Mark Leiren-Young, Stampede Queen

As surprised as he might have been at the time, it makes excellent sense that Mark Leiren-Young's memoir Never Shoot a Stampede Queen would win the Leacock Medal for Humour.

Leiren-Young's voice is never far from the surface in any of his writing, be it podcasts or be it one of his increasingly numerous books (most of them nonfiction), and in Stampede Queen, we get all of the things that he's known for: curiosity, incisiveness, gentleness, self-deprecation, fairness, and a good heart. When these things are put to the service of humour, and when humour gets used to expose the truth, the Leacock Medal should be a natural consequence, even if plenty of Leacock winners fail to meet that standard.

(Disclosure: when I say "the things that he's known for," I mean that Mark's been a friend and a member of the Beers & Books Club for the last eight years. I've also posted here about some of his other books: The Green Chain back in 2010; The Killer Whale Who Changed the World, which brought him to book club; and most recently Free Magic Secrets Revealed.)

In Stampede Queen, we get Leiren-Young openly walking and writing about the line between insider and outsider, in a highly specific situation, and it's irreplaceable. Admittedly, the Cariboo is off the radar of most readers, and it's about the far-away times of the early 1980s, plus the book itself came out almost 20 years ago now, so its natural audience is likely pretty small. Regardless, this book achieves things that it shouldn't, and that's a very good thing.

The time period covered here overlaps with the remarkable writing that the increasingly complicated Terry Glavin did about the Cariboo, particularly his essay about Judge Cunliffe Barnett in his book This Ragged Place. This was a time when the justice system in BC openly treated Indigenous people differently than everyone else, not just systemically but intimately. Leiren-Young finds himself parachuted into life as a first-time reporter in Williams Lake, a long-haired city kid who couldn't have been more alien to the place if he'd been designed in a lab, and so in coming to terms with the place and its people, he ends up as witness to the times.

Glavin proved it was possible to write accessibly about the time and place without needing humour, and of course This Ragged Place has a different and sustained focus that Stampede Queen doesn't, but Leiren-Young's outsider documentary gives all of this an immediacy that's still needed. As well, even though this element is what stood out for me, it's just one thread of a complex narrative.

Heritage House has an uneven publishing record, but they've done some very good things. Never Shoot a Stampede Queen was a really good acquisition on their part. Forty years after the events Leiren-Young recounts, and twenty years after its publication, it remains a readable, thoughtful, and yes, funny book: highly recommended.