I started this collection with a few of my early magazine stories that some of you asked to see and I’m happy to reincarnate here. Their literary era was labelled the New Journalism — yes, iconic and ironic from this vantage point 50 years later. It was first practised and perfected by virtuosos like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson who made their magic wordsmitheries seem ridiculously normal. My own off-the-shelf writs from that era can be seen in this collection, most visibly in M
I’ve also mixed in a few dozen shorter, sharper newspaper reads from Stall Stories, my decade-long, thousand-story gig as a Vancouver Province columnist in the 1990s when mainly I chose to write stories of real people — weirdly varying, some funny, sad, dramatic and mostly even true — instead of commentaries on news and politics. Truth to tell, literally, I think that plain old storytelling is the main reason these columns stole the most newspaper readers in British Columbia in the 1990s and ev
Their 10 years came during the last gasp of the long flourishing, 20th-century newspaper industry, its one-time bedrock base since crumbled and buried in the rubble of emaciated newsrooms, increasingly sociopathic social media, high-rant unchecked fake news and computer codes posing as reporters writing. As these stories were published before journalism was swarmed by the internet, I’m glad to preserve some in this book.