Chloé Bach
arts@theotherpress.ca

B.C. journalist shares the stories behind his
sto ri es By Sam VanSchie, CUP Western Bureau Chief

 

VICTORIA (CUP) — 22 years ago, Mark
Leiren-Young got his first “real job” as a
newspaper reporter.

After a summer interning at a major
daily paper and a couple years writing
for the University of British Columbia’s
student newspaper, he headed into B.C.’s
rugged interior to work at the Williams
Lake Tribune, in a town with fewer
people in it than the university he was
used to.

Leiren-Young writes about his year
writing for the Tribune in his first book,
Never Shoot a Stampede Queen, which
tells the stories behind the stories he
wrote for the newspaper. The book serves
as something of an explanation as to why
journalists have so much fun.

“It’s an addictive profession,
especially for a nosy guy like me,”
Leiren-Young said, flashing his constant
smile, his thinning long hair swaying as
he talks.

He found trouble from the moment
he entered Williams Lake. Arriving in the
wee hours of the morning, he stopped to
refuel his car and saw an armed robbery
at the gas station, which became the first
of many crime stories he’d write.

The logging town with a population
of 10,000 has the highest crime rate in
the province.

“Every reporter says they’re going
to write a book like this, but nobody ever
does,” Leiren-Young said.

He admits that, in interviews, he’s
more comfortable asking the questions
than answering them. But this isn’t the
first time he’s promoted himself on a
media circuit. In the years since the
Tribune, Leiren-Young wrote plays,
performed in a comedy duo, and wrote
and directed the movie The Green Chain,
between freelancing for newspapers.

The reason he time-warped back to
his formative years for Stampede Queen?

“I showed the manuscript to a friend
and he told me: ‘You have to publish it or
you’re stupid,” Leiren-Young said.

He originally wrote the collection
of stories in 1988, but had no success
publishing it. But with the critical
distance 20 years brings, he was able to
re-order and make slight revisions to the
stories to make them flow as a book.

“T had to think of it not as a memoir,
but as a story of a crazy town,” said
Leiren-Young. “Just writing about me
would have been too self-indulgent.”

The process of updating the
stories threw Leiren-Young back to
Williams Lake where some of the
book’s characters still live (to protect
their identity, names in the book were
changed).

He re-read all his old articles and
leafed though many of his old notepads,

which he had stored in boxes.

“The research was, in a sense, easy
because this job creates such a paper
trail, literally,” he said, admitting that
some of the articles weren’t as great as he
remembered them.

“I know I thought they were just the
best at the time. That’s the thing about
being a journalist, you really have to
think you’re a God when you’ re doing it
or you’d never last on the job,” he said.
“TI remember times when I was 1,000 per
cent sure I’d change the world through
my writing.”

It’s clear from his book that Leiren-
Young has no respect for authority; part
of this is just his nature, he says, but he
got away with it at the Tribune because
he never intended to stay, so wasn’t
looking to make friends.

“Every paper should hire somebody
to come in for a year and get what
nobody else wants to,” he said. “You see
the city with new eyes, and notice stuff
that everybody else is used to.”

And while the town was perhaps
glad to see him go, when the book hit
stores in September, it was perhaps most
popular in Williams Lake. They sell it
there as a supermarket book, next to the
soft cover Steven King bestsellers.

“Everybody [in Williams Lake] has
either read it or knows somebody who
has read it,” he said, laughing about some
of the phone calls he’s received from
people who recognized themselves in the
book.

“They’ve been so excited and
supportive, it’s just amazing,” he said. “I
thought they’d hate it.”