While he was researching his book Live to See the Day, Mark Medley, Artsci’04, visited the famous cathedral in Canterbury, England. “It was an impromptu pilgrimage for me,” he writes, “an English major who’d spent countless late nights deciphering Chaucer, and completely unrelated to this book, or so I thought at the time.”
It turned out to have a lot to do with his book, which is about people who work toward goals that might outlive them: treasure hunters, scientists, activists – or builders of cathedrals. In Canterbury, he sensed “a slip in the fabric of time.”
That sense of history had drawn him as a teenager to Queen’s, where he fell in love with the campus. Carolyn Smart’s creative writing workshop was a formative experience. “That was the first time I’d been surrounded by other people who were serious about writing.” He also got involved with the student-run magazine Ultraviolet.
Mr. Medley then studied journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University. In 2008, as a reporter for the National Post, he profiled Liz White, leader of the Animal Protection Party of Canada. He wanted to understand what drove a politician who knew they could not win.
Liz White would eventually inspire the prologue of Live to See the Day. While that seed germinated, Mr. Medley moved to the Globe and Mail, where he’s now deputy opinion editor.
He began Live to See the Day just before the pandemic, as the father of one young child and, soon after, two. Sometimes, finishing the book seemed as unlikely as the hopes he was chronicling: Jeremy Holden’s search through the rainforests for a creature that might not exist; Bonnie Morton’s advocacy for Canada’s poor; astronomer Seth Shostak’s decades of asking: Are we alone?
As a kid, Mr. Medley had been obsessed with big questions – dinosaurs, buried treasure, outer space. He’d also dreamed of becoming a writer. Now, the next time he starts a book, it’ll feel less impossible.
As a student, he used to pull a novel off the shelves in the Joseph S. Stauffer Library whenever he needed a break.
“Ultimately, I wanted to have one of my books in Stauffer on that shelf,” he recalls. “At the time, being 20 or 21 years old and trying to figure out how I was going to accomplish that – that seemed like the top of the mountain: If you got your book in Stauffer Library, and some other kid 20 years from now would take it off the shelf and go back to their carrel and waste an afternoon instead of working on their essay.”
Live to See the Day is available from McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada.
