvy Martin. In the beginning of the Vegetables section in Food That Really Schmecks, she opened with a scene from Martin’s garden:

There isn’t a Mennonite farm that hasn’t a garden near its sprawling farmhouse. As soon as the well-manured ground in Bevvy’s garden has been cultivated in spring, she plants seeds in long neat rows; then she looks out of her kitchen window to watch the vegetables grow. “Quick, Salome,” she’ll call on a sunny June morning, “I think the beans came up last night.” And out they’ll both run to rejoice at the promise of coming abundance. Every day they keep watching, comparing growth progress with neighbours and friends. “My beets are slow this year,” one will say; or “I don’t think my cauliflower will amount to much,” or “There’s going to be a bumper crop of peas.”

In the introduction to the Pies and Tarts section, she quotes a Mennonite man named Amsey—“And that really schmecks!”—to describe a peach pie made with the peelings. The exclamation, describing something superb, became the series’ inspiration.

After hearing that many people read her cookbooks before bed each night, Staebler joked that she was the cause of the country’s declining birth rate. Never a cook herself (though she loved food), Staebler laughed at mistakes in early editions of her recipes. Kathryn Wardropper, sales representative at HarperCollins, administrator for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and one of her closest friends, says Staebler’s true passion was writing. “Cooking,” she says, “had nothing to do with it.”

No one intimidated Staebler, and certainly not lawyers for billion-dollar cookie companies. Don Sim, a Toronto lawyer representing Procter & Gamble (P&G), which had recently purchased the baked goods company Duncan Hines, was about to find that out. In 1984, he called Staebler to ask if he could visit Sunfish Lake. P&G had filed a suit against Nabisco (the National Biscuit Company) for infringement of a patented formula for crisp, chewy cookies. Nabisco, the cookie industry’s top company, commanded 80 percent of the market.

The argument between the two corporations centred on rigglevake cookies (Pennsylvanian Dutch for “railroad cookies”), a combination of molasses and old-fashioned sugar cookies. The swirly design of the two types of dough made them look more exciting than they tasted, but that wasn’t the point. Nabisco argued that P&G couldn’t patent the recipe because it appeared in Food That Really Schmecks, and published recipes cannot be patented. Sim’s job was to prove that P&G’s cookies were different from rigglevake cookies, so he asked to watch Staebler’s Mennonite friends bake, promising to pay them for their time. Staebler was protective of her friends, but was also pretty sure they would be happy to make money. This began a strange relationship between the Mennonites and lawyers representing both major companies, hoping to prove the rigglevake recipe was, or was not, crisp and chewy. Many cookies, 182 days of pretrial testimony and 200 witnesses later, the case was settled out of court.

Staebler’s Saturday Night feature about the episode, “The Great Cookie War,” was in her signature style, using characters to show exactly what happened. She described Sim plainly as “six feet five inches tall and weighing over three hundred pounds,” but then, with more colour, she “wondered which of my chairs would hold him.” Her point of view was vital. She didn’t understand all the nuances exactly, or how her Mennonite friends played a role, so she became the naive narrator to guide readers and write about patent infringement in a way that wasn’t impenetrable and boring. Staebler also refused to be boring in her personal life.

In her younger years, she escaped the confines of her marriage with travel through Europe and across Canada. In university, she had been inexhaustibly social. Alyson King, who teaches at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, was drawn to Staebler after reading her published diaries and decided to study her U of T years, 1926 to 1929. King was studying the experience of women in universities from 1900 to 1930, a period with what she refers to as the second generation of university women. She wanted to focus on what being students was like for them. “I had the feeling,” King says, “those years were when Edna really could be herself.” Wardropper was impressed that Staebler had obtained her degree in the ’20s and once asked what was the most rewarding part. Staebler replied, “Partying.”

Wardropper has smile lines around her eyes and thin, silver hair, which she wears long. She reaches out to touch my hand while I’m talking to show me that she’s listening. She was holding Staebler’s hand when she died and feels lucky to have been friends with her for so many years. “If she loved you,” says Wardropper, “she loved you very, very deeply, and there were many people she did love.”

The two met in 1978 while putting together a float for the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest parade. With it, Wardropper wanted to showcase inspirational women in the community, and asked Staebler and a few others to ride. Staebler sat on a pedestal wearing a black and white tweed coat, smiling and waving despite the rain. “I would have thought she was the queen,” says Wardropper. “I fell in love with her.” After the parade, the two often drank afternoon tea in the sunroom at Sunfish Lake until it got dark. They talked for hours and lost track of time as night fell. Apart from writing, having visitors over was Staebler’s full-time job. On any given day, people—from Neil Young’s mother to famous writers like Berton and W.O. Mitchell to a homeless ex-convict—were in her living room. When she turned 100, nearly 500 people came to her birthday party at Wilfrid Laurier University, and her funeral attracted just as many. Writer Ardy Verhaegen says a trip to Staebler’s cottage was like a soiree.

Staebler had a calendar in her kitchen with visitors listed, often with several names pencilled into the same box. Many walked down the path to knock on the door, and Staebler would always shout to come right in. Sitting in her big chair with a homemade blanket draped over the back, she was always knitting. Never idle, she kept busy handmaking toy mice for cats that were distributed locally. She used different colours of yarn, and her sister Ruby later stuffed the bodies with catnip and sewed on the nose, tail, ears and whiskers at her home in Peterborough, Ontario. By the time Staebler died, she estimated she had made tens of thousands of the mice.

Staebler always owned cats. She died in her sleep with a fat tuxedo named Oliver sitting on her thin knees. She used to love Rose Murray’s dog Scamp, too, but she didn’t extend the same kindness to the angry possum she caught bothering chipmunks on her property. Thomason recalls seeing Staebler shooing the possum with her cane. She wasn’t afraid and managed to scare it off. “She had phenomenal moxie,” says Wardropper. “She was a feisty lady.”

Staebler’s moxie was evident in the way she stood up for her beliefs. In the final quarter of her life, she started an endowment with Wilfrid Laurier University to establish the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. First awarded in 1991, the prize honours a Canadian writer, who now receives $10,000 for a first or second book.

Since her death, the university used the money Staebler left to establish a writer-in-residence program as well. During her life, Staebler was astutely aware of her own finances and spoke with Laurier’s president when she felt the university’s investments could be doing better. The president took note. “She looked like a sweet, apple-faced old lady,” says her friend Wardropper, “until she wasn’t happy.”

Staebler had plenty of motivation to establish the award. After spending the first half of her life around people who warned her she’d never make it, she won the 1950 Women’s Press Club Award for the Maclean’s story “How to Live Without Wars and Wedding Rings.” This public confirmation of her talent gave her the confidence to continue and eventually inspired her to create something similar to help others. When the prize launched, Staebler was in her mid-eighties, and the process of determining a winner kept her busy reading the nominated books, usually around 50.

Since her death, others, including Gillespie and Wardropper, have helped choose the winner. At the most recent ceremony in November 2015, Lynn Thomson stood at the podium to accept the award for her book, Birding with Yeats: A Mother’s Memoir. Thomson and her husband own Ben McNally Books in downtown Toronto, so naturally she always thought of herself foremost as a bookseller. “Now,” she said, “I feel like a writer.”

Barbara Wurtele, Staebler’s niece, was sitting in the audience. As Thomson took questions, Wurtele raised her hand to say she used to go birdwatching with her aunt when she was younger. “Edna,” she said, “would have loved your book.”

Staebler was also present at the ceremony, albeit in video form. In an excerpt from Lawrence McNaught’s in-development documentary about her, she talked about the award. Every once in a while she scratched her face with one of her knitting needles. Her voice was quiet and raspy as she described how it felt to finally get recognized for her writing. “I had no confidence in myself,” she said. “Then I won this great award, and I thought, I really am a writer.”

There’s an increasing trend of writers speaking out against publications that don’t pay their writers. Freelance writers are exploited, they say. Putting in countless hours of research, interviewing and sometimes painful writing sessions filled with self-doubt and lack of sleep can lead to very little in return—sometimes nothing at all. Huffington Post UK editor Stephen Hull is proud to say he doesn’t pay his writers, because it makes their work more authentic. Sadly, he’s not alone. The industry is filled with people who believe writing doesn’t need to be paid for.

Something has shifted along the way, and people have stopped seeing writing as work. But it is hard work; writing takes serious brainpower and dedication, with constant generation of ideas and a huge amount of research. So why are we not getting paid? (Especially when this is a reality for anyone going into journalism today.)

Many writers are fighting this, and I want to stand with them. I want to be able to proclaim that I will never write for free. I want to say that I will turn down jobs if I’m not getting paid. But it’s hard to say that with vigour when I’m a young writer who is itching for experience.

Freelancing seems to be getting more accessible to writers like me. It was recently announced that freelance writers will soon be able to get paid for Instant Articles. An Instant Article shared on Facebook would give the writer around 70 percent of ad revenue attached to the story. This is good news for anyone who is tired of writing simply for the sake of getting her name “out there.”

But getting exposure is an essential part of the freelance job. A good circle of contacts is imperative if you want to make it in the industry, according to freelancer Robert Osborne, and a good way of making these connections is through unpaid work. On March 3, 2016, Osborne gave a workshop on freelancing at Ryerson University. He says he will often shoot his stories to The Huffington Post, knowing very well he won’t be paid, just to get his story on the radar. Then he’ll rework the piece into a different medium for a different audience, and this time, he will get actual money for it. He also stresses the importance of making industry friends. These are the kind of people you will at some point need to ask to do something that you may not be able to pay them for. So when they ask you for a favour, you’re happy to help them out for nothing. It’s a give-and-take relationship. You don’t always have to stand your ground and refuse to work for free.

From here, inside the security of post-secondary school walls, the freelance world looks terrifying. It’s tricky to balance that pressing need for exposure and the need for the money—money for, you know, food. It’s important to remember that writing is work, and work should be compensated. Publications should pay their writers. But sometimes, it’s okay to do a little free work, whether it’s for a friend or for making your own reputation. Only sometimes.

At age 12, Julie Scott was the only girl in a boys’ hockey team. There were no girls’ teams when she was growing up in the 1980s in Guelph, Ontario, but she was determined to play hockey just like her big brother. Buried under padding and sometimes using her brother’s old equipment, she proved she was just as good as the boys. Now, almost 30 years later, the head of the sports section at Canadian Press applies the same determination to a male-dominated industry.

Many women in sports journalism acknowledge the skewed gender balance and sexism in the industry but would rather not dwell on these negative aspects. Instead, some female leaders are supporting each other and mentoring the next generation.

There has always been a huge gender gap in sports journalism. According to a 2014 U.S. study by the Women’s Media Center, women make up less than 10 percent of journalists in this beat in print and online. This ratio extends beyond the borders of the U.S. and many sports desks continue to be notoriously unbalanced.

Early in Megan Robinson’s career, a much older male superior told her that she would never make it because she talks like a girl. That was a decade ago, but she still thinks about it from time to time. Today, the Global sports anchor runs a series called Women at Work on her blog that highlights women in various industries. She wants to give them a platform to discuss challenges they face across all fields, and to unite them through storytelling. Robinson says there were many times when she experienced sexism at work at some of her past jobs. She’s been doubted by male colleagues and catcalled in locker rooms. In one post, she links a CBC video of sports reporters speaking out against sexism. The women in the video discuss experiences they’ve had on the job and why they feel like they can’t talk about it. One says, “If you said something, you’d probably be perceived as being weak.”

But things are finally starting to change: at four leading Canadian news organizations, women hold some of the highest positions in the sports sections. Scott is the senior editor of the sports-arts-lifestyles section at CP, Jennifer Quinn is the sports editor at the Toronto Star, Shawna Richer is the sports editor at The Globe and Mail and Bev Wake is the senior executive sports producer at Postmedia Network in Vancouver.

These women made it to the top in an industry that is historically overwhelmingly male despite the pitfalls and ingrained sexism that accompany the job. Although there is competition between their news organizations, the women are friends. They meet often—usually when Wake is in Toronto—to have dinner, catch up and encourage each other. “We’re a good support system for each other,” says Scott.

While it’s refreshing to see women at the top in sports journalism, Jan Kainer, a professor at York University in gender, sexuality and women’s studies, says it’s an anomaly for many professions. The majority of women aren’t given leadership opportunities. Kainer’s course on women in professions analyzes the way women need to act like men and sound like men in order to be accepted. The way female sports broadcasters speak is distinctly masculine, while their appearances are exaggeratedly feminine. “It’s such a contradiction,” says Kainer. This is why comments such as “you talk like a girl” can be damaging.

Subtly sexist language can be the most harmful. Robinson is always referred to as a “female sports journalist,” while male colleagues are just sports journalists. “It’s a subtle way of sorting or reducing,” says Rachelle Williams, a freelance writer and intersectional feminist advocate in Toronto. “The problem is that this can delegitimize the work a woman in a field is producing, and make her sex or gender identification more prominent than the actual work she’s producing.” She says this practice of modifying titles can be seen in other typically male-dominated industries, such as engineering, and can also be applied to people of colour and those with diverse sexual orientations.

Scott and Quinn know they’re lucky to work in progressive newsrooms and want to mentor and support other women in the industry. Along with other colleagues, they run Women in Sports Toronto, a networking and mentoring community inspired by their friendship. “We recognize that we’re quite lucky to have each other and it’s good to share that with other members of our community,” says Quinn. Events so far include a panel discussion at Ryerson University and a time for members of the industry—mainly women—to socialize and talk about jobs, applications and story ideas.

At Women in Sports, the focus is on mentoring. Terry Taylor from Associated Press and Jane O’Hara from the Ottawa Sun were pioneers of female sports journalism and women that Scott looked up to and admired. Now, she is able to do the same for others, which she considers the most rewarding part of her job.

Meanwhile, Robinson uses the negative aspects of the job as motivation. “No matter what,” she writes in an email, “I have chosen and continue to choose this field every day because I love it and because the stories matter to me.”

Tyler Brûlé and Andrew Tuck launched Monocle in 2007 as a global, general interest print magazine. Many people were skeptical of a magazine going against the tide–launching print in the alleged digital age. But Monocle’s circulation numbers continue to grow at a fast pace. “As circulations were in decline for a number of magazines, we just grew,” said Brûlé when speaking at Ryerson University on November 10. “Even through the darkest hours.”

The magazine’s success is linked to the idea that people in the digital age still want the tactile experience of a physical book or magazine. Tuck referred to the science behind reading, and the way reading in hard copy is an entirely different experience from reading something on a screen. He said it’s this tactile experience that we yearn for, as it’s something that breaks us away from the norm. “There’s a really magical moment where we relax and say, okay, the book isn’t going away, magazines are not going away,” said Tuck.

Tuck tied this idea into the return of the record player. He talked about people going to work and listening to digital tracks on their phones but then coming home and putting on a record. As the world becomes more and more digital, it awakens a new hunger for the exact opposite. Tuck said you can’t only live in one of these worlds, so while people today are constantly depending on technology, they still want aspects of the world without digital.

Brûlé  and Tuck say that it’s especially young people who are seeking this escape from technology, this tactile experience. Brûlé said this pressure for magazines to go fully digital is mainly affecting older generations in the industry, who are afraid of looking out of touch and are trying to look current. But Brûlé said youth want a variety of experiences, and writing for print and reading magazines in print provides that opportunity for a tactile, more personal experience.

Though Monocle has a wide range of other elements in addition to print, such as travel books, cafes and conferences, it is not on social media. Brûlé  and Tuck say this strategy is to form a deeper relationship with readers. “It doesn’t feel like we’re hiding away,” said Tuck. “For our audience, it doesn’t feel like the right fit.” While other magazines have Twitter accounts for readers to reach out and tweet at them, Tuck said this strategy usually doesn’t connect readers to the editors. At Monocle, there’s a genuine community, which is based on shaking people’s hands and forming a personal relationship.

“It’s quite amazing that we’ve all been seduced by the digital era,” said Brûlé. But the magazine knows there is no expiration date on print, that there’s still a need for print in today’s world. “Monocle is one of hundreds of brands that are beginning to understand that, and don’t believe that there’s a tsunami coming that’s going to wash us all away,” said Tuck. “We’re going to be here, we’re going to make money, we’re going to tell stories and we’re going to continue to surprise people.”