OASAR Pioneer*, Doug Mackey,
wins the
CBC Radio Competition,
"Northern Ontario Reads",
with his book about the former logging town of Kiosk.

2008 April 3, the winner of the CBC Radio Northern Ontario Reads competition was announced this week. The winner was The Kiosk Story by the North Bay area heritage columnist and local historian, Doug Mackey. The Northern Ontario Reads competition was presented by the Northeastern Ontario CBC of Sudbury and was decided by listeners who voted by email or phone during March on which of four books entered by knowledgeable panelists is “that one piece of literature with a Northern Ontario connection that all of us should read?" The other books being considered were: The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson, Forty Words for Sorrow by Gilles Blunt, and a collection of short stories called Outcrops.

The Kiosk Story was entered by panelist Suzanne Brooks, owner of Gulliver’s Books, in North Bay. She said that when the book became a “runaway best seller” just before Christmas she decided to take another look to see why it had such wide appeal. She discovered that it told the “quintessential northern story” of a resource based industry town as well as the history of the First Nations people, the railway, and other areas of interest.

She said that another reason why it is so popular is that it is the story of the people of the community. Individual family stories enhance the facts of the story such as the First Nation Amabe du Fond family who have a river named after them, the Bergerons, a typical lumbering family, and the Cappadocias, a CNR family. She said that although the author has told the individual stories he has written a “story which transcends that particular town and those particular people and speaks to what life in northern Ontario is about”.

Commenting on the win, panelist Marian Botsford Fraser, last year's winner, said that she was “kind of torn because the book about Kiosk is actually a book that I have on my bookshelf in Toronto and in fact … I went to Kiosk and I spent a week there and it is an extraordinary place. First of all it’s an extremely beautiful place and you could feel that there was a real story there, a very important story about Northern Ontario, so I’m glad that The Kiosk Story won”.

The Kiosk Story is a sequel to The Fossmill Story which won the Ontario Historical Society’s 'Award for Best Ontario Regional History" in 2001. The Kiosk Story concludes the saga of a logging and lumbering community that started in Fassett, Quebec on the Ottawa River, moved to Fossmill in Chisholm Township and then moved again to Kiosk inside Algonquin Park. Included in the “Special Edition” of the book is a DVD of old film footage of the town and mill, including film of the fire that ultimately ended the story.

The Kiosk Story is available in bookstores and other outlets throughout Northern Ontario and is available online from the publisher’s website www.pastforward.ca or from www.indigo.ca.

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Author Doug Mackey can be contacted at 705-724-6882 or by email dmackey@pastforward.ca  Above is an image of the cover of the book.

(Doug Mackey was instrumental in the founding of OASAR, and was a director on the first board of directors of THE ONTARIO ASSOCIATION FOR STUDENTS AT RISK which had its formal beginning in 1987. He was recently acknowledged at a President's Dinner at the 20th Annual Conference of OASAR in April, 2008.)