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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 a style of writing. ” – Curtis Gillespie “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 Mac. Queen, 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 Mac. Queen. 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 oilhungry 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 i. Pad) 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 Mac. Queen’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 Mac. Queen 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 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, Mac. Queen 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 Mc. Alliser, 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, ’ Mac. Queen was saying, ‘and overnight it was gone. It was one of those gutwrenching, heartstopping events that you just don’t see coming. ’” – Julian Mac. Queen 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-in-law 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 cooperation 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.