Western Magazine
Awards Foundation
The Magazine School TMS 2012
Bringing outstanding writing, design and photography to the
classroom
westernmagazineawards.ca
Western Magazine
Awards Foundation
An annual awards program recognizing excellence in Western Canadian
editorial work and design.
The Magazine School TMS 2012 is a project of the Western Magazine
Awards Foundation. It provides classroom material to instructors and
professors.
Gold Award Best Article
Alberta/NWT
Finalists:
Alberta Views, David Ebner, “Oil Sands For Sale”
Eighteen Bridges, Chris Turner, “Bearing Witness”
Eighteen Bridges, Omar Mouallem, “Under the Veil”
Eighteen Bridges, Tim Bowling, “On The Rails”
Swerve, Jeremy Klaszus, “For the Love of God”
The Winning Entry Is:
Eighteen Bridges
Chris Turner
“Bearing Witness”
About Eighteen Bridges
Launched in 2010 by Curtis Gillespie and Lynn Coady in
Edmonton:
“We want to create an audience for
writing.” – Curtis Gillespie
a style of
“A [not-for-profit] modern, in-touch magazine
concerned with people, politics, culture, and ideas, its
articles substantial, in-depth, and grounded in the narrative
tradition.”
Publisher: Canadian Literature Centre at the University of
Alberta.
Subscription $25.95 for four issues.
Funders include: Edmonton Arts Council, Alberta
Foundation for the Arts, private philanthropists.
Click here for Eighteen Bridges website
Meet the editor: Curtis Gillespie
Author of five books, including the memoirs
Almost There, Playing Through and the novel
Crown Shyness.
Winner of three National Magazine Awards; he
has been nominated 14 times.
Works as a teacher and mentor at the University
of Alberta and the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Click here for author bio at Banff Centre for the Arts
Meet the author: Chris Turner
Calgary-based author and journalist
Green Party Candidate, 2012, Calgary Centre
Books:
The Leap: Hoe to Survive and Thrive in the
Sustainable Economy (2011)
The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We
Need (2007)
Published in Fast Company, Time, Utne Reader, The Walrus,
The Globe & Mail, Canadian Geographic, MNN.com and
others.
Click here for author's website
Call to action
Chris Turner called by PR person for Tides Canada and the
International League of Conservation Photographers:
“If you can get to Vancouver, we’ll bring
Bear Rainforest.”
Click here for International League of Conservation Photographers website
you to [the] Great
Great Bear Rainforest background
“The Great Bear Rainforest, I learned, was a protected wilderness on the remote
northwest coast of British Columbia, comprising a quarter of the world’s
remaining intact coastal temperate rainforests.”
The Forest is home to the “Spirit Bear,” a unique white-coated
Kermode bear.
There’s a proposal to run two oil pipelines through it.
Click here for related photos in the Georgia Straight
Spirit Bear threatened
“They [pipelines] would pass within a few hundred metres of
the First Nations village of Hartley Bay and within a few
kilometres of Princess Royal Island, home to the world’s
largest known population of Kermode bears. The Kermode is
a rare subspecies of black bear that renders its coat a ghostly
white; locals call them ‘spirit bears,’ and they are billboard
icons of the Great Bear wilderness.”
Trying to sell the story
Chris Turner’s agent approached the Toronto Star.
Idea was declined.
The Globe and Mail decided it looked too much like a
“junket.”
“Which is okay if Suncor’s going to fly
me over the oil sands. There’s a double standard.”
– Chris Turner
The bet
“I figured something would come out of it. I paid for
the trip myself. I did interviews as if I was on
assignment even though I wasn’t.”
– Chris Turner
Storytelling “gift”
Author is flown north by volunteer Julian
MacQueen, an American who owns a Florida
resort destroyed in the BP oil spill. He lives in
B.C. part time.
“That was just a storytelling gift. To have Julian
and his experiences with an oil spill.”
Chris Turner visits the Great Bear
Rainforest with the International
League of Conservation
Photographers.
They picked Great Bear as project of
the year.
Click here for related photos in the Georgia Straight
The goal
ILCP’s goal was to advocate for Great Bear through
photographs.
Chris Turner’s goal was to create an impression of the place.
“There is no value you can put on this place. It is
invaluable.”
– Chris Turner
Click here for related photos in the Georgia Straight
The story waits . . .
Author sits on the story for a year.
The Globe and Mail changes its mind
The Globe and Mail publishes “Pipeline to Prosperity or Channel to Catastrophe?” Sept. 23, 2011
Eighteen Bridges comes to fore
Chris Turner and Curtis Gillespie are drinking a beer . . .
Gillespie: “I said,‘You’re writing for me. Tell me what you’re
thinking about.”
They agree on a 7,000-word article about the trip.
Chris Turner hands in 12,000 words.
The editor responds
The editor provided edits and the author trimmed it back.
“My first reaction was, ‘we have a really strong piece of work,’ but it was too partisan. Parts that
made their point a bit too strongly.”
“I wanted him to be less personally partisan, more personally affected. It’s important the article is
convincing to everybody. So somebody who works in the oil industry thinks, ‘holy shit, wow.’
Not, ‘this is some environmental nut who has drunk the Kool-Aid.’ ”
– Curtis Gillespie
Sidestepping politics
“We left out economic arguments. What you cannot debate is
what that landscape is and that’s what we decided.”
– Curtis Gillespie
Importance of place
“It’s very easy for them [pipeline proponents] to create the
narrative they want to create given 99 per cent of the population
has never been there. We wanted to try and achieve as much clarity
as possible. What exactly is at stake there?”
– Curtis Gillespie
Edits
Story is chronological
Author calls it “old-fashioned”
Editor removes author’s extra notes, asides and sentence
fragments
A reflective section from Ottawa is removed
Publishing info
Published in Eighteen Bridges
Winter 2011 edition, pp. 22-31
Approx. 7,350 words
Single photograph of Turner quietly observing on the Douglas
Channel, notebook in hand, taken by Julian MacQueen.
Pipeline drawn across tops and bottoms of pages.
Story Components
Headline and Deck
[Headline] Bearing Witness
[Deck] What’s really at stake in the Great Bear
Rainforest?
Lead
Lead
“Let’s say you’ve never heard of the Great Bear Rainforest. I never
had. Let’s say it’s a theory, a conjecture, a proper noun three words
long and as real to you as fabled El Dorado or the moons of Jupiter.
There it is in the subject line of a Facebook message: ‘invite to the
great bear rainforest.’ A Facebook message, not even capitalized.
Incidental. Marginal. A rumour of a place.”
Nut Graf or Theme Statement
Nut graf
“I thought at first it might not be worth the trip. I’d long regarded climate change as the great black trump
card in the conservation deck, the overarching crisis bearing down on us with such ferocious
transformative power it will erase any act of regional conservation, however noble; keeping one
pipeline’s bitumen from reaching Kitimat, after all, would do nothing to keep out the carbon dioxide
emissions released by an oil-hungry world. If an awareness campaign isn’t aimed at ending the age of
fossil fuels in toto, I tend to see it as an act of deck-chair feng shui on the biospheric Titanic.
Still: this was uncharted territory. Here there be serpents, at least on the mental map of my own
experience. Float planes, coastal First Nations villages, temperate rainforest, spirit bears—this was an
irresistible enticement. Thankfully so: there was much to learn about the spirit bear’s iconic place in the
global struggle to contain the climate crisis.”
Story Tension
The tension
“In the case of Great Bear, the imminent peril was the arrival of Big
Oil. Enbridge had applied to the federal government early in 2010 to
build two pipelines from an oil terminal northeast of Edmonton
across 1,170 kilometres of wilderness to the industrial town of
Kitimat.”
And more tension
“To bring the pipeline’s oil to markets around the Pacific Rim—
China, in particular—mammoth supertankers would need to
move in and out of a long narrow passage known as Douglas
Channel at a rate of two hundred or more per year.”
Pipelines threaten Spirit Bear
“They would pass within a few hundred metres of the First Nations
village of Hartley Bay and within a few kilometres of Princess Royal
Island, home to the world’s largest known population of Kermode
bears. The Kermode is a rare subspecies of black bear that renders
its coat a ghostly white; locals call them ‘spirit bears,’ and they are
billboard icons of the Great Bear wilderness.”
Descriptive Passages
Description
“The banks of the stream were spongy like peat and so thick
with foliage they seemed to exhale when you stepped on them.
Grasses and underbrush were shoulder-high, taller, a Jurassic
landscape of ancient, mammoth plants.”
Description
“And then we were in shadow, lost among the true giants. The forest
was towering, majestic, impossibly alive. Moss and lichen hung from
every branch and crawled across every stump and rock. The tops of the
cedar and Sitka spruce around us were mere hypotheses somewhere
far over our heads. The creek’s trickle became a steady growl as we
moved further inland. The air grew so thick and fragrant it was less like
hiking than pressing through a membrane.”
Use of Numbers
Use of numbers
“A typical supertanker—specifically a very large crude carrier (VLCC) or
ultra large crude carrier (ULCC) of the sort that would depart the proposed
oil terminal in Kitimat almost every day—is at least 300 metres long,
maxing out north of 400. A thousand feet long, half [as] long as Hartley
Bay’s coastal hills are tall. At its broadest point, its beam measures more
than 50 metres, wider than half a football field’s length. The largest
ULCCs can carry more than two million barrels of oil. A floating colossus,
a self-propelled city block, a mobile reservoir: the scale is at the outside
edge of most people’s imaginations.”
Use of numbers
“At the start of the summer of 2010 (this was the story he told as he
scrolled through photo albums on his iPad) oil from BP’s massive
blowout in the Gulf of Mexico began to wash ashore along the Florida
panhandle. One of the first places it arrived was the beach in front of
MacQueen’s row of resort hotels on Pensacola Beach. Summer is the
peak tourist season in Pensacola, the ninety days that sustain the
business for the other 275, and the summer of 2010 slid away on
an oil slick.”
– Julian MacQueen describing BP oil spill
Writer’s Voice
Writer’s voice
“We talk about the cycle of life as if we invented it by
naming it, not as if it were as unknowable as the cosmos or
the Judaic god’s true name.”
Writer’s voice
“Formerly, I knew salmon primarily as a piece of common meat
on a plate, a lifeless pink quadrilateral almost impossible to
reconcile with the power of the fish racing upstream in cold
autumn water in the Great Bear Rainforest, where wild is not a
sales pitch but a way of being.”
Writer’s voice
“Attached to the float plane terminal at the airport is a welcoming bar and grill
called the Flying Beaver. It’s got a patio out back, an unassuming oasis jutting out
over the placid little bay of Pacific water that serves as the runway for the float
planes. It’s a tucked-away corner of a tucked-away corner of a tucked-away corner
of the main airport, and I was seated there with the dregs of a coffee when I heard
the buzz of propeller engines for the third time that morning and watched an odd,
boxy little airplane that looked like something Howard Hughes might’ve owned
come down and down into the bay.”
Use of First Person
Use of first person
“The skies began to clear. A few kilometres south of Hartley Bay, MacQueen spied
a couple of black shapes in the water below and banked the Widgeon around and
down for a closer look. They were humpback whales, the Great Bear Rainforest’s
sentinels, signalling our arrival in a world far away from Pensacola Beach and
Vancouver airport, a place that could legitimately claim to be outside that world,
perhaps, were it not for the exigencies of overseas oil shipping. My notes from this
point on grew steadily more sporadic, staccato, episodic. I carried a notebook, but
chose to keep my digital recorder in my bag. I had to decide whether it was more
important to report on Great Bear or absorb it.”
Use of Quotes
Quotes
“ ‘You’ve got every major oil company in the world and the world’s
second largest oil reserve looking to diversify its markets,’ he said,
‘and the only thing standing in its way is this little community.’ ”
– Ian McAlliser,
founder of Pacific Wild conservation group
Quotes
“It is, says [Norm] Hann, ‘one of the most treacherous, narrow
bodies of water anywhere in the world.’ ”
– description of the Hecate Strait,
which tankers would have to traverse
Quotes
“ ‘I spent 25 years building up a business,’ MacQueen was saying,
‘and overnight it was gone. It was one of those gutwrenching,
heartstopping events that you just don’t see coming.’”
– Julian MacQueen to the
CBC about his Florida resort
Credible Sources
Credible sources
“And so he comes back home, and he says, ‘Guess what I saw.’ And he said, ‘You’ll
find it hard to believe. Because,’ he said, ‘I never believed it all my life.’ And he told
me about this experience with a bear. ‘Oh, why didn’t you kill it,’ I said, ‘We
would’ve had this white bear fur.’ And he said, ‘You foolish woman, that’s your
white blood talking.’ So we both had to laugh. He didn’t say that in an insulting
way, just because, he said, ‘It was only meant for me to see that it was real. Now I
have to do something about it to protect it.’ And so he told his people they are not
to shoot that animal no matter what. ‘It’s there. I saw it. And nobody is to hunt it.
We don’t need it for nothing.’”
– Helen Clifton on her late
husband's encounter with the spirit bear
The Ending
Ending
“Canada is an improbable country in many ways, and sometimes
this makes our nation all the more powerful and wondrous. But it
can also seem ridiculous, absurd. No: outrageous. It’s outrageous
that a legislature on the other end of a vast continent from the
Great Bear Rainforest—in another world, really, another age—
assumes the authority to decide its fate. What do they know in
Ottawa of salmon or spirit bears?”
Ending
“I spent three days in the Great Bear Rainforest, and it was long enough
to know that we can presume to have no such authority, that it is not
for us to decide, ever, what Great Bear is for.
‘We have to win this one.’ This is what Marven Robinson’s mother-inlaw had told Clifton.
It’s what Robinson told me in parting.
It’s what I’m telling you now.”
Credits
The Magazine School is a project of the Western Magazine
Awards Foundation, which acknowledges the financial
support of the Government of Canada through the Canada
Periodical Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage
toward project costs.
The Magazine School 2012 content was prepared with the
skilful assistance of Janice Paskey and MRU students Shane
Flug and Jennifer Friesen with the generous co-operation of
the winners of the 2012 Western Magazine Awards.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) of the
Department of Canadian Heritage towards our project costs.