Saddam Hussein circles Lanny McDonald, preparing to spit venom at the retired hockey player. Twirling his moustache, McDonald stares the dictator down. The Iraqi leader and the hockey legend line up head-to-head in the cipher, preparing to face off in the final round of the battle of the moustaches. They bump mikes, declaring lyrical warfare.

Hussein drops the first verse:

I got you stuck off my moustache, I be the praised

Hussein

You heard the name

Officials certified me insane

Saddam come equipped for chem-warfare, beware

Of gases you can’t see but you’ll damn sure feel

tear

For all those, Iran to Kurdistan

Rock Mac tonight, Iraq ain’t no Playland

I’m all alone in the Mid-East, blastin’

Every tribe’s on its own in my land I be gassin’

Shaken by Hussein’s wounding words, McDonald retaliates with:

Yippy yappin’ ’bout oil politics, dodging the subject

of discussion

And I’m-a beatbox Iraq’s boss like vocal percussion

Fact is, my ‘stache is bigger, better, stronger ?

facial pube perfection

Problem is, this comp’s not rigged, this ain’t some

wacky Iraqi election

Hockey player hater,

You don’t even have the best mustachio for an evil

dictator

Can we say “Heil Hitler?”

Who’s the thickest spitter?

Hands-down whisker victor?

A former teammate of Darryl Sittler

So if you ain’t gonna drop bombs, kindly get off the

shitter!

The aftermath: “Lanny’s verse, the rap equivalent of shaving a man with a chainsaw, decimated Saddam’s hopes of victory. Even with the Devil behind Hussein, there was no denying the weapon of destruction that Mac’s verse represented.”

Who witnessed this war of words? The readers of Pound magazine. Such exchanges, real and imaginary, are what they’ve come to expect from the three-and-a-half-year-old hip-hop title: rhyme and politics rolled into one.

Hip-hop is to “playas” and “thugs,” what rock music was to hippies in the 1960s: the voice of a new generation. Popularized by stars like Eminem, this music has become an extension of pop culture. But for real aficionados, hip-hop goes beyond the beat: It’s a melding of diverse people and cultures that share a common social consciousness, and encompasses storytelling in rap and rhyme, b-boying (also known as break-dancing), deejaying and graffiti. It is these elements that give hip-hop its distinct identity.

It’s an identity that has finally found a stronghold in Canada. After more than a decade of lobbying with the CRTC for a broadcasting licence, Milestone Radio established the country’s first urban-format radio station with FLOW 93.5 FM, which hit Toronto airwaves in February 2001. Similar stations in Vancouver, Ottawa and Calgary soon followed.

“Urban radio has helped to bring hip-hop to the forefront. It’s paved the way for new artists for development. It’s made record labels wake up and say, ‘Hey, this is now,’ turning it into a very viable and profitable business,” says Wayne Williams, music director at FLOW. “Now that it’s getting the exposure on-air, a lot of businesses ? record labels, retail and clothing ? are starting to put money into the whole hip-hop scene. When you talk about hip-hop, you’re talking about an entire culture.”

To represent that culture, Pound was born. Established in 1999, the six-times-a-year magazine ? available for free at record stores, radio stations and other shops around Canada ? has built a loyal following of predominantly young urban males. The saddle-stitched glossy boasts a national circulation of 30,000 and a 100 per cent pick-up rate. While publisher Rodrigo Bascu??n is reluctant to pin down exact profits, he concedes: “Let’s just say that we are doing well.”

Much like hip-hop, Pound began underground. “It did start in a basement, but not this one,” says Bascu??n, who runs the publication from his parents’ home in the St. Clair Avenue West area of Toronto. It’s not the kind of “ghetto fabulous” area where you would imagine a hip-hop title would be based. There’s no graffiti on the buildings ? an art form in hip-hop culture. There are no hip-hop heads b-boying in the alleys. There are no ciphers on the street corners, featuring emcees battling in exchanges of rhyme. Instead, the neighbourhood is quiet and conservative.

But there’s nothing conservative about Bascu??n’s sense of mission for his music. The self-proclaimed hip-hop head spent six years working as a deejay at various Toronto nightclubs and on the campus radio station, CHRW, during his time at the University of Western Ontario, where he studied biology. But through those years, Bascu??n and his friends couldn’t find decent media coverage of their music anywhere.

They weren’t alone. “I’ve never found that newspapers spend a lot of time on pop culture,” says Julie Adam, program director at Toronto’s KISS 92.5 FM radio station. “They do a lot of classical music and jazz. They do a lot on the so-called intellectual music.” A search on music articles published in the Toronto Star during 2002 found 94 articles about classical music compared with 12 on hip-hop ? including a letter to the editor complaining about the newspaper’s poor coverage of the genre. Adam points out that newspapers are not hip-hop publications, but says it is surprising that the media are not covering a form of music that has become an important part of pop culture. “It’s the most popular music there is right now,” she says. “It’s huge.”

Matt Galloway, music writer at Now magazine, agrees that hip-hop is “stronger than ever before,” but notes that the media give it little attention. “Unless somebody major comes out, you don’t really get any coverage,” he says .

Phil Vassell, publisher of Word magazine, one of Canada’s 14 hip-hop titles, says the media is behind on popular trends. “The mainstream media in Canada have not kept pace with the U.S. mainstream media as far as hip-hop coverage is concerned. Come to think of it, it has been several years now since Lauryn Hill [the hip-hop artist who earned five Grammy Awards in 1999 ? the most ever by a female artist in one year] made the cover of Time,” says Vassell. “Young readers know their interests aren’t covered or taken seriously, so they go elsewhere.”

Bascu??n hopes that youths will turn to Pound, a name that characterizes the hip-hop lifestyle. “It’s like the salutation, to give someone a Pound,” says Bascu??n, demonstrating the greeting. “It’s also like ‘the musicPounds,'” he says. The “P” in the magazine’s logo holds a double meaning as well. It is the letter “P,” but its design also resembles a fist.

With fist and ambition in ample supply, the Pound group started from scratch. Bascu??n read about publishing, registered in a young entrepreneurs class and put together a pilot issue that he had copied in colour at a printing house. Approximately 500 copies were sent to prospective advertisers and investors. The trial issue generated a lot of interest, but little in the way of funding. Money was, in fact, the group’s biggest roadblock; they had tons of ideas to hustle, but no “bling” to finance their venture. Salvation came with the approval of a $12,500 credit line ? $7,500 in the form of a government loan and $5,000 in overdraft. ThePound staff contributed another $15,000 of their own. “I was just lucky that I went to schools with affluent kids,” says Bascu??n.

The first issue was published in December 1999 ? a 64-page book with only six pages of ads. That unhealthy ratio coupled with an overly ambitious distribution of 40,000 copies instantly thrust Pound into the red, with a $20,000 loss. “That’s a third of our debt for the whole three years we’ve been around,” says Bascu??n. “That put us right against the wall from the get-go.”

But success wasn’t far away. While handing out flyers promoting the Pound launch party, Bascu??n ran into Michael Evans, an acquaintance from Western. Intrigued by Bascu??n’s project, Evans offered to help. He had already started an advertising business with his father, specializing in the sale of new, innovative advertising. His experience served as a natural background for his foray into selling ads for the magazine. ByPound‘s eighth issue, Evans had helped the title turn a modest profit.

But it wasn’t easy. “A lot of people would say, ‘Why don’t you see me after you do three or four issues?'” says Evans. “I felt like saying, ‘Well, I need you now.'” Also tricky was explaining hip-hop to advertisers who knew the magazine fit their demographic, but didn’t understand why.

At one meeting with a panel of ad reps, Bascu??n and Evans watched in disbelief as one woman frowned and made rude gestures as she leafed through their publication. In her view, the magazine’s content was too negative to be associated with her product. “To write about police brutality and how it occurs, when it occurs and how important it is for us to address something like this ? you just can’t sweep something like that under the carpet,” says Evans. “But that’s negative in her eyes. To be honest, she might as well have said that there are too many black people in this magazine. That’s the feeling you got.”

It’s a feeling that’s shared by other members of the hip-hop community. “With the exception of a few writers at the dailies, I’d have to agree that the mainstream media’s coverage of hip-hop continues to be biased and based on sensationalism,” says Errol Nazareth, music writer at eye Weekly, and former music columnist atThe Toronto Sun. “I fought this every step of the way when I worked at the Sun. For every wire story about DMX getting busted for some dumb behaviour, I’d write a story about, say, hip-hop artists protesting police brutality or helping raise awareness about AIDS.”

Harris Rosen, publisher of Peace magazine, says that a lot of the prejudicial attitudes toward hip-hop are the result of mixed messages sent out by the community itself, from sexist images in music videos and in song lyrics. But there is more to the lifestyle, he says, than what is presented to the audience.

Besides contending with hip-hop’s shady reputation, as a music magazine, Pound is perhaps not taken seriously in the industry. “Magazines in the category tend to fall victim to boosterism and not a lot of critical coverage that I can see,” says Bill Shields, editor of Masthead, the magazine industry trade title. Certainly Bascu??n’s own interest in the genre smacks of the smitten and has been the driving force behind the magazine. “I think the main motivation was just caring about the culture and wanting to do it justice in another medium,” says Bascu??n.

That said, his approach is clearly working. After three years in the game, Pound is springboarding off its success into other ventures. In the next year, Bascu??n plans to produce a series of books based on the magazine’s regular political section, Babylon System. “The first book, Babylon System: Weapons, addresses the main weapons ? arms, media, food, education ? that are used to oppress people in the world,” says Bascu??n. “The second book, Babylon System: Tools, will teach readers how to combat these weapons.” The Pound posse also plans to setup an American version of the publication and are in the process of developing a new international general-interest magazine. Bascu??n hopes this new title will allow him to cover issues that don’t quite fit into his hip-hop magazine. Pound for pound, the Pound boys are “pushing weight.”

With the March 2003 issue, 2,000 copies of Pound hit New York City, and another 5,000 ? at $4.95 a piece ? appeared on Canadian newsstands, alongside larger American hip-hop titles like The Source, XXL and Vibe. The bulk of the circulation, however, still comes from shops that continue to offer the magazine for free.

Growth and change are not new to Pound. Shields has noticed the title’s improved production values. “The latest incarnation seems to be quite ritzy compared to what it was looking like two or three years ago,” he says. “They’ve increased the quality of their paper-stock, their trim size is a little larger, and they’re obviously investing more money in production.”

Others are more lavish in their praise. “For my money, Pound is doing the best job of covering hip-hop culture in Canada. The articles are well written, insightful and interesting,” says Nazareth. “The writing in the majority of hip-hop magazines ? here and in the U.S. ? reads like fan mail, and I am being kind when I say that. Either the publishers and writers do not have the courage to ask tough questions or the brains to offer something insightful, or they are scared to piss off their advertisers ? which include record companies ? that pump so much money into their magazines.”

Sitting in his basement office as a fax machine rattles off documents from advertisers, Bascu??n takes all the attention in stride. “Either everyone is full of it and kissing our asses, or they’re being honest,” he says. “I think they’re being honest, though.”

It’s about an hour before show time. Manny, the floor director, places them strategically around two elevated white couches. Soft blue clouds hang from the ceiling. The walls are decorated with boards painted in rich shades of orange with tiny white lights. Two tall lamps?looking like giant pipe cleaners glimmering with blue light?cast a faint glow on the walls. Technicians run around setting up camera angles and pulling blue electrical cables. A giant boom camera weightlessly floats through the air. The crowd listens to Manny yell out instructions.

“No frowning! No crossing your arms! Look like you want to be here!” he says, moving an excited couple closer to the stage. “When we come back from commercials, we need long, thorough clapping!” He takes the crowd through six practice entrances. A short blond stands in for the star. Manny directs the crowd, pulling a girl here, shifting a couple here. He demonstrates the art of utilizing small spaces by teaching the crowd to stay to the sides first as the stand-in walks toward the platform, then engulf the absent space. It’s an old trick to make small spaces seem larger. The music is cued up, and the crowd is ordered to yell, scream and clap until the stand-in sits down. Throughout the practice entrances, host Karina Huber goes over her lines and speaks toward the boom mike above. Her words can’t be heard over the applause and catcalls; the mikes are kept low to avoid feedback. Finally, it’s time for the real thing.

The crowd grows quiet as the star waits for her signal to enter. She is dressed in black, and her slender legs resemble twin licorice sticks. Black makeup is smeared around her brown eyes and long blond hair cascades past her shoulders. She stands relatively alone, with only a large man?her assistant, or maybe a bodyguard?nearby. The dark, empty hallway behind her will never be seen in the “building that shoots itself.” Suddenly, it’s 8 o’clock?showtime. The crowd that’s waited for hours in the cold will now participate in an Intimate & Interactive program. Some will stand an arm’s length away from the guest, Faith Hill. It’s probably their first chance to see a star close up.

MuchMusic, or Much, as most call it, features live shows like Intimate & Interactive on a regular basis. Usually it showcases a live artist every month, whether it’s for Live@Much, I&I or a MuchOnDemand appearance. With 10 human VJs and a sock puppet called “Ed,” Much creates about 42 hours of original programming a week. You will see endless variations of the MuchMusic Countdown: MuchTopHookUps,MuchTopAssVideos, MuchTopRocks, as well as Becoming,Gonna Meet a Rock Star, Spotlight and Power Shift, yet another video countdown. All Much programming runs dependably on a nine-hour loop.

Much has no real competition and can legitimately claim to be the Canadian television source for breaking music. Record companies provide a steady stream of video content, and VJs keep the message light and lively. The problem is, although many on-air staff have backgrounds in journalism or broadcasting, Much rarely indulges in the actual production of journalism. Other than The NewMusic, a more serious show that has been reduced to one half-hour per week (Mondays at 9 p.m.), the station rarely ventures into critical territory.

Much may act as if it’s doing music journalism? onducting live interviews, reporting live from various locations, doing research?but almost
everyone agrees the station provides little journalistic content. It is assumed that if teenagers think at all, what they think about is having fun. Much is popular and makes money for its owner, CHUM Ltd., but is it underestimating the intelligence and shortchanging the very audience to which it slavishly caters?

***
MuchMusic has set its sights on a fairly young demographic, which is reflected in its shows. Employees will tell you the target audience ranges from 18 to 24 years of age, which, depending on the programming, can stretch more widely from 12 to 34. “If your main target is people between the ages of 16 and 20,” says Alan Cross, director of radio station Y108 FM in Hamilton and writer/host of The Ongoing History of NewMusic, “they don’t want ultra hard-hitting journalism.” There is TreeToss, a bizarre annual stunt that has been airing since 1986. “Celebrity Tosser” Rick Campanelli hosts a show where he throws a used Christmas tree?usually in flames?off the CHUMCity building rooftop and tries to land it in a dumpster in the parking lot below. “When you take into account the audience that MuchMusic is going after,” says Cross, “all they really care about is when Britney’s new CD is out and whether Eminem did something naughty again.” Kieran Grant, former Toronto Sun music columnist and current listings editor at eye Weekly, a Toronto news and entertainment tabloid, concurs, saying, “They have obviously tapped the youth market. They’ve got it and they’ve gone after it increasingly.”

Generally, Much programming emphasizes fun, not information. MuchOnDemand, a zany live spectacle that tapes from 5 to 6 p.m. Monday to Thursday, tests video games on-air while guest musicians drop by. Hosted by Jennifer Hollett and Rick Campanelli, MOD represents a trend at MuchMusic to do away with any pretence of practising journalism. Other teen programming includes Becoming, an American show where fans reenact their favourite musicians’ videos, and Gonna Meet a Rock Star, where the rabid faithful compete to see who’s enough of a fan to meet his or her preferred idol. Both shows focus on an immature level of music appreciation. “It defines a lack of direction for MuchMusic in the amount of American programming that they buy,” says Grant. “It’s part of a worrying trend that they should lower themselves to that kind of programming.” But it’s the kind of programming that makes money.

A lot of what Much does is centred on making money?which is what any successful television station must do?but its innocuous programming in no way challenges the viewer. Alan Cross says, “If you offend an artist or label, what do you think your chances of getting access to artists in the future are going to be like?” Much has to answer to the record companies that provide the videos and the artist appearances. It’s a mutual arrangement?Much needs celebrity musicians to appear on its shows, and record companies need Much for the publicity that sells CDs.

Exactly if and how much content is determined by advertising isn’t known. No one at Much would comment on the numbers. Cross says management must “walk that fine line between art and commerce,” but even Much employees?past and present?agree that the true nature of music television is advertising, not journalism.

George Stroumboulopoulos is a popular, nose-pierced VJ at Much. He and I sit down for a chat in the greenroom at Much headquarters. He slips his leg up onto the arm of the soft blue leather couch, slouches back and smiles. He is very comfortable in chatting about his work. He talks a mile a minute and I’m thankful for the tape recorder. “The purpose of music television is to sell soap and to sell records,” he says. “We got 50 channels and all you ever see is entertainment on television?there’s so many different ways to promote this shit.”

Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC’s Play, has viewed Much from two sides of the music business. As front man for the band Moxy Fr?vous he experienced Much’s handling of Canadian artists and arts entertainment first-hand. “I don’t think Much does music journalism,” he says. “MuchMusic operates to a certain extent as a profit-making arm of the marketing department of major record companies,” he says. “Do I think programming over there might be based on what Clearasil wants because they buy the ads? Yeah.”

***
I’m inside the office of vice-president and general manager of MuchMusic and MuchMoreMusic David Kines, at the CHUMCity building. Much’s top gun is surrounded by the tools of his trade. A giant 36-inch television blares host Richard Cazeau wrapping up a session of MuchMoreMusic’s news show, The Loop. An oversized, red double-M logo sits on top of the TV, a reminder of the station’s past. Two smaller televisions feature other CHUM music channels. An entire wall is crammed with framed pictures of music celebrities. To Kines’s left is a massive print of pop superstar Britney Spears wrapping her arms around Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. “If someone’s selling two million CDs but they’ve got a shitty video, it can be tough,” observes Kines, reinforcing the relationship between the companies that supply the videos and Much, which broadcasts them. “We want the record music industry to be healthy.”

Kines, who started at Much in 1983 as an editor and worked his way up, looks anxious, almost fidgety. He’s swift to defend Much from the accusation that it doesn’t produce any worthwhile journalism. “We don’t just go off and cover anything just ’cause it’s news,” he says, shifting back and forth in his chair, crossing his legs. “We try to pick issues that are relevant to our audience.” He cups his shoe with his hand as he talks. His eyes dart around the room. His tiny dog, Mitzy, a white bichon frise, lies sleeping in the corner. Kines confesses that Mitzy might ruin his reputation as a hard businessman, but when asked whether he’s concerned about the large amount of teen-oriented fare in rotation, he fires back, “We have MuchLOUD and MuchVibe for people who don’t want pop.” He scratches his short salt-and-pepper hair and looks away?the interview seems to be at an impasse.

Since going on air in ’84, Much has been appealing to a set demographic, respecting its advertisers and turning a profit. “It’s essentially been a licence to print money, and it’s done really well,” says former Much VJ Tony Young, a.k.a. Master T. “Advertisers realize that it’s one of the few stations that really caters to a particular market of youth.” Young left the station in late 2001?his contract expired and he was asked to search elsewhere. He was encouraged to look for work at other CHUM properties, specifically MuchMoreMusic, but says he “didn’t want to be shuffled and placed somewhere else.”

MuchMoreMusic was started in 1998 with the intent to provide an outlet for more serious programming?that, in theory, current Much viewers would gravitate toward after outgrowing the teen product. With its limited VJs, MMM relies heavily on musician biographies and purchased foreign content, usually from MTV or VH1. Shows like Behind the Music and The Story Of? focus on a predictable rise-fall-rise narrative of success, setback, then return to glory. They are designed to delve deeper?but not too deeply?into the careers of popular musicians and recycle old interview snippets.

MMM’s demographic stretches from 24 to 49, but it’s left many viewers wanting, well, much more. Daniel Richler, who worked at Much in the 1980s, hosting and producing The NewMusic, says, “I don’t know what it is, but when people turn 30 they’re suddenly supposed to be listening to easy rock.” When asked whether he watches MMM, Richler says, “That is truly a bland channel. There are no opinions offered?just wallpaper. Rock should not be background, it should be foreground.”

Much used to do music journalism. J.D. Roberts (who went on to news broadcasting fame in the United States), Laurie Brown (who later moved to the CBC) and Richler, who is now editor-in-chief and supervising producer of BookTelevision (also launched by CHUM Ltd.), all broke ground working on The NewMusic. Before the birth of MTV, it was the only music television show on air. “The purpose now,” says current host Stroumboulopoulos, “is to examine not just music and musicians but also what musicians feel about other things going on in the world and the environment that they deal with.”

When The NewMusic was one hour long, “You didn’t just slavishly follow whatever some advertising campaign told you to do,” says Richler. “A lot of times people used to yell at me out of pickup trucks on Yonge Street, ‘You asshole!’ because I had asked a critical question of M?tley Cr?e. The fact is, most of the bands enjoyed it because it was so boring for them to answer the same questions over and over again.”

Richler began as a reporter on The NewMusic in 1982. He was immediately assigned grunt jobs. “I was brought on to do the stinky bands in the cockroach-infested hotels,” he says, laughing. In 1984, he took over as host and producer and began to try what he calls “rockumentary” style programming?combining rock music with in-depth journalism. “Record companies were always piling us up with media releases, videos, records and T-shirts, so the real job was to sort out the hype from the groove.”

Richler pushed the limits of rock journalism by purposely asking difficult questions, which often made his subjects uncomfortable. “I never minded conflict. A lot of interviewers tend to shy away from conflict because they won’t be invited back,” says Richler. During an interview with Bryan Adams in 1984, Richler pressed the Vancouver rocker with a line of questioning about Adams’s financial involvement with an antisealing operation. Richler asked Adams if his fans appreciated his political stand on sealing and Adams immediately said, “Oh yeah, everywhere, from coast to coast.” When pressed further as to how fans in the Maritimes felt about Adams’s public boycott of an industry that represents almost half of their economy, Adams tried to back away from his comment. Richler pushed harder, suggesting that the singer hadn’t thought the issue through enough. Adams’s manager, the tempestuous Bruce Allen, stormed into the studio and demanded the tape. The beleaguered host asked, “What is this?the Soviet Union?” but he didn’t give up the tape or his line of questioning. “I wasn’t being belligerent,” he remarks. “I wanted to give musicians respect by asking them honest questions. I didn’t want to just be a handmaiden to the record companies.”

Much has tried to do something other than what Richler calls “press release journalism” on The NewMusic by injecting world affairs into the show. Stroumboulopoulos hosted one program about World AIDS Day, December 1, 2002, in Zambia, Africa. On another, Hollett was sent to Afghanistan, where she did a story on Afghani women and the newfound freedoms they have. But Stuart Berman, music editor at eye Weekly, is critical of Much’s real journalism. “It’s a weird juxtaposition between interesting stories about people who had been tortured for listening to music and this weird section where they take these Afghanistan teenagers around and show them Avril Lavigne videos and are, like, ‘What do you think of that?’ Deep down they know they’re catering to a bunch of teenagers who just want to see an ‘NSync video.”

Today, hardly anyone thinks Much engages in journalism. Certainly not Kines’s predecessor, Denise Donlon, now president of Sony Music Canada. “Much’s mission is to speak to the widest possible audience that it can,” she says. “The Backstreet Boys are selling millions of records around the world and that’s not something they can avoid. Music television is designed to sell advertising. It’s a commercial endeavour designed to capture ratings.”

I talk to the amiable Bill Welychka, host and producer of MuchMoreMusic’s The Story Of?, about it, and he’s troubled by the question of whether he does music journalism. He says, “Just by the mere virtue of the word ‘music,’ it is entertainment. Maybe it’s the connotation that the word ‘journalism’ brings, but I’d be uncomfortable answering that question. Yeah, we can be journalistic, but it’s still entertaining, whereas CNN is journalistic but it’s not entertaining.”

Music journalism “should educate the people as to what the music’s all about,” says the Calgary Herald‘s music critic Heath McCoy. Music journalism should delve past record company PR and inform the audience. If everything Much is programming is in the service of the record companies and advertisers, it’s missing the point of music and music journalism. Even Stroumboulopoulos might agree with that. As he observes, “Music is important because it keeps people company. This is a world filled with lonely people and for a lot of them music is their solace.”

The problem with maintaining a narrow view of what kind of programming young adults want?that kids don’t want to think; they’re only interested in infomercials and fluffy game shows?is that it doesn’t expose them to a critical analysis of music. By pandering to the baser instincts of fandom, Much reduces music coverage to an all-or-nothing approach?either say something nice or don’t say anything at all. Mom’s old adage becomes Much’s motto and its video suppliers’ dream slogan.

Of course, the business view is different. Whether the broadcast is about tossing a burning tree from a roof or attempting an educational program about AIDS, MuchMusic’s ratings are solid and, if we take the company at its word, profits steady. So why challenge the audience by shaking up the status quo? Apparently, failing to ask musicians the tough questions doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Sitting in the boardroom of the cramped, paper-strewn Geist offices, tucked in the middle of the trendy art galleries, upscale glassware shops and condo developments of Homer Street, Osborne shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He’s in no mood to talk. He declines to have his voice committed to audiotape during our interview, and won’t even allow the door to be closed due to his claustrophobia. “There are no secrets here,” he says, a trace of paranoia in his voice.

Despite his tics, Osborne is something of a local celebrity, a charismatic bon vivant in the B.C. literary community, inspiring awe and devotion in what could (and have been) described as “groupies.” The 55-year-old Osborne is also a computer genius, a devoted grandfather and a man whose shyness led him to begin publishing his photography in the pages of Geist under the enigmatic pseudonym Mandelbrot (after the inventor of chaos theory).

Adamant that Geist is unparalleled among Canadian magazines, Osborne clearly loves to talk about his baby. “I think we have the highest editorial control in the country,” he boasts, his voice veritably purring. “We edit word by word. We fact check the fiction.” Not exactly the kind of casual congeniality you’d expect from a magazine with a steaming mug of coffee for a logo. Osborne has been called business-savvy, ambitious, philanthropic, irreverent and an opinionated idea man. Above all, he is viewed in the insular world of Canadian magazine publishing as having what former Saturday Night editor Paul Tough calls an “outsider personality.” And being an outsider suits Osborne just fine. After all, it usually takes one to lead a revolution, cultural or otherwise.

Okay, it may be a tad hyperbolic to equate a literary magazine with a revolution, but if any Canadian magazine out there is working to shake up a stagnant publishing industry, it’s Geist. People who know Osborne are quick to point out that father and brainchild are indistinguishable, one and the same in tone and worldview. While the quarterly Geist is currently the largest literary magazine in Canada, its circulation still hovers around 7,000 an issue, and it operates on a shoestring $180,000 annual budget. Compare that with the two biggest moneymakers in Canadian magazine publishing, the Rogers-owned Chatelaine and Maclean’s, with a combined total revenue for 2002 of over $80 million.

According to a 2000 study Osborne completed for the Canada Council, the average total circulation for a Canadian English-language literary, visual arts or performing arts magazine is a mere 1,817. Most pin their financial prospects on government money, but since Canada Council grants only account for an average of 23 per cent of total revenue, and provincial grants 13 per cent, these magazines rely heavily on advertising and subscribers to make up the difference. With a dusty back-shelf presence and less than one-tenth of the marketing budget of a magazine with a circulation of 100,000, it can be almost impossible for a small-circulation magazine to find an audience. What’s a self-respecting independent publisher to do? Fill the void.

While most Canadian cultural magazines are (or are perceived as) stuffy, eggheaded publications content to stay on those back shelves and blend in with magazines that read like university dissertations and have the visual panache to match, a handful have come up with fresh approaches to documenting Canadian cultural life. Magazines like HighGrader, a northern Ontario public affairs magazine, and Lola, a Toronto-based arts journal, are doing their parts to subvert readers’ negative expectations. On top of this list of innovators isGeist. Osborne not only wants to “document the Canadian imagination,” his goal for Geist is to become the definitive Canadian magazine. If its burgeoning reputation in the national literary community is any indication, he just might get his wish.

…………………….

“Politics is open and discussed in Canada. Unlike in the U.S., there are alternative venues of thought,” Osborne says. “What’s hidden in Canada is culture.” For over a decade, he had seriously entertained the idea of creating a magazine modelled after the venerable U.S. publication Harper’s?and to a lesser extent The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly?and adapting it to suit a Canadian audience. With $7,500 and encouragement from his long-time life partner and senior editor Mary Schendlinger, Osborne created the first issue in his living room in the fall of 1990.

Today, Geist (German for “ghost” or “spirit”) is published by the Geist Foundation, a nonprofit board with Osborne acting as sovereign lord and master. The magazine shares office space with Vancouver Desktop Publishing (founded by Osborne in the 1980s and currently run by his sister Patty), Arsenal Pulp Press (an alternative book publishing firm Osborne started in the 1970s) and an arts management agency (he had nothing to do with this one).

Over the last 12 years, Osborne has managed to transform Geist from a roughly designed magazine?published on what looked like that pulp paper fourth-grade teachers hand out with the fat pencils?to an elegant publication full of luxurious white space, thick-stocked, silky pages, clean lines and stunning black-and-white photography.

But the spirit of the content has changed little. Each issue is devoted to intensely personal, nostalgic and evocative nonfiction and fiction. The front section of the magazine, Notes and Dispatches, always includes a brief essay by Osborne. (In last fall’s “The Lost Art of Waving,” he wondered, “Who today is willing to be diagnosed as nostalgic? Who confesses to that once noble affliction, now reduced to a mere attribute of sentimentalism, a component of kitsch?”) Schendlinger contributes regular cartoons under the pseudonym Eve Corbel. (“Hi, I’m Eve Corbel?and I am Intermittently Unnoticeable. No, really.”) Recently, Geist has received national media attention for its campaign to induct folk legend Stan Rogers into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. The magazine is often funny and irreverent, but are its ideology and outlook a little too, well, West Coast (read “flaky”) to appeal to a national audience?

“They say ideology is like halitosis, everyone else has it, right?” jokes Melissa Edwards, Geist‘s assistant editor. Her responsibilities include editing the magazine’s back page, “Caught Mapping.” (Each issue features a different theme map of Canada, like summer 2000’s “Menstrual Map,” which included the real locations Bloody River, Gush Cove and Bitch Lake.) She also does the day-to-day “monkey work” of the operation. “You don’t see your own ideology,” she says. “To me Geist is not a western magazine.” Edwards comparesGeist‘s situation to The Globe and Mail. “People from Toronto say that it’s not a Toronto newspaper, it’s national. I read it and it’s like, ‘It’s a Toronto newspaper.’ You can’t help be focused on where you’re from.”

…………………….

“Please cancel all future editions of Geist magazine. I dislike the writings printed?Mad to me, and they have a ridiculous, non-sensible, no-talent style. I’ve reread the magazine (or tried to), attempted to understand the prose, poetry (no rhyme), and articles that fill up (with small print) this unique, non-talent (so it seems to me), rambling in the clouds, magazine.”

Like this anonymous former subscriber (sounds as if he or she needs new reading glasses), many readers in the West don’t have any love for a “rambling in the clouds” literary journal either. “A lot of people find it really boring,” says Edwards, who was so enraptured by Geist she started out as a volunteer. A project manager with the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers, Edwards started marketing campaigns in little British Columbia towns, only to discover that many of those remote outlets not stocking Geist were downright confused by it.

“A lot of them said, ‘This is a magazine? It doesn’t look like a magazine,'” she recalls. Apparently, light and glossy plays as well in Dawson Creek as it does in Stoney Creek. While Edwards thinks a Toronto-based magazine will eventually come along to try to take the place the faltering Saturday Night used to occupy in the cultural lexicon, she still thinks Geist is on “the cusp of being something really big.” Osborne certainly has no plans to relocate, especially since he considers Toronto such an “intellectual wasteland.” He says his obligation is to the Canadian Small Town?whether or not it’s receptive to him?and mourns its loss as an idea both in the Canadian media and in the collective Canadian imagination.

“If you hit a neutron bomb south of Bloor Street, you’d take out 95 per cent of Canada’s media,” HighGradereditor Charlie Angus says, echoing Osborne’s refrain. “They all come from the same gene pool, and they all end up basically telling the same views.” Like Geist, Angus’s magazine seeks to document the small-town Canadian imagination, but in a more self-consciously regional sense. Since 1995, HighGrader has provided a cultural voice for northern Canadians, written from a northern perspective. “Rural Canada is an internal Third World,” Angus says. “People’s stories are just written off, or they’re from an urban perspective, which diminishes the northern voice.”

Published bimonthly from the small mining town of Cobalt, Ontario, HighGrader bills itself as “a magazine with dirt on its fingernails.” Neither Angus nor his wife, publisher Brit Griffin, has any formal journalistic training, but both share a deep commitment to fighting social injustice, and their magazine generally reflects their pro-labour and anti-Tory views.

HighGrader straddles the line between serious political reportage and a folksy voice that articulates the culture of the north. The Fall 2002 issue, for instance, includes pieces on diverse topics like “The Kam Kotia Mine Disaster” (“Ontario’s most notorious mine waste problem”), to Jim Moodie’s nostalgic pilgrimage to Bob Dylan’s boyhood hometown, Hibbing, Minnesota, which would be right at home in the pages of Geist.HighGrader‘s scope is not limited entirely by geography, either. “We try to put an international perspective on rural hinterland issues,” Angus insists. He says his magazine doesn’t reflect a particular party line; Angus himself is almost as suspicious of urban warriors like Earthroots as he is of the Tory government.

…………………….

“Our magazine is being kept alive by old people,” Angus says with a chuckle. Some faithful subscribers are even in their 90s. While the magazine’s circulation is only about 2,000, a recent reader profile estimated its actual readership as high as 12,000. Angus claims the real boon is HighGrader‘s unusually high subscription renewal rates (although he has no firm numbers). With an almost nonexistent newsstand profile and frustrating experiences with past distributors?including one that never paid and refused to reveal where the magazine was stocked?HighGrader relies on its subscribers to keep it alive, a unique situation, considering subscription sales account for only 17 per cent of the average small-circulation magazine’s revenue.

Still, it’s not an unusual phenomenon for a small Canadian title to have such a rabidly loyal following. According to John Degen of the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association, Canadian magazines have become world leaders in per-capita subscription sales. “Canadian consumers are wily,” Degen says. “When they don’t see themselves reflected at the supermarket checkouts or newsstands, they make sure their perspective gets delivered to their door instead.”

Like Osborne and Schendlinger, Angus and Griffin pride themselves on their high level of editorial control. Unlike Geist, however, HighGrader has stayed away from grant funding. About two-thirds of Geist‘s budget comes from public funding, mainly from the Canada Council and the Canada Magazine Fund, which was launched in 2000 by Canadian Heritage.

For the 2000-02 funding period, the Geist Foundation received $40,000 from CMF for a direct mail campaign. But the CMF is by no means exclusively funding struggling independents. The program also gave the French and English versions of Chatelaine, the richest title in the country, over $500,000 combined for 2001-02. Sibling Maclean’s received over $1 million.

While the HighGrader team has discussed starting a foundation in the past, generally when money is tight, they make a plea to their readers. HighGrader subscribers have saved the magazine with their donations many times. For the past two years, Angus hasn’t had to make that plea, although subscription rates are going up at the request of many readers. “They think it’s way too low,” Angus says. “Twenty bucks a year, you just can’t make it.” He recently had to take a full-time job with the Algonquin Nation to support the magazine and his family (Angus has three daughters, aged 14, 12 and 5. The two eldest are already writers and activists).

Since HighGrader is such an eccentric magazine, Angus has basically given up on advertising revenue as a major source of income. “I can’t stand having to phone people time and time again for chintzy little ads,” he grumbles. Clearly, Angus is happier muckraking than marketing. But some fledgling cultural magazines are toying with the potential of big publicity, bigger circulation and (just maybe) big-time profits.

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“Who the fuck is Sharon Salson?” the press release demands. Salson sits cross-legged in a space-age desk chair in a downtown Toronto office building with a rather tony King Street address, wearing a casual uniform of jeans and a black cardigan, her blond-streaked hair stylishly tousled. Tucked in a small, bright corner of the cavernous, loft-style offices of Inside Entertainment publishers Kontent?an industrial space laden with wood blonder than she is and an assortment of candy-coloured iMacs and fuzzy-topped pens?Salson (who became Salson-Gregg after marrying pollster and former Conservative Party strategist Allan Gregg last August) is beaming with an air of enthusiasm that only someone with a marketing background can possess. She is, in fact, none other than the brand spanking new publisher of the country’s cheekiest, scrappiest and most irreverent art magazine, Lola, and she couldn’t be happier about it.

In February 2002, when Lola announced via brassy press release that it had acquired its first-ever publisher, the magazine was already a comparatively big success on the Toronto indie scene. But Salson-Gregg knew when she took the position it might be a struggle to transform Lola from underground darling to heavyweight commercial success. “It was an entrepreneurial challenge, a creative challenge,” she says. “It was a magazine that I had been following. I do believe strongly that it’s got tremendous potential in this market to really break through.”

Salson-Gregg came to Lola after marketing stints at Toronto Life and Telemedia and as marketing director at the Art Gallery of Ontario. (She still runs her own consulting business on the side.) After joining Lola last winter (and throwing a high-profile party in honour of her new gig), Salson-Gregg set out to build a growth strategy for the magazine. She is looking to expand Lola’s readership beyond its current niche of art insiders to readers who are interested in learning more about the art world but might be too intimidated to pick up a conventional art journal.
Founded in 1997 by editor and arts writer Catherine Osborne (no relation to Geist‘s Stephen), artist Sally McKay and curator John Massier, Lola quickly separated itself from the milky quagmire of stuffy academic journals like so much creamy goodness. From an initial print-run of 1,300 freebies distributed to art galleries and bookstores in downtown Toronto, Lola has grown to a circulation of 10,000.

The ladies of Lola were frustrated with the lack of freshness and innovation in the world of arts and culture coverage. “We were tired of reading the same bylines,” says Osborne, an impossibly petite brunette sporting groovy cat’s-eye glasses. “We were tired of the same artists getting coverage.” Osborne was also bored with the sterilized approach most art magazines took to rough and ready exhibits, robbing them of their vitality and “street cred.” Equally frustrated that she couldn’t score much freelance work in a stagnant Toronto arts journalism scene, Osborne met with McKay and mutual friend Massier, and decided to start a magazine (Massier left after two issues because of work obligations).

“When we started it was very much with that kind of do-it-yourself, “we’re-just-gonna-make-this-thing’ attitude,” says McKay, sitting in the front room of her tiny second-floor apartment in west end Toronto. “It quickly became clear that there was a place for a serious endeavour.” With a background in fine art, McKay is entirely self-taught when it comes to magazine layout, her principal job as Lola’s art director. (Despite the separation of tasks, McKay and Osborne share editorial control.)

Lola’s success on the Toronto arts scene has as much to do with its style as its substance. A cross between the cut-and-paste homemade quality of zines and the glossiness of consumer magazines, Lola treats visual arts with the appropriate attention to the visual. Although until recently most of the magazine’s distribution base has been art galleries, Lola shows no signs of the elitist sensibility that might imply. The magazine includes ongoing columns like Ask Lola’s Lawyer, featuring legal advice for artists from attorney Adam Bobker. (Last winter’s issue featured a letter from the “co-editors of a Toronto art magazine” about copyright infringement suspiciously signed “C.O. and S.M.”) There’s also a gossip column, sex column and the most popular department, the “shotgun review” section, featuring a slew of art exhibit mini-reviews. Contributors are cheekily identified at the back in “Who the Fuck Is Lola?” (Sample: “R.M. Vaughan is easily swayed by his emotions.”)

This is culture for the populace, albeit a progressive populace, and Lola has never been afraid to offend. So, were McKay and Osborne worried that “taking it to the next level” would jeopardize their obvious nose-thumbing tendencies?

For Osborne, bringing Salson-Gregg into the fold was a matter of practicality. “In the morning I’d be calling galleries to advertise and then in the afternoon call them to ask editorial questions. You can’t do that,” she says, laughing. Unlike Geist and HighGrader, Lola has relied heavily on advertising from the very beginning. Osborne and McKay were also able to secure a $50,000 line of low-interest credit after putting together an initial business plan. Lola only started receiving grant funding from the Canada Council this year, but the $20,000 it got didn’t go very far. (It also received an $80,000 multiyear grant from the CMF for its “growth spurt.”) Even though the magazine is still barely breaking even?it costs as much as $25,000 to print each issue?it’s clear the potential pool of advertisers eager to court Lola’s tragically hip readership is enormous.

Salson-Gregg has been busying herself landing advertising accounts like Absolut Vodka based on the statistics from Lola’s most recent readers’ survey. “We know our readers spend money going out,” she says. “They’re not stay-at-home types. So it’s about buying CDs, books, clothes, feeding into a lifestyle that’s about socializing and accessing the culture and entertainment that’s available.”

Last November, Lola finally went completely “newsstand,” ceasing to be a free publication in Toronto. While it had always cost $5 for magazines distributed outside the GTA, Lola’s price is now $3.95 almost everywhere. “It’s not unusual for a free magazine to go newsstand,” assures Osborne. “That’s a good thing.”

And even more radical changes are in the works. “We have to be more inclusive around what defines art and culture,” says Salson-Gregg, who this past winter became a Lola co-owner along with McKay and Osborne. “Moving beyond visual art into other forms, but staying true to the magazine, being smart without being turgid, funny without being silly, accessible without kowtowing to the lowest common denominator.” She would also like to see the magazine grow from a quarterly to a bimonthly. Still furiously brainstorming redesign ideas, the ladies are aiming for an early fall rebirth of Lola.

“My personal goal is that it survive,” McKay says when asked if she would like to see her magazine become as successful as the granddaddy of Toronto publications, Toronto Life. But she’s wary about courting the same affluent audience at the expense of Lola’s current activist core. “I’m interested in a more alternative readership. To me, Toronto Life is the most boring magazine in the world. As far as making that much money? Sure. Whether it’s possible? I don’t know.”

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The successful rearing of a small-market magazine takes as much careful nurturing as it does steely tenacity, and tends to consume every facet of a struggling publisher’s life. Geist senior editor Mary Schendlinger insists it’s the nature of the business. “People talk about Stephen and me retiring and we just kind of look at them,” she says. “We know we’ll be doing this forever. We don’t strive to separate those things.”

Schendlinger, Geist‘s kind-hearted “ambassador,” worked on the magazine without pay for 10 years; Osborne has yet to take a salary. (Both teach at Simon Fraser University and work on outside writing and editing projects.) “Mary keeps on an even keel and tends to temper things when they need tempering,” says managing editor Barbara Zatyko, Geist‘s lone full-time, paid employee.

Zatyko and Edwards both say the day-to-day operations of Geist have received a welcome streamlining as the magazine has grown. “Steve always had the business savvy,” Zatyko says, “but there was no time to incorporate it because printers were calling and screaming at us for not paying bills and we were always on the brink of going under. We now have more time to devote to strategic planning.” Adds Edwards, “We can actually put our efforts toward boosting circulation, selling the ads, getting involved in the community. Branding, if you want to use that word.”

When launching the first direct marketing campaign, Geist‘s natural audience was immediately evident to Osborne. Before publishing an issue, he spent U.S. $1,000 to buy Harper’s list of Canadian subscribers, mailing the first issue to half the list, the second issue to the other half. He got a five per cent response on both mailings?an unusually high return from a direct marketing campaign. According to current CMPA director Judith Parker, a former This Magazine publisher, the average subscription rate for a campaign is between 1.5 and 2.5 per cent. Unfortunately, reaching readers through “DM” campaigns can be a costly gamble for small magazines. Osborne estimates it currently costs $20 to court one potential Geist subscriber directly. As a rule, magazines that aren’t driven by advertising should spend no more than twice their annual subscription rate on direct marketing. “That way, you will make the money back in three or four years?if your cash flow lets you live that long!” Parker says.

Through its own readers’ surveys, Osborne found that Geist‘s readers are 52 per cent female, have one or more university degrees per household, and make between $40,000 to $80,000 a year. Most are white collar “cultural workers” who listen to a lot of CBC Radio. (“We didn’t even ask about TV.”) They also read seven times as many Canadian books as typical Canadian university graduates. Geist (which has a newsstand price of $4.95) recently started distributing on the B.C. ferry system, where it has been outselling many large consumer titles, although a minor outcry from more conservative ferry passengers erupted over the cover photo of the fall 2002 issue, a group shot of pink-bummed nudists frolicking by the ocean.

While Charlie Angus is relying mainly on loyal subscribers to keep HighGrader afloat (“I guess we’re not as efficient as we should be,” he says), Geist, like Lola, is aggressively looking to expand its readership. Osborne is itching to crack into the untapped market of Canadians living in the U.S. “The readers I show it to down here are always enthusiastic,” says Geist contributor and New York Times Magazine story editor Paul Tough. “More than other Canadian magazines, Geist has a confidence, a sense of place in the world.”

“These magazines will always struggle to increase audience share above a certain number, and I don’t think this is a particularly Canadian phenomenon,” says the CMPA’s John Degen. He points to the relatively low circulation of Harper’s magazine (a little over 200,000?modest for an American publication). That’s not to say he thinks it’s fair. “I personally love Geist. I read every issue cover to cover.”

Is it probable that one of the big three magazine publishing entities?Transcontinental, Rogers Publishing or St. Joseph Media, which published the recently folded Shift under its Multi-Vision arm?will ever champion a general-interest cultural publication like Geist? Don Sedgwick, the co-ordinator of Centennial College’s Book and Magazine Publishing program in Toronto and a 25-year publishing veteran, believes it’s probably wishful thinking. “It would be hard to justify to any corporate board or publicly traded operation,” he says. “They’re not in the business of philanthropy. It would have to be someone with very deep pockets and enormous concerns for those kinds of issues.”

Osborne has no interest in relinquishing autonomy to the corporate world anyway, yet his editorial goals remain ambitious. Thanks to a recent $120,000 grant from the privately operated Tula Foundation, Osborne plans to expand the spring 2003 issue to 80 pages and, as part of his goal of becoming the “definitive Canadian magazine,” to resurrect the long-form essay that Saturday Night has all but dropped, and the photo essay that used to be the hallmark of Life magazine. Osborne and Schendlinger might share studio space on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, but the Grand Poobah of the West Coast literary world is realistic aboutGeist‘s overall commercial reach.

“We are not a consumer magazine, and we never will be,” he says.

After being grilled in his boardroom for over an hour, Osborne grows noticeably antsy. As I flip through my notes to ensure I haven’t missed anything, those steely eyes of his bore into mine once again. “You’ve got enough,” King Geist decrees as I quake in my red wedge-heeled boots. He’s probably right. I get the feeling that Stephen Osborne is seldom wrong, and that he knows it. He hands me mounds of back issues (there’s that Osborne generosity) and is off in a flash. Maybe he has an important meeting, or he has to prepare for his master of ceremonies gig at the annual Writers Fest’s poetry night. Or maybe he just wants to grab a bite at the local greasy spoon, where he will work on a chapter in the nonfiction novel about Vancouver he is writing, or sneak a few snapshots of the diners. (Robert Fulford once wrote “the perfect Geist story would take place in a donut shop,” but he’s probably never seen the Homer Caf?.) Whatever he’s up to, he’ll most likely be thinking about his magazine while he is doing it.

“He’s the one who lies awake at night with his fists clenched if there’s any struggle,” says Schendlinger. “It’s his magazine.” Still, it’s nice of him to share it with the rest of us.

It’s easy to imagine why CBC producers would choose Manji to conduct the interview. She’s young, attractive, articulate, opinionated, feminist, lesbian, Muslim?in post-9/11 North America, she is a talk-show producer’s dream. She has boldly stepped across a few lines herself in her 34 years, challenging everyone from mullahs to prominent feminists to right-wingers?anyone with an ideological agenda she questions. And she has done it vocally and publicly, in newspaper columns, books and on television. She’s faced stark criticism from both left and right, and from conservative Muslims. As the lively interview unfolds, there’s palpable warmth between the seasoned author and the provocative young interviewer as they explore a subject that sparks passionate feeling (and some pain) for both of them. When Rushdie expresses the thought that any meaningful Islamic reform will come from Muslim women in the West, it sets an enduring smile on Manji’s face.

You get the feeling that behind the scenes, publicists and producers must be smiling, too. The interview was a mutual dialogue, free of ideological tensions. Afterward, though, with cameras and makeup off, Manji looks not just elated but also exhausted. She is stretched thin with multiple commitments these days. She is regularly asked to host TV shows and be a guest on discussion panels. Jonathan Whitten,the CBC producer who approached Manji to interview Rushdie, has also asked her to host occasional spirituality segments onThe National. Whitten agrees that the broadcastmedia tend toward what’s “hot,” and CBC is no exception. He adds that he’s genuinely interested in Manji’s views. “The National has made a commitment to significantly expand the diversity of faces, voices and views on our programming,” he says.

As well as coming on hot for the cool medium of TV, Manji has a book manuscript to complete, her second. When she’s not in front of one camera or another, she spends a lot of time at University of Toronto’s Hart House, where she is a writer in residence. Her professional dance card is indeed crammed full, which may be why her preferred after-work activity isn’t dancing but cocooning at home with her partner of four and a half years, Michelle Douglas.Public iconoclasm, it turns out, takes its toll on even the feistiest of fighters. And while Manji still usually says yes to a lot of those requests for appearances, the iconoclast enjoys peace and quite. But will the ever-ravenous media, which groomed her after all, and her own ambition, allow it?

A week after the Rushdie interview, I visit Manji at home, the top floor of a modest house in Toronto’s Riverdale. Manji takes pride in owning real estate (an old man’s trait, a friend suggests). She gives me a warm hug after opening the door. Douglas has told me that it is unusual to see Manji out of her red pyjamas, and today she is indeed wearing a red fleece pyjama top, paired with Parasuco jeans. She is surprisingly pint-sized. Her signature short mane is flame-tipped. Dark circles around her eyes are continuing witness to her overly demanding schedule. She has just arrived home from interviews for her upcoming book. She walks me to the cozy living room, gestures me to sit on one of the blue couches and shortly excuses herself to make chai. Do I want a grilled cheese sandwich or anything else to eat, she asks, as dinnertime is approaching. I’m surrounded by portraits of the strong female side of Manji’s family, with whom she remains close, although most live in B.C., where Manji was raised ? two sisters, mother, grandmother. No pictures of her father, though; Manji says he was abusive, and she has no desire to keep in touch with him. Manji encouraged her mother to leave him, throughout her childhood, which she finally did shortly before Manji enrolled at University of British Columbia. She had raised her three daughters without any financial support from her husband. She cleaned airplanes, working long shifts and on statutory holidays to earn the much-needed time-and-a-half pay to make ends meet.

There’s also a picture of Douglas and Manji, taken on the day they met at the Metropolitan Church of Toronto. Before launching Queer Television, Manji wanted to make sure that she didn’t ignore the spiritual side of gays and lesbians as she produced the show. For an entire summer in 1999, Manji would periodically go to the alternative church to witness the impact of religion on gays and lesbians. On a Sunday morning in August, Manji hurriedly walked inside the church and found a spot at the end of a pew. Douglas, who had known Manji from a previous speaking engagement, was sitting at the other end. Afterward, at the coffee and cookie social, Manji was introduced to Douglas by a mutual friend. She was ecstatic to find that Douglas was the same woman who had sued the Canadian military. She had praised Douglas in one of her editorials while she was at the Ottawa Citizen. Douglas gained a public profile in 1990 when she successfully sued the Canadian military for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She has a bachelor’s degree in law, and now heads the Foundation for Equal Families, an organization that acts as an intervenor in precedent-setting cases for same-sex relationship rights. It also provides funding to aid individuals who are involved in such cases through fund-raising. Manji and Douglas’s union seems solidly based on mutual respect and common goals. On their second date, they both confessed that they did not want children, an issue that had been a problem in Manji’s previous relationships (though they are both huge supporters of choice). “And it was love from there on,” she says. The couple has also chosen not to get married. Though both are involved with separate progressive organizations, the only groups they support together with regular donations are World Vision and Doctors Without Borders by making regular donations.

Manji places the tea tray on the coffee table. Just as she’s taken a sip of her chai, the telephone rings. She ignores it and goes on with the interview. When it rings for the second time she says, “It must be Michelle.” It is. After a minute of chatting, she hangs up. I ask Manji how important her Muslim faith is to her. She pauses and then replies, “I don’t think that I would be a Muslim if I lived in an Islamic world, because the only condition under which I will consent to observing a faith is if I have the freedom to ask plenty of questions. If I don’t have that freedom, fuck religion.”

Manji’s career as an asker of questions began early. Growing up in Richmond, B.C., she attended madresa, a Muslim religious school, every Saturday. There, she says, she was taught appalling things: she was not to befriend non-Muslims,specifically Jews; if she was a bad Muslim, her coffin would be squeezed so hard that passers-by would hear her screams; reciting prayers in a “Canadian accent” was blasphemous. Manji would challenge the logic of these and other pronouncements. Her questions (and the fact that she dared to ask them at all) were not well received by the mullahs. At 15, she was finally expelled. “At that moment,” she wrote in a Globe and Mail editorial in November 2001, “I had crossed the threshold into a wider world called Canada. Praise be to Allah.”

“I”t was not the last time Manji would find herself trying to change the system from within, only to be turfed out for her trouble. In 1992, editors at The Ottawa Citizen decided they wanted a minority voice on the all-white, mostly male editorial board. Twenty-four years old, fresh out of university, and with a BA in history, Manji applied for and got the job as the Citizen’s youngest editorial writer. But problems arose almost immediately: Manji couldn’t quite accept the editorial-board convention of writing opinion pieces that express opinions the writer does not necessarily hold herself. It was difficult, in other words, to push a left-leaning peg into a right-leaning hole. After six months, Manji and the Citizen agreed to an amicable parting of ways. “What she really wanted to do was to be an opinion columnist and a commentator,” says Manji’s former boss, Peter Calamai, “where she could defend whatever position she had, and editorial writers, unfortunately, just do not have that kind of freedom. And never have.”

Despite the early stumble, Manji’s journalism career was up and running. Journalist Susan Riley, a member of the Citizen editorial board that hired Manji, and a confidante while Manji was on the job, calls her a great self-marketer. “I admire that about her. She invents herself, she’s a true entrepreneur.” Broadcast outlets vied to get her on their various shows; she was among a handful of women of colour who had served on major editorial boards in Canada at the time, and her opinion was eagerly sought by media looking to broaden their appeal to minority groups, and to better reflect the increasing pluralism of Canadian society. Enter Moses Znaimer, whose Citytv famously pioneered and championed diversity. Manji’s appeal was obvious. In 1998, Znaimer offered her the position of host and producer of Q-Files, a weekly segment about “queer” life (gay, lesbian, highly alternative) on CablePulse24, Znaimer’s all-news channel. The offer came after the success of her first book, Risking Utopia, a series of idealistic essays exploring the concept of exercising individuality in a democracy, and in which she made her sexuality known. Manji’s cheeky, discerning editorials each week on Q-Files made her a local celebrity. Q-Files also became the top-rated show on CP24. The success of Q-Files, the world’s first commercial TV show about the queer lifestyle, gave birth to Queer Television. In its first two seasons, the program received three Gemini nominations.

Despite her resistance to being recognized solely on the basis of her sexuality, Manji loved the spotlight that came with Queer TV. Wodek Szemberg, Manji’s former producer on “Friendly Fire” (a kind of Canadian Crossfire, with Manji going head to head with right-wing writer Michael Coren, which ran from 1992 to 1994 on TVOntario’s Studio 2) fondly recalls observing Manji during Toronto’s Gay Pride parade several years ago, as she joyously waved from the Queer TV float to cheering onlookers. “I came up to her and said, ‘Irshad, you just love being the princess, the queen, the star.’ And she said, ‘Of course I do!'”

Manji may have revelled in the lighter side of her role as media princess,but waving to fans from parade floats could never satisfy her more seriousaspirations. When Queer TV didn’t get picked up in 2001, Manji said farewell with no regrets, to pursue other opportunities, which include developing VERB, a TV channel being produced to engage young people on issues of global diversity. Since September 11, 2001, she has been cast differently, and that’s fine with her. In the days that followed the terrorist attacks, it quickly dawned on the western media that they had paid far too little attention to the Islamic world in general, and religious faith in particular.

Manji stepped forward as a uniquely well-informed crusader, without hesitation, and readily found her platform. In early November 2001, she wrote an opinion column for The Globe and Mail, urging Muslims in post 9-11 North America to embrace the pluralism that allows them to live in a democratic society, rather than blindly defending their faith, and to question the anti-Semitism that prevails in many Muslim countries today. Letters flew into the Globe, from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, expressing both fury and support. Soon, Manji was approached by Random House editor John Pierce to write a book. It will be, she says, an open letter to Muslims everywhere to embark on a reformation ? to adapt the wisdom of the Koran to whatever culture they live in, instead of taking the teachings literally. In Manji’s own words, “People in the Islamic world, particularly women, also need to know of their God-given right to think for themselves. So my book will outline a global campaign to publicize innovative approaches to Islam. I call it Operation Ijtihad [promoting independent thinking among Muslims].”

Manji is taking advantage of the current exposure to examine all of her contradictory beliefs and how she came to have them. She grew up “queer” in a Muslim household, and has had an impressive amount of practice in “reformation” as she reconciled her faith with her homosexuality over the years. In 1999, she delivered a lecture at University of Western Ontario entitled, “Queers and God.” She explained that she had always felt that her homosexuality was a struggle. She added that diversity is conscious and deliberate in this world, which is why her sexuality should be celebrated. “I’m here to suggest,” she said during her lecture, “that God and queers are not just reconcilable, but indeed compatible.”

Her prepubescent experiences also included her first lesson in the oftenunhappy politics of finding a niche for herself. At school, she let her classmates address her by her nickname “Pinky” (given to her affectionately by her mother, who really liked the name) because it was easier for them to say than “Irshad.” But the decision backfired; her nickname invited chants of “Ink, Pink, you stink, riding on a horse’s dink.” She soon volunteered to play lunchtime Santa ? taking snacks from home and selling it to students at cut-rate prices ? hoping to improve her chances of finding popularity among her classmates. And it worked; she soon learned that actively belonging was far more beneficial than passively assimilating. She writes in Risking Utopia, “To improve my chances of finding a niche, however fleeting, I could not allow myself to feel powerless.”

Today, Manji picks and chooses her compromises carefully, and freely admits to her contradictions. For a feminist who once sat on the editorial board of This Magazine, capitalism sits rather well with Manji; certainly the profit margin on many of her career decisions has been larger than that of most left-wing activists. And she is well aware that demand for what she supplies has gone up since September 11. “She wanted to earn her happiness,” says her mentor Wodek Szemberg, who went on from “Friendly Fire” to work with Manji again on Big Ideas, another TVO program. “She is a doer, not a whiner. In a deeper sense of the words, she wants to be rich and famous and influential. She wants to be God’s messenger.” Manji doesn’t agree that she is motivated by materialism in any way; she insists that the sole drive behind her work is enriching others. “Where some see problems, barriers and impossibility, I see opportunities for growth. I guess that’s why I’m often accused of being an ‘opportunist.’ I plead guilty.”

Not surprisingly, Manji has faced much criticism from people on the left when it seemed she was abandoning activism in favour of personal career growth. In the feminist magazine, Herizons, she has persistently challenged older feminists to stop imposing outmoded ideas and labels on younger feminists. Naturally, some of them have not been amused. Judy Rebick, who doesn’t agree with many of Manji’s ideas, is also aHerizons columnists. She says, “Maybe part of the reason that she doesn’t define herself as left anymore is because her notion of what left is is very sort of dogmatic, and kind of combative, and she has chosen not to be that way anymore.”

The response she has garnered from members of the Muslim community is also complex. Manji’s efforts to encourage Muslims to reform Islam stand in contrast to the stance of other Canadian Muslim journalists, who often blame the West for misunderstanding Muslims. Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star, for instance, unapologetically recites tales of how the West continues to oppress Muslims. He wrote in his editorial on November 3, 2002, “We cannot be prescribing democracy for Muslim nations while violating the basic rights of our own Muslim citizens. That sense of injustice partly explains willing recruits for Al Qaeda and other groups.” Manji begs to differ. “If everything can be blamed on somebody else,” she says, “then we’re never going to have to look at the internal problems that are also keeping us down.”

Many Muslim activists have vehemently rejected Manji’s opinions. Wahida Valiante, vice president of the Canadian Islamic Congress (who refused to be interviewed for this story), indignantly refuted Manji’s reconciliation of her faith with her homosexuality in The Report, the 29-year-old conservative bi-weekly newsmagazine. She told writer Peter Stock that Manji is “not an authentic voice for Islam.” She believes that Manji “doesn’t know Islamic history, and she has only the most basic knowledge of the faith. The Koran clearly states that sexual relations are between men and women.” Valiante speaks for a constituency of Muslims for whom that is the end of the discussion. But Manji is unfazed by her many detractors, and continues to form her own interpretations of what it means to be a Muslim. “It’s often said that in addition to meaning peace, which it doesn’t, Islam means submission, submission obviously to God ? if I’m going to be a Muslim by that definition, then I must submit to God. But what does it mean to submit to God? It’s not about what sect I belong to, it’s not about programmed pieties, it’s about how I conduct myself, and most importantly, to me, the accountability I have to explain why I do what I do. If I can’t explain why I do what I do, then I’m not submitting to God.”

Watching her in action as she prepares for three tapings of intros and extros for Big Ideas, it’s clear that Manji takes great pleasure in explaining why she does what she does and believes what she believes. And she’s good at it. She’s sitting around a meeting table with Szemberg and an intern, with a barely touched cup of tea in her hand. They’re discussing one of the show’s pieces, on the subject of branding. Manji thinks that York professor of marketing’s Alan Middleton’s reaction to Naomi Klein’s book, No Logo, is shallow. He argued that branding is a profoundly historical phenomenon that addresses human needs. “I remember thinking that he isn’t being fair to her, and surprised that a professor of marketing who presumably had all the facts at his disposal and could come up with something a little more intelligent, didn’t,” she says. “He was preying on the ignorance of his audience.”

It’s easy to see why Manji would be particularly perturbed by this kind of tactic, as well as by ignorant audiences. “The only thing I ask is that those criticisms be backed up, be based in context, be reasonable. Back it up!” Manji says the criticism she got from viewers when she debated Michael Coren on “Friendly Fire” was often racist: “That Manji woman couldn’t help herself,” a viewer wrote. “Arrogant immigrants are being more and more vociferously noticeable.”

Manji may have every intention of remaining vociferously noticeable, but the toll her work takes on her is evident. Meeting her at Hart House last December, I immediately notice the already tiny woman’s dramatic weight loss since October. She cites the stress of writing a challenging book ? due out before the September 11 anniversary this year ? as the reason for her waifish appearance. We walk toward the caf? with our drinks and find a place to sit. She signals me to turn on my recorder. “I’m making a contribution to honest journalism,” she says, “the public conversation that is uncensored and needs to be had. My role is to speak the truth about what I know and let the chips fall where they may.” The truth that she speaks of has taken a different tone since the beginning of her career. Szemberg says Manji is a different person from when he first met her in the early ’90s. “Irshad no longer claims to be on the margin. When I met Irshad, she was demanding for the world to become just,” he says. “Irshad today is a woman who wants to do her bit for justice. And that’s a big, big, difference.”

Manji doesn’t enjoy being profiled, she has told me. Perhaps she fears that the complexity of her ideas will be lost in sound bites and limited word counts. She tells me that she was surprised when the factchecker for aToronto Life story asked her if she’d said that she’s “Muslim, South Asian, leftist and a lesbian-feminist.” Manji told the checker that she doesn’t identify herself as a leftist. She was disappointed when the article described her as a “leftist and a lesbian-feminist.” To Manji, labels imply that a person is static. They are loaded with connotations that one doesn’t necessarily choose for oneself. Her concern with these labels seems to be that other people’s definitions are not her own. Many of her beliefs are radical in the context of mainstream and certainly Muslim society. She does consider herself a Muslim, but not one who accepts everything about the religion at face value.

And in some self-defined way, she will even admit she is a feminist. Radical, Muslim, feminist. As long as she can define the terms, stamp them with her own personal experience, Manji might accept them, warily. She often cites her experiences as an abused child who grew up being called a “Paki,” but says she doesn’t want to use these experiences as the focus of her arguments. “To appreciate that gift of citizenship,” she wrote in aNational Post guest column last year, “we need to spring ourselves from the enfeebling habits of victimhood. It won’t be easy.”

Manji interviewed exiled Bangladeshi feminist Taslima Nasrin for Herizons when she was in Canada late last year promoting her most recent book, a powerful memoir entitled Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood. Nasrin, who is 40 years old, has been living in exile since 1994 in Europe, after a fatwa was issued against her in 1993. She caused riots among men in the streets when she criticized verses in the Koran that treat women as sexual objects, and faces imprisonment or even death if she returns to her native country. The sharp-tongued radical feminist told Manji that it’s impossible to be a feminist and a practicing Muslim. “Actually, I don’t understand how women can be religious because religion is made for men, for their own pleasure.” Manji’s response was interesting. While she admires Nasrin’s bravado, she later tells me that “Nasrin believes that Muslim reformation is impossible to pull off. I don’t think she’s right.” Canadian-raised Manji, free to express her opinions, retains a kind of hope that Nasrin, faced with far more severe curtailments and threats, perhaps cannot.

As she finishes her manuscript and gears up for the coming round of promotion, Manji ultimately pins her faith on Islam’s tradition of gender equality. In a recent Herizons article, she wrote: “Prophet Muhammed’s wife, Khadija, was 15 years his senior and a wealthy, self-made merchant ? who proposed to him!”

Salman Rushdie may be right: Muslim reformation will begin with Muslim women in the West. If it does, one of those women will surely be the self-made, very tired Irshad Manji.

After a final scan over his question sheet and a nod from the control room, Carlin went to work. For the next 40 minutes, the host of The Media File, CBC’s half-hour discussion show that runs Tuesday nights at 7:30, turned the apparent confusion into a comprehensive debate on the ethics involved in sports journalism. Williams lambasted professional baseball broadcasters, calling them “clowns” for drooling over the “carpet-bagging baseball player who spends his winters in California.” Short called the Toronto Blue Jays “foreign mercenaries” and criticized the press for labelling them “Canada’s Team.” Frayne took a rip at team owners and suggested the media should ignore them completely. When it was over, Carlin again smiled. After a good edit, it would make a critical, interesting and entertaining item that would run less than a week later on January 21.

It’s these qualities that Carlin, senior producer Stuart Allen and editor Dale Ratcliffe have tried to inject intoThe Media File since it first went to air last October. It wasn’t always easy, but then again, no one expected it to be. When the trio took the assignment, they knew they were breaking new ground. And despite their share of unforeseen difficulties, they’ve created a program that has made front-page news, done well in the ratings, and generated response from its listening audience. “This type of program is a major, major breakthrough for radio news,” says Allen, a veteran newsman at CBC. “The standard view is that radio doesn’t have opinions.”

The idea for the show developed one day last September. A group of CBC news executives, including Allen, had met with managing editor of radio news Michael Enright to come up with an idea for a show to fill the Tuesday time slot following As It Happens.

The CBC decision-makers were interested in a show about the media, but under one condition: it had to appeal to regular listeners, not just journalists. Allen agreed to this, but quickly added a condition of his own. “We had to make it clear to the hierarchy of the CBC that we were going to take a hard look at all the media-CBC included.”

This was easier to envision than to implement. As Allen and company would soon find out, breaking ground can be a harrowing experience. Time would prove to be the first problem. The original format called for as many as three items per show as well as a response to listener mail-all crammed into 30 minutes. This left little time for details. On one occasion, a taping session was arranged among six people at once-four in the studio and two on broadcast lines from studios in other cities-for a story on the manipulation of the press by the government. Even though Carlin managed to fit everyone in, the result was too many opinions and not enough focus.

But time wasn’t the only problem. The trio quickly discovered that journalists are not quick to criticize themselves. In the early stages of the show, the refusal rate for those asked to appear was close to 50 per cent. And when the journalists did consent to an interview, Carlin often found them hesitant. He faults himself for not being able to bring out the replies he wanted. “Interviewing a person in a short period of time was a new technique for me,” says Carlin, “I found I was letting easy answers go by.”

Throughout the first month, the trio struggled to overcome these problems. Then came a break. CBC president Pierre Juneau called one morning in October to agree to an interview for a story on the latest government cutback plans for CBC. Recalls Allen: “We agreed beforehand that if he said absolutely nothing, we wouldn’t run it.” Despite warnings from their peers that they were wasting their time, Allen and his associates gave it their best shot. Juneau responded to the first question from Carlin by saying the CBC would be “destroyed” if current cutbacks continued. The CBC news department immediately wanted the story, but Allen told them to wait until after it aired on the November 5 Media File. When it did, CBC used the story as did others. The Globe carried the story on its front page.

From here, the evolution of the show seemed to speed up. In the fall ratings, The Media File was tops among the five CBC special-interest programs that filled the 7:30 p.m. weekday time slots. Listener response has also been good. During the first month, fewer than five letters a week were received. During one week before Christmas, 86 listeners wrote in. Journalists as well seemed to be paying attention. “Now only about 15 per cent won’t talk to us,” says Allen.

Understandably, Carlin, Allen and Ratcliffe are all happy with what they’ve accomplished. But they are not about to let their minds slip into neutral. Says Allen: “My personal philosophy is that there is no such thing as a perfect show. But we’re striving for that.”

In his book, Company of Adventurers, Peter C. Newman is at times a very enchanted writer. The book is the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its crucial place in Canadian history. While the work is extensively researched, one prominent anecdote reveals a shining example of enchantment leading to error.

Newman presents the tale in the first page of his foreword. Two men were hiking in northern Saskatchewan far from any other human contact. One night as the pair were preparing their camp they noticed something glinting high in a spruce tree. One climbed the tree and brought down, “a weathered copper frying pan with the letters HBC still clearly stamped on the green patina of its handle. The two men had their dinner and sat around the campfire, cradling and examining the intriguing object, asking themselves why anyone in his right mind would have hung it 40 feet up a black spruce.

“In one of those moments of heightened sensitivity that sometimes telegraph the flash of understanding, the truth dawned on them simultaneously. They broke into smiles that collapsed into belly-pumping laughter. Of course. The frying pan, much like the one they had just used to make their meal, must have been hung on a sapling by some long-gone Hudson’s Bay Company trader. It had inadvertently been left behind the next morning, and the little spruce quietly continued growing-and growing.”

Anyone with any knowledge of trees might already see a problem. Unfortunately Newman didn’t and continued to promote the story, which he saw as a “graphic reminder of how deeply the Hudson’s Bay Company is woven into the memories and dreams of most Canadians.”

Last Nov. 4 Newman again related the anecdote-this time on CBC Radio’s Morningside. Listeners wrote in to point out that the frying pan could not have reached its position in the tree simply through the tree’s growth.

One wrote that “spruce trees, in common with all other trees, grow from the top. A frying pan or anything else for that matter, attached to a branch five feet above the ground 200 years ago would still be five feet above the ground today no matter how high the tree had grown in the meantime.” Another used examples to illustrate the point: “Old tap holes in maple trees don’t migrate skywards. Old telegraph transformers along logging roads stay at transformer height. The tree house that you built as a kid probably seems lower now, not higher.”

Tree experts agree with the letter writers. As Philip Brennan, management forester for York Region of the Ministry of Natural Resources explains, “The way a spruce tree grows is by extending new shoots from buds on the old branches. By late summer, the new shoots have formed their own buds, so they can’t extend anymore. The shoots can’t extend, so the frying pan can’t move.” Brennan says the possibility of the frying pan’s transference from shoot to shoot would be “a small miracle if it happened once,” but this method couldn’t possible carry a frying pan 40 feet up a tree.

At the University of Toronto a similar tall tree story is told in second-year forestry classes. “We use it as a fallacy that people hear,” says Dr. T.J. Blake, associate professor of forestry. “It’s an old wives’ tale that’s been spread around.”

Somewhere in northern Saskatchewan stands a black spruce that was almost a legend.

Every so often even the best writers become too enchanted with a story. They are captivated, and perhaps a wish not to disturb the tale causes them to overlook any faults that might be found by less involved observers.

In his book, Company of Adventurers, Peter C. Newman is at times a very enchanted writer. The book is the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its crucial place in Canadian history. While the work is extensively researched, one prominent anecdote reveals a shining example of enchantment leading to error.

Newman presents the tale in the first page of his foreword. Two men were hiking in northern Saskatchewan far from any other human contact. One night as the pair were preparing their camp they noticed something glinting high in a spruce tree. One climbed the tree and brought down, “a weathered copper frying pan with the letters HBC still clearly stamped on the green patina of its handle. The two men had their dinner and sat around the campfire, cradling and examining the intriguing object, asking themselves why anyone in his right mind would have hung it 40 feet up a black spruce.

“In one of those moments of heightened sensitivity that sometimes telegraph the flash of understanding, the truth dawned on them simultaneously. They broke into smiles that collapsed into belly-pumping laughter. Of course. The frying pan, much like the one they had just used to make their meal, must have been hung on a sapling by some long-gone Hudson’s Bay Company trader. It had inadvertently been left behind the next morning, and the little spruce quietly continued growing-and growing.”

Anyone with any knowledge of trees might already see a problem. Unfortunately Newman didn’t and continued to promote the story, which he saw as a “graphic reminder of how deeply the Hudson’s Bay Company is woven into the memories and dreams of most Canadians.”

Last Nov. 4 Newman again related the anecdote-this time on CBC Radio’s Morningside. Listeners wrote in to point out that the frying pan could not have reached its position in the tree simply through the tree’s growth.

One wrote that “spruce trees, in common with all other trees, grow from the top. A frying pan or anything else for that matter, attached to a branch five feet above the ground 200 years ago would still be five feet above the ground today no matter how high the tree had grown in the meantime.” Another used examples to illustrate the point: “Old tap holes in maple trees don’t migrate skywards. Old telegraph transformers along logging roads stay at transformer height. The tree house that you built as a kid probably seems lower now, not higher.”

Tree experts agree with the letter writers. As Philip Brennan, management forester for York Region of the Ministry of Natural Resources explains, “The way a spruce tree grows is by extending new shoots from buds on the old branches. By late summer, the new shoots have formed their own buds, so they can’t extend anymore. The shoots can’t extend, so the frying pan can’t move.” Brennan says the possibility of the frying pan’s transference from shoot to shoot would be “a small miracle if it happened once,” but this method couldn’t possible carry a frying pan 40 feet up a tree.

At the University of Toronto a similar tall tree story is told in second-year forestry classes. “We use it as a fallacy that people hear,” says Dr. T.J. Blake, associate professor of forestry. “It’s an old wives’ tale that’s been spread around.”

Somewhere in northern Saskatchewan stands a black spruce that was almost a legend.