I interviewed Richard Mackie to get to know his interesting life path from being an archaeologist to becoming a publisher, what he enjoys most about his work and how he copes with the challenges magazines are currently facing.
Richard, your career path is quite fascinating. How did it all start?
When I was growing up on Vancouver Island, I dug up antique bottles from nineteenth-century dumps along the shoreline of North Saanich between 1969 and 1973. It was the best history course I ever took.
In my twenties I worked as an archaeologist in BC in the summers, and in the winters, I earned an honours Master of Arts in medieval and modern history at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, between 1977 and 1981. In the end, I preferred history to archaeology, because of the literary riches of history including letters, diaries and photographs, which are absent in early BC archaeology. I used to gaze down at hearths or post moulds that were thousands of years old and wonder, is this all we leave behind, this hard-packed, mottled, fire-stained earth? By contrast, history offered actual writing, the direct line between mind and heart and paper, love letters, shopping lists, the motivations and opinions that determine human behaviour. So, this part has always been my passion. Later in my life, I taught history, geography, and creative non-fiction at a number of universities and colleges in BC.
When did you start working at The British Columbia Review?
In 2011 I got a job as an academic editor at the journal BC Studies. Then, seeing an opportunity, I started The Ormsby Review with Alan Twigg’s help in 2016. At first, we were part of BC BookLook (a digital news platform) and BC Bookworld (a newspaper about books), but we went independent as the BC Review in 2019. We changed our name to The British Columbia Review and are now the main book review platform in the province of British Columbia.
What do you like about your work as a publisher?
I enjoy my work as publisher at The British Columbia Review, because it brings me into contact with people in every part of the book world: writers, reviewers, publishers, publicists, bookstore owners, and readers, to name a few. The best book reviewers are known for their idiosyncratic and characterful opinions and reflections with their marvelous and deeply individualistic personalities.
I also get to work with our great team at The British Columbia Review: editors, social media manager, bibliographer, and board members.
The annual fundraiser in October and November is the best part of my work as a publisher, because it’s an opportunity to connect with our generous supporters and donors. And, as I said, I also enjoy the constant interaction with book reviewers and hard-working publicists and marketing people at presses across Canada.
We joined MagsBC and got to know Sylvia Skene by our mutual friend, the late and much-missed Allyson McGrane (1975-2024) of Left Right Minds, a company with focus on technology and creative consulting. Allyson was a big part of our success at the The British Columbia Review.
These are challenging times right now for any magazine out there. How do you experience it?
The hardest part is raising money to pay our editors Brett Josef Grubisic and Trevor Marc Hughes, social media manager Myshara Herbert-McMyn, bibliographer Liv Cadwallader, and website troubleshooter Shane Birley. For me as publisher, it means constant work—applying for grants, soliciting ads from publishers, and securing donations from our readers and supporters. The American tariffs have not helped. I’d like to see granting agencies cut the paperwork required in the application process.
Do you have any advice for people who want to build up a career in publishing?
Avoid politics and focus on building human relationships.
Can you name an example of your favourite articles for our readers.
In my free time I read a lot. I like finding a writer I like and then reading everything they’ve written. I’ve done this for Thomas Hardy, Carl Jung, Agatha Christie, and most recently Graham Greene.
I have two favourite memoirs at the BC Review. They were both published in our early years. The first is from 2016, Bumbling down the Danube by Howard Macdonald Stewart, which tells the story of Howard’s bicycle trip in 1973, when he was 20, down the Danube River through Belgrade, the Wallachian Plains, Pitesti, Bucharest, Tulcea, Braila, and the Danube Delta on the Black Sea. The second memoir, published in 2018, is The Spider Hunters by Lee Reid, a poignant, harrowing, yet intensely hopeful account of Lee’s early life in England and on Vancouver Island in the 1940s and 1950s. These are examples of why I left archaeology for history; they reveal human motivations and impressions, reasons and rationale, and the colour and texture of ordinary lives.
What is your favourite quote?
“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.” — Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
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