Margaret Atwood writes some really awful books.” “David Suzuki is bad for the environment.” “Group of Seven artists are overexposed genre painters.” These are among the seven things you can’t say in Canada, according to Margaret (Peggy) WENTE ’68 in a Reader’s Digest article. But say, and defend them, she does. Anyone who would describe a provincial premier as “…a deadbeat brother-in-law who’s hit you up for money a few times too often” has guts, not to mention a knack for metaphor. Newfoundland’s premier, Danny Williams, was the target of that vintage Wente column after he had ordered the removal of all Canadian flags at the Newfoundland and Labrador legislature to protest what he deemed unfair provincial equalization payments. Ms. Wente, perhaps the most loved and loathed columnist at The Globe and Mail, is a must-read regardless of your position. Her column has been kicking the shins of Canada’s sacred cows since 1992. In addition to her Globe and Mail duties, Ms. Wente is a favourite talk show guest, the author of An Accidental Canadian: Reflections of My Home and (Not) Native Land, a sought after speaker, and this year’s BSS Distinguished Old Girl.

To encounter this charming, petite woman who describes herself as an introvert, one would never guess that she’d be capable of publicly defending such unpopular positions as loving her gas-guzzling SUV, (which, more recently, she wrote that she wished to sell because fuel prices are now too high). Her engaging smile, sharp eyes and quiet approach would not immediately suggest that a Christopher Hitchens-type is lurking beneath the surface. Like the infamous contrarian writer, who is known for his extreme views on topics ranging from religion (“all religion is equally stupid and an expression of contempt for reason”) to Mother Teresa (“a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”), Ms. Wente takes great pleasure in prodding conventional wisdom—well, maybe stabbing it would be more accurate. And although her views might be repugnant to some, no one can disagree with the fact that they come from a writer who is gifted, thoughtful and informed.

To explain this penchant for blasting open taboos, Ms. Wente quotes John Tierney, a writer for The New York Times, who said, “Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people, doesn’t mean it’s wrong…but that’s a good working theory.”

“He nailed it,” she says of Tierney’s quote. “A journalist is supposed to be such an iconoclast but we are subject to ‘groupthink’ as much as anyone else, and flavour-of-the-day opinion as anybody else…in fact, sometimes worse.” So her aim is to question the popular opinions of the moment and offer the other perspective that might go against the prevailing rhetorical winds.

A conversation with Ms. Wente is freewheeling with topics that comfortably range from American politics to the future of newspapers. She believes in conversation, debate, thoughtful consideration of the day’s events, and she wants her readers to engage—not only with her, but also with each other.

“I have the best job in journalism,” she says with a smile. “This is my ideal job. I was always shy, but opinionated. What could be better than having this fabulous soapbox with the best readers in the country? You don’t have to dumb anything down. In fact, they’re smarter than you are so you’d better watch it. It’s so fun…such a thrill!”


Clearly, writing was in her future from the beginning. Described in her 1967 yearbook as “the blond bombshell,” she stated that her ambition was “to go down in history as an immortal bard.” Ms. Wente’s fellow students appreciated her contribution to the literary arts at BSS and believed that she would achieve that ambition. Her Marjorie Pickthall award-winning poem, The Dance, revealed the true artist she was at the age of 17.

But arriving at her destiny was a bit circuitous as the professional lot for women was undergoing a vast reformation during her early career years and new opportunities were just beginning to emerge. “In my childhood there were only three professions for women: teacher, nurse and secretary,” she says. “And if you didn’t want to do that you could be a ballet dancer. So when I was 10, I wanted that, but I was short and chunky, so it didn’t work out. Then I thought about being a teacher because that seemed closest [to her inclinations]. Back in the ’60s there were not a lot of career role models for women.”

She always knew she wanted to work, but having a distinct career path wasn’t within her grasp at that time, as it wasn’t for many girls. So, with a vague idea of wanting to do “something intellectual” — and in a hurry to grow up—she graduated from BSS in Grade 12 to attend her mother’s alma mater, the University of Michigan.

After what she describes as an “exhilarating” experience on an American campus during the turbulent ’60s, she returned to Canada to earn a Masters of English at the University of Toronto. She contemplated a career as an English professor but decided against it because she felt she “didn’t have the calling.”

Ms. Wente believes that luck and timing have a lot to do with success. She says that when she was starting her job search in 1972, “anybody who could stand up could get a job.” The demographics of the baby boom were on her side and, answering an ad in the newspaper for a job at the publishing house Doubleday, she got in and was quickly made a manager of publicity. But she really wanted to be a book editor and kept her eyes open for opportunities.

She soon found an editing job at the Royal Ontario Museum, which she wryly describes as “editing scholarly works on earthworms,” as well as editing the ROM magazine Rotunda. That soon led to a job at Weekend Magazine, which at the height of its popularity in the early ’70s had a circulation of more than two million readers. Ms. Wente was a copy editor and researcher, which provided her with enough experience and exposure to move up in the world of magazines.

And move up she did. “It was the end of the 1970s and I knew nothing about business, but business journalism as a field was exploding back then.” A new magazine, Canadian Business, was launched and run by the legendary editor Alexander (Sandy) Ross, who was a mentor for countless writers and editors. He hired Ms. Wente, as she puts it, to “get the magazine out on time.”

She was just 30 years old when she took over the magazine as editor following Mr. Ross’ departure. That made her the youngest editor of a national magazine in Canada and one of a few women. She invokes the “luck and timing” explanation for her early success, but certainly her talent, intelligence and ambition had a lot to do with making that luck and timing work.

Under her skilled hand, the magazine took home countless awards, including one for Ms. Wente for best business writing. Her time at Canadian Business is remembered with great fondness. “I loved the whole process,’’ she says. “You can control it and shape it and put your own stamp on it.” Of course, the harsher realities of the business of publishing had to be dealt with as well. “In publishing, so long as your magazine is making piles of dough, you’re a genius. As soon as the recession comes and you stop making piles of dough, they think, oh, she’s slipping.” The lesson, she says with a playful gleam in her eye, is “always choose to be an editor in good economic times and you’ll always be a genius.”

With a brief pit stop in television at Venture, the CBC business show, a stint she recounts with several shudders—“I hated television. Hated it. Hated it.”—she quickly looked for a way back into print. “I had no aptitude [for television]. I was so impatient. It’s like lugging around a two-ton pencil. And the politics were excruciating.”

So, when The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Magazine offered her a job, she was eager to accept. This was a major milestone for Ms. Wente. She had long harboured a fascination for newspapers and even had crushes on columnists. She had revered The Globe and Mail as a girl and hung around its offices as a teenager, absorbing the culture. While other girls were cooing over The Beatles, Ms. Wente was dreaming of political journalists. “The day I walked into the newspaper, I had to pinch myself that I am actually walking into this building and I’m going to work here. It was just…totally thrilling.”

From the magazine it was a short, albeit challenging, leap into the daily newspaper. Starting in the ROB section, Ms. Wente dove in with a mandate to make it more reader-friendly by broadening its focus and embracing a more diverse audience.

When the newspaper wars started in the late 1990s with the launch of the National Post, everything at The Globe and Mail began to shift. The new competition called for new management and a different vision for the paper. Ms. Wente, by then the managing editor, a job she jokes that she held for five minutes, describes this period as the best thing that could have happened to The Globe. Its investors had to substantially up the ante to meet the new challenges, and the leadership had to revitalize the paper to deepen its connection with its readers. The formula appears to have worked as The Globe has emerged as a leader, winning the battle for readers and ad revenue in a competition that has experienced declines in both.

During her two years at BSS, Ms. Wente was active with the yearbook as literary editor of The Prism and her poems won both praise and awards. At the time she lived with her newly remarried mother in Don Mills, an area of Toronto. But the first 14 years of her life were spent in a community on the north shore of Chicago that she describes as “Dick and Jane land,” referring to the Fun With Dick and Jane books popular in the 1950s. It was, she said, “Wonderbread town,” where everyone was white and middle class and all families lived in lovely houses with big lawns and went sailing on the weekends. She says she was a rebellious young girl, hardly surprising given her penchant for stirring up an argument. She liked to hang out at malls, smoking and wearing “gobs of blue eye shadow, white lipstick and go-go boots.” Shades of Nancy Sinatra. But despite her outward lassitude, she was always a gifted student and brought home straight A’s from her local high school, no matter how little work she did. This alarmed her mother, who decided that her daughter needed a more rigorous challenge. They chose BSS.

“I was prepared to hate it,” Ms. Wente says with her usual honesty. “The uniform, no makeup, those Oxfords, the skirt down to the knees. It didn’t conform with my idea of being a rebellious beatnik.” But she did discover a lot of kindred spirits among her peers and she soon formed friendships with the other “smart but rebellious ones.” “We would go somewhere and smoke, roll up our skirts a few inches…and smoke. We felt very wicked.”As a side note, she kicked the rebellious smoking habit 25 years ago.

It was in the fullness of time that Ms. Wente came to really appreciate her experience at BSS. “I was enormously valued there,” she says. “It was an environment for me where it was all right to be smart. I met other smart girls, which was fabulous because it said I’m not alone in the world.”

One teacher in particular proved to be transformational for her. Although Ms. Wente describes Mrs. Halliday, her English teacher, as somewhat notorious at BSS for being a tough, unconventional bohemian, that was a combination of traits that suited Ms. Wente just fine. "She was pretty different," says Ms. Wente. “She took me under her wing—she saw something there and gave me extra. She taught us Leonard Cohen before anyone had ever heard of him. It wasn’t on the curriculum but she taught it anyway. She invited me to her house where there were actual poets and writers. It was extraordinary. She made me realize that this was the area where I had a gift. I needed to pursue it—read everything, just gobble it up. I just flourished with my experience there.”

Ms. Wente is married to Ian McLeod, an independent producer/director—and fellow storyteller. The couple met in 1986 and, after a long engagement, married in 1997. They live in Toronto where they enjoy a wide circle of friends and are part of the glamorous crowd of media insiders and influencers. They have remained childless, a fact that Ms. Wente speaks of with refreshing candor. She implores young women to think about these things, even with the pressure to wait because of career concerns. “I want to shout back at women in their early 30s, ‘Do it!’ Don’t wait. You hit 35 and your eggs are past their ‘sell by’ date.” After a pause, and perhaps based on her own experience, she thoughtfully adds: “It’s the first thing a lot of women fail at, the first thing they can’t control,” she says of the growing incidence of childlessness. “It’s really an existential thing. Women have more choices but it doesn’t always work out the way you think. Girls grow up thinking they can have it all and they can actually. They’ll have spectacular lives and do spectacular things—and they’ve grown up knowing there are no limitations on what they can do. But life…it brings its own limitations.”

Whatever limitations have crossed her path, this year’s Distinguished Old Girl has come to terms with or simply overcome. She has blazed a trail for women in journalism and continues to enlighten the country with her thought-provoking writing. Girls following her path can thank Peggy Wente for clearing the way.

 

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THE DANCE
The beautiful stars exploded all around them
As they wended their secret ways
Through the passages of each other’s souls.
Framed in the golden light
They danced by moon
Across the vast beaches of their love.
The ever-present sea watched and waited
Unheeded
Lapping and sucking at their feet
Their knees
With infinite patience
Watched and waited for the dance to end.
With the last flicker of the last star
A tiny bubble rose to the surface.
The dying moon kissed it farewell
And it vanished forever.
—P. Wente, Age 17
Marjorie Pickthall, Senior Poetry First Prize

Posted July 20, 2008 at 09:14pm

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