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Essay Type: publishing
Essay Date: 2010
Here we continue our series about the origins of publishing enterprises by focusing on the life and times of Cherie Smith. Janina Stajic and researcher Helen Clay, both Print Futures: Professional Writing students from Douglas College, have recovered the story of how Cherie Smith, a 36-year-old mother of two, started November House in 1969, releasing twenty-one titles, against a backdrop of male chauvinism, as B.C.s first female book publisher.
Cherie Smith came first. As one of the five founding members of the organization that became the Association of Book Publishers of B.C., “shy, internal Cherie” was seemingly dependent on her husband Buddy Smith, whom she married when she was 18—but she had an ardent love of literature, an adventurous spirit (her recipe for a happy voyage on their boat included a complete state of undress) and a significant family history.
As her friend Alice Zilber says, Cherie Smith had an inner chutzpah that helped her stand her ground. That chutzpah partially arose from her Jewish heritage.
Cherie Smith’s grandfather Solomon Steiman was sent to Viatka in the Urals, 450 miles north-east of Moscow, in 1914, as a political exile. His wife and family later joined him there.
Born in Latvia in 1898, Cherie’s father Iser Steiman was sent to Canada in 1912 when he was 14. His experiences as a teacher in northern Manitoba, starving and freezing, are contained in the one book Cherie Smith wrote, Mendel’s Children.
As a physician he started King Edward Hospital in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, where he married Laura Shastky. Their daughter Cherie was born November 13, 1933.
November House began at UBC, where Smith earned her Honours degree in English Literature, about ten years after creative writing teachers Jan de Bruyn and Jacob Zilber had decided to found PRISM in 1959. It was one of the few literary magazines west of Toronto. Zilber, a friend of the Smiths, asked Cherie Smith to help. She took on the most difficult job, selling advertising for a literary periodical. Ten years later, out of the blue, Jacob handed her a manuscript by Bill T. O’Brien, one of his students. “Why don’t you start a small publishing company and make this your first work?” he said. “We’ll co-publish it with you.”
Cherie Smith consulted her husband and decided she’d give it a go. That’s how 1,000 hardcover copies of Bill T. O’Brien’s novel Summer of the Black Sun were published by “PRISM international in association with November House.” She chose the name simply because her birthday was in November. O’Brien’s fictional account of a man in a mental institution garnered rave reviews from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro (who had published her first book the year before) who described it as “terrifying, desperately funny.”
Produced with the help of a Canada Council grant, Summer of the Black Sun was selected by the Ministry of Education for B.C. for inclusion in the high school curriculum. Paperback rights were sold to Simon & Schuster who printed another 10,000 copies.
Cherie was delighted. But not everyone applauded. Buddy Smith, Cherie’s friends and colleagues take great pleasure in telling the story of what happened next. They were all at a party when a belligerent, SFU poetry professor ran up to Buddy and declared, “You keep your wife on a leash, or she’ll be in trouble.”
Buddy was flabbergasted. “First of all,” he recalls, “I didn’t like him saying that. Second, I don’t like anybody waving their finger in my face. So I told him, ‘Take your finger out of my face before I break it off!’”
The man had marched up to Cherie, interrupted her conversation with a group of friends, and then demanded to know, “what business she had publishing a piece of crap like Summer of the Black Sun?”
With the author Bill O’Brien standing right behind them, Cherie Smith tried to reason with the unwanted critic, but he simply wouldn’t listen. Feeling she was being “verbally raped,” she defended her author and herself by slapping her verbal assailant—twice—across the face.
After Summer of the Black Sun, manuscripts came pouring over the transom. “98 percent were bad,” says Buddy Smith, “and the other two percent [were] not very good.” When Charlie Leeds’ manuscript, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, was put into her hands by another UBC professor, Cherie knew she’d found November House’s second book.
Not only did Cherie publish Charlie’s book, she helped get him out of prison.
Charlie Leeds was a jazz musician who had been sentenced to 25 years in a maximum security prison in New Jersey, having been arrested for breaking into a drugstore at 3am. Charlie had faced a zero-tolerance-to-drugs judge. Luckily for Charlie, his book somehow found its way to Cherie and, after publishing it in 1970, she began a correspondence with his prison warden. She sent the prison warden Charlie’s book with a note saying, “You know you have in that prison this man who is a great writer.” Eventually the warden agreed that Cherie and Buddy could visit Charlie.
Buddy recalls the prison as a horrible place, “We had to visit him through thick glass and by telephone.” After the visit, Cherie was even more determined to get Charlie released. She unearthed the name and address of the judge who had sentenced him and began sending him letters about Charlie. Through her efforts, Buddy recalls, “he got out on parole and went onto a methadone program.”
After Summer of the Black Sun and Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the formal association with PRISM was dropped. By the early 1970s a group of publishers, including Cherie, began meeting to discuss the possibility of forming a professional association. At that time, Buddy Smith owned Harry Sons & Co., a book wholesaling company, so men still dismissed her as Buddy’s wife. Many of the formative meetings were held at Cherie’s home, and she would often welcome her guests with goodies. The gesture backfired; Cherie became known as “Mrs. Cookies.” Cherie stayed with the group long enough to see November House become a founding member of the Western Canadian Publishers’ Association, known today as the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. Unwilling to tolerate sexist attitudes, she left the group not long after it was fostered in her home.
Cherie Smith published another 19 books including Allan Fotheringham’s first book, Collected & Bound, in 1972, along with David Evanier’s The Swinging Headhunter. In 1973, November House published Sister Roxy, a first novel by Albertan Kenneth Dyba, another ex-student of Jacob Zilber. November House went on to publish Dyba’s children’s book Lucifer and Lucinda (1977) and The Long (and Glorious) Weekend of Raymond (and Bingo) Oblongh (1983), one of its two final titles.
Harry Adaskin, a violinist, broadcaster, teacher and first head of UBC’s music department, became a November House author after Cherie, relaxing in a bath, heard him on CBC Radio. She called him up, and November House ended up publishing two of his books: A Fiddler’s World: Memoirs to 1938, in 1977, and A Fiddler’s Choice: Memoirs 1938-1980, in 1982. Harry Rankin, a hugely popular city councillor, was also approached by Cherie, and in 1975 Rankin’s Law: Recollections of a Radical hit the bookstands.
During its 14-year-run, November House published an eclectic mix although Cherie tried to focus on non-fiction, controversial subjects and books about B.C. Cookbooks such as Denny Boyd’s Man on the Range: or, How to Survive in the Kitchen Without Really Crying (1973) were published alongside First Nations’ stories, Legends of the River People (1976), and local tales of interest: Stanley Park: an Island in the City (1971). One of the last books from November House was Feldafing (1983), the story of inmates from a concentration camp who, after the war, took over what had been a wealthy town in Bavaria in order to heal from the trauma of war.
Cherie Smith liked to say publishing was like fishing. It was “incessant expectation followed by perpetual disappointment.” She kept a picture of two hands on the edge of a cliff, hanging on by the fingernails, representing the publishing business. Cherie was publisher, editor and literary agent. And she made hors d’oeuvres for book launches. Dealing with disgruntled authors and applying for limited Canada Council funding was hard work: “Douglas & McIntyre have had a very rocky history,” says Buddy Smith. “Even in Toronto, McClelland and Stewart had a difficult time…”
November House closed its doors in 1983. In 1984, Cherie Smith founded the Jewish Book Festival and turned her hand to writing her family memoir, Mendel’s Children (University of Calgary Press, 1997), a history that charts the course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over 100 years. It includes stories and memories of her relatives including her grandfather Solomon Steiman.
Mendel’s Children received glowing reviews in the The Midwest Book Review, The Montreal Gazette, and from Wayson Choy: “Cherie Smith’s family chronicle is written with such storytelling skill, with such an honest and compassionate clarity, that the reader turns page after page with growing fascination.”
In 1998 Cherie was diagnosed with cancer. By the end of the year she was living at home under the care of a hospice nurse. Despite urgings from the nurse to “let go,” Cherie Smith held on. Even though she was bedridden and could barely speak, she wanted to wait for the birth of her third grandchild. When her granddaughter was finally born, her daughter-in-law came straight from the hospital to Cherie’s bedside and placed the tiny baby next to her. And then everyday after that, she would bring the child to lie with Cherie in bed. Once the baby was born, the nurse again urged her to let go; she’d seen her grandchild. But she had to fulfill one more wish—to celebrate her and Buddy’s 47th wedding anniversary, which she managed to do on June 29th, before passing away on July 13, 1999.
Cherie Smith was never particularly interested in the ground-breaking nature of her achievements. She simply loved literature and was determined to encourage local writers by publishing books of high quality. And she continues to encourage budding literary talent. The Cherie Smith Prize in Creative Writing, a grant of $500, is available to creative writing students at UBC, and the literary festival she founded now bears her name. The Cherie Smith Jewish Book Festival celebrated its 25th anniversary in, appropriately, November of 2009.
Female book publishers in B.C. have included Cherie Smith’s closest contemporary, Diana Douglas (Self-Counsel Press), as well as Michelle Benjamin (Polestar Press), Catherine Edwards (Pacific Educational Press), Maralyn Horsdal (Horsdal & Schubart), Vici Johnstone (Caitlin Press), Anita Large (Theytus Books), Ruth Linka (Touchwood Editions), Diane Morriss (Sono Nis), Naomi Wakan (Pacific-Rim Publishers), Carolyn Zonailo (Caitlin Press) and the women who collectively managed Press Gang.
November House Titles:
FICTION:
Bill T. O’Brien: Summer of the Black Sun (1969)
Charlie Leeds: Tillie’s Punctured Romance, & The Love Song of Rotten John Calabrese, plus selected short subjects (1970)
David Evanier: The Swinging Headhunter (1972)
Kenneth Dyba: Sister Roxy (1973); Lucifer and Lucinda (1977); The Long (and Glorious) Weekend of Raymond (and Bingo) Oblongh (1983)
Robert G Sherrin: The Black Box (1976)
NON-FICTION:
Barry Broadfoot: Stanley Park: an Island in the City — photography by Ralph Bower; text by
Barry Broadfoot (1971)
Jack Wassermann: Vancouver on 5,000 Calories a Day: a Guide to Dining Out (1971)
Allan Fotheringham: Collected & Bound (1972)
Harry Rankin: Rankin’s Law: Recollections of a Radical (1975)
Harry Adaskin: A Fiddler’s World: Memoirs to 1938 (1977); A Fiddler’s Choice: Memoirs 1938-1980 (1982)
Julian Smith: Rules to Keep the Rascals Out (1978)
Simon Schochet: Feldafing (1983)
COOKBOOKS:
Denny Boyd: Man on the Range: or, How to Survive in the Kitchen Without Really Crying (1973)
National Council of Jewish Women of Canada: The Council Cookbook: a Treasury of Jewish Recipes. 5th Ed. (1974)
DRAMA:
Betty Keller: Trick Doors and Other Dramatic Sketches (1974); Taking Off: a Practical Handbook for Teachers of Creative Drama (1975); Opening Trick Doors: a Guide to the Use and Production of the Sketches in Trick Doors (1975)
FIRST NATIONS:
Norman H Lerman: Legends of the River People (1976)
[BCBW 2010]
Cherie Smith came first. As one of the five founding members of the organization that became the Association of Book Publishers of B.C., “shy, internal Cherie” was seemingly dependent on her husband Buddy Smith, whom she married when she was 18—but she had an ardent love of literature, an adventurous spirit (her recipe for a happy voyage on their boat included a complete state of undress) and a significant family history.
As her friend Alice Zilber says, Cherie Smith had an inner chutzpah that helped her stand her ground. That chutzpah partially arose from her Jewish heritage.
Cherie Smith’s grandfather Solomon Steiman was sent to Viatka in the Urals, 450 miles north-east of Moscow, in 1914, as a political exile. His wife and family later joined him there.
Born in Latvia in 1898, Cherie’s father Iser Steiman was sent to Canada in 1912 when he was 14. His experiences as a teacher in northern Manitoba, starving and freezing, are contained in the one book Cherie Smith wrote, Mendel’s Children.
As a physician he started King Edward Hospital in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, where he married Laura Shastky. Their daughter Cherie was born November 13, 1933.
November House began at UBC, where Smith earned her Honours degree in English Literature, about ten years after creative writing teachers Jan de Bruyn and Jacob Zilber had decided to found PRISM in 1959. It was one of the few literary magazines west of Toronto. Zilber, a friend of the Smiths, asked Cherie Smith to help. She took on the most difficult job, selling advertising for a literary periodical. Ten years later, out of the blue, Jacob handed her a manuscript by Bill T. O’Brien, one of his students. “Why don’t you start a small publishing company and make this your first work?” he said. “We’ll co-publish it with you.”
Cherie Smith consulted her husband and decided she’d give it a go. That’s how 1,000 hardcover copies of Bill T. O’Brien’s novel Summer of the Black Sun were published by “PRISM international in association with November House.” She chose the name simply because her birthday was in November. O’Brien’s fictional account of a man in a mental institution garnered rave reviews from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro (who had published her first book the year before) who described it as “terrifying, desperately funny.”
Produced with the help of a Canada Council grant, Summer of the Black Sun was selected by the Ministry of Education for B.C. for inclusion in the high school curriculum. Paperback rights were sold to Simon & Schuster who printed another 10,000 copies.
Cherie was delighted. But not everyone applauded. Buddy Smith, Cherie’s friends and colleagues take great pleasure in telling the story of what happened next. They were all at a party when a belligerent, SFU poetry professor ran up to Buddy and declared, “You keep your wife on a leash, or she’ll be in trouble.”
Buddy was flabbergasted. “First of all,” he recalls, “I didn’t like him saying that. Second, I don’t like anybody waving their finger in my face. So I told him, ‘Take your finger out of my face before I break it off!’”
The man had marched up to Cherie, interrupted her conversation with a group of friends, and then demanded to know, “what business she had publishing a piece of crap like Summer of the Black Sun?”
With the author Bill O’Brien standing right behind them, Cherie Smith tried to reason with the unwanted critic, but he simply wouldn’t listen. Feeling she was being “verbally raped,” she defended her author and herself by slapping her verbal assailant—twice—across the face.
After Summer of the Black Sun, manuscripts came pouring over the transom. “98 percent were bad,” says Buddy Smith, “and the other two percent [were] not very good.” When Charlie Leeds’ manuscript, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, was put into her hands by another UBC professor, Cherie knew she’d found November House’s second book.
Not only did Cherie publish Charlie’s book, she helped get him out of prison.
Charlie Leeds was a jazz musician who had been sentenced to 25 years in a maximum security prison in New Jersey, having been arrested for breaking into a drugstore at 3am. Charlie had faced a zero-tolerance-to-drugs judge. Luckily for Charlie, his book somehow found its way to Cherie and, after publishing it in 1970, she began a correspondence with his prison warden. She sent the prison warden Charlie’s book with a note saying, “You know you have in that prison this man who is a great writer.” Eventually the warden agreed that Cherie and Buddy could visit Charlie.
Buddy recalls the prison as a horrible place, “We had to visit him through thick glass and by telephone.” After the visit, Cherie was even more determined to get Charlie released. She unearthed the name and address of the judge who had sentenced him and began sending him letters about Charlie. Through her efforts, Buddy recalls, “he got out on parole and went onto a methadone program.”
After Summer of the Black Sun and Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the formal association with PRISM was dropped. By the early 1970s a group of publishers, including Cherie, began meeting to discuss the possibility of forming a professional association. At that time, Buddy Smith owned Harry Sons & Co., a book wholesaling company, so men still dismissed her as Buddy’s wife. Many of the formative meetings were held at Cherie’s home, and she would often welcome her guests with goodies. The gesture backfired; Cherie became known as “Mrs. Cookies.” Cherie stayed with the group long enough to see November House become a founding member of the Western Canadian Publishers’ Association, known today as the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. Unwilling to tolerate sexist attitudes, she left the group not long after it was fostered in her home.
Cherie Smith published another 19 books including Allan Fotheringham’s first book, Collected & Bound, in 1972, along with David Evanier’s The Swinging Headhunter. In 1973, November House published Sister Roxy, a first novel by Albertan Kenneth Dyba, another ex-student of Jacob Zilber. November House went on to publish Dyba’s children’s book Lucifer and Lucinda (1977) and The Long (and Glorious) Weekend of Raymond (and Bingo) Oblongh (1983), one of its two final titles.
Harry Adaskin, a violinist, broadcaster, teacher and first head of UBC’s music department, became a November House author after Cherie, relaxing in a bath, heard him on CBC Radio. She called him up, and November House ended up publishing two of his books: A Fiddler’s World: Memoirs to 1938, in 1977, and A Fiddler’s Choice: Memoirs 1938-1980, in 1982. Harry Rankin, a hugely popular city councillor, was also approached by Cherie, and in 1975 Rankin’s Law: Recollections of a Radical hit the bookstands.
During its 14-year-run, November House published an eclectic mix although Cherie tried to focus on non-fiction, controversial subjects and books about B.C. Cookbooks such as Denny Boyd’s Man on the Range: or, How to Survive in the Kitchen Without Really Crying (1973) were published alongside First Nations’ stories, Legends of the River People (1976), and local tales of interest: Stanley Park: an Island in the City (1971). One of the last books from November House was Feldafing (1983), the story of inmates from a concentration camp who, after the war, took over what had been a wealthy town in Bavaria in order to heal from the trauma of war.
Cherie Smith liked to say publishing was like fishing. It was “incessant expectation followed by perpetual disappointment.” She kept a picture of two hands on the edge of a cliff, hanging on by the fingernails, representing the publishing business. Cherie was publisher, editor and literary agent. And she made hors d’oeuvres for book launches. Dealing with disgruntled authors and applying for limited Canada Council funding was hard work: “Douglas & McIntyre have had a very rocky history,” says Buddy Smith. “Even in Toronto, McClelland and Stewart had a difficult time…”
November House closed its doors in 1983. In 1984, Cherie Smith founded the Jewish Book Festival and turned her hand to writing her family memoir, Mendel’s Children (University of Calgary Press, 1997), a history that charts the course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over 100 years. It includes stories and memories of her relatives including her grandfather Solomon Steiman.
Mendel’s Children received glowing reviews in the The Midwest Book Review, The Montreal Gazette, and from Wayson Choy: “Cherie Smith’s family chronicle is written with such storytelling skill, with such an honest and compassionate clarity, that the reader turns page after page with growing fascination.”
In 1998 Cherie was diagnosed with cancer. By the end of the year she was living at home under the care of a hospice nurse. Despite urgings from the nurse to “let go,” Cherie Smith held on. Even though she was bedridden and could barely speak, she wanted to wait for the birth of her third grandchild. When her granddaughter was finally born, her daughter-in-law came straight from the hospital to Cherie’s bedside and placed the tiny baby next to her. And then everyday after that, she would bring the child to lie with Cherie in bed. Once the baby was born, the nurse again urged her to let go; she’d seen her grandchild. But she had to fulfill one more wish—to celebrate her and Buddy’s 47th wedding anniversary, which she managed to do on June 29th, before passing away on July 13, 1999.
Cherie Smith was never particularly interested in the ground-breaking nature of her achievements. She simply loved literature and was determined to encourage local writers by publishing books of high quality. And she continues to encourage budding literary talent. The Cherie Smith Prize in Creative Writing, a grant of $500, is available to creative writing students at UBC, and the literary festival she founded now bears her name. The Cherie Smith Jewish Book Festival celebrated its 25th anniversary in, appropriately, November of 2009.
Female book publishers in B.C. have included Cherie Smith’s closest contemporary, Diana Douglas (Self-Counsel Press), as well as Michelle Benjamin (Polestar Press), Catherine Edwards (Pacific Educational Press), Maralyn Horsdal (Horsdal & Schubart), Vici Johnstone (Caitlin Press), Anita Large (Theytus Books), Ruth Linka (Touchwood Editions), Diane Morriss (Sono Nis), Naomi Wakan (Pacific-Rim Publishers), Carolyn Zonailo (Caitlin Press) and the women who collectively managed Press Gang.
November House Titles:
FICTION:
Bill T. O’Brien: Summer of the Black Sun (1969)
Charlie Leeds: Tillie’s Punctured Romance, & The Love Song of Rotten John Calabrese, plus selected short subjects (1970)
David Evanier: The Swinging Headhunter (1972)
Kenneth Dyba: Sister Roxy (1973); Lucifer and Lucinda (1977); The Long (and Glorious) Weekend of Raymond (and Bingo) Oblongh (1983)
Robert G Sherrin: The Black Box (1976)
NON-FICTION:
Barry Broadfoot: Stanley Park: an Island in the City — photography by Ralph Bower; text by
Barry Broadfoot (1971)
Jack Wassermann: Vancouver on 5,000 Calories a Day: a Guide to Dining Out (1971)
Allan Fotheringham: Collected & Bound (1972)
Harry Rankin: Rankin’s Law: Recollections of a Radical (1975)
Harry Adaskin: A Fiddler’s World: Memoirs to 1938 (1977); A Fiddler’s Choice: Memoirs 1938-1980 (1982)
Julian Smith: Rules to Keep the Rascals Out (1978)
Simon Schochet: Feldafing (1983)
COOKBOOKS:
Denny Boyd: Man on the Range: or, How to Survive in the Kitchen Without Really Crying (1973)
National Council of Jewish Women of Canada: The Council Cookbook: a Treasury of Jewish Recipes. 5th Ed. (1974)
DRAMA:
Betty Keller: Trick Doors and Other Dramatic Sketches (1974); Taking Off: a Practical Handbook for Teachers of Creative Drama (1975); Opening Trick Doors: a Guide to the Use and Production of the Sketches in Trick Doors (1975)
FIRST NATIONS:
Norman H Lerman: Legends of the River People (1976)
[BCBW 2010]
