Barbara Moon

44 Ryerson review of journalism Summer 2010 www.RRJ.CA
Full
MoonObsessive.Temperamental. Brilliant. Looking back
on the life of the late Barbara Moon, a storied magazine editor,
whose quest for perfection haunts writers still
{
women were as rare in creative positions as sunny days were
that Banff July, Moon’s later career was devoted to wresting
excellence from authors at a number of magazines,but primar-
ily at Saturday Night.As she told the Ryerson Review of Journal-
ism in 2008, for her, the craft of editing was“rich and fulfilling
and different every day and marvellous.”To her admirers, her
skills were almost preternatural. After Moon’s death at 82
from viral encephalitis in April 2009, writer Eileen Whitfield
wrote on the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers listserv:
“No one could give as fast and intelligent a‘fix’ to a long piece
as Barbara Moon.”Journalist Peter Worthington, in an article
for the Toronto Sun, described Moon as a talented editor“who
specializes in rescuing writers from themselves.” But others
remember her as overbearing and“discouraging.”
In all, her fierce commitment to quality beyond everything
and her love of working on long, meaty features for extended
amounts of time would likely render her unemployable today.
And with her death last year, the industry lost someone who
symbolized a time when stories weren’t rushed to be posted
online, edits weren’t made in “track changes” and it wasn’t
uncommon for writers to spend months on a story.
Moon undeniably had a number of quirks. She dis-
trusted technology and would seldom accept manuscripts sent
by fax in the days before e-mail.Hand delivery was her preferred
method of receiving copy, no matter if it was time-consuming.
n the summer of 1994, David Macfarlane was
among eight journalists at the Banff Centre in
Alberta for the prestigious, month-long literary
arts journalism program. A freelancer since the
late 1970s, and, he jokes, notorious for missing
deadlines, Macfarlane had managed to get his draft in on time
after warnings from Barbara Moon, his editor. To submit his
story, he went right to Moon’s room. He knocked, waited, but
no one answered, so he slipped the piece under her door.
Macfarlane remembers Banff that July as generally grey, but
the day after he handed his manuscript in, the sun finally came
out. He and some of the other writers decided to celebrate
making their target by enjoying the nice weather on a rooftop
patio.A tape deck played music,someone brought up a pitcher
of vodka and orange juice, and they just relaxed.
Then Macfarlane realized someone new,and not very happy,
had arrived—he could feel the chill.There,standing before him,
was Moon, glaring. He had gotten the wrong room.
That tense moment passed quickly,but working with Moon
was seldom without drama and, not infrequently, friction,
a combination that often resulted in both author angst and
award-winning writing.(The next year,Macfarlane would win a
silver at the National Magazine Awards for his finished piece,“A
Fan’s Notes,”a profile of jazz musician Bill Grove with a memoir
component, which was published in Saturday Night.)
For decades a highly regarded writer herself, in an era when
I
By Seema Persaud

www.RRJ.CA Summer 2010 Ryerson review of journalism 45
She decreed writers were entitled to“three exclamation marks
a year.” If you turned a draft around quickly, odds were she
wasn’t impressed. Speed was not her imperative; quality was.
As she once advised a writer with whom she was working,“Let
it ferment. What stays with you are the critical things.”
The critical things about Barbara Moon herself are these:
Born in St.Catharines,Ontario,in 1926,to an engineer and
a homemaker, Moon was the second daughter and last child.
She attended the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, the
High Anglican factory that manufactures leaders and thinkers,
whose students still wear academic gowns to dinner; at the
time, just over a fifth of all bachelor degrees in the country
were awarded to women. Moon played on a basketball team,
was an assistant editor on The Trinity University Review and
won several prizes during her four years studying English.After
graduating in 1948,she got a clerk-typist job at Maclean’s,where
she became girl Friday to Pierre Berton,then an assistant editor.
Moon saw the edits he made to copy, learning exactly what he
looked for in a story. Soon, she was offering her critiques of
stories to Berton and, in 1950, she became one of 10 assistant
editors, and one of only a few women who did anything other
than type and file at the iconic bimonthly.
The first article Moon produced for the magazine was in
1950, called“The Murdered Midas of Lake Shore,”about mil-
lionaire Sir Harry Oakes, a native of Kirkland Lake, Ontario,
who had been found murdered seven years earlier at his home
in the Bahamas.Moon only used a single quote before the final
paragraphs of the 3,700-word story. Instead, the piece offered
meticulously phrased detail and engaging narrative:“He spent
more than half his life in rawhide boots and lumberjack shirts,
slept in caves and lean-tos and pup tents, trenched and single
jacked and swung an axe, shared quarters with rattlesnakes
and fought black flies. Before he died he bought his suits on
Savile Row and his underwear from Sulka, had mansions in
Kirkland Lake, Niagara Falls, Bar Harbor, London, Sussex,
Palm Beach, as well as the estates in the Bahamas.”It read like
a short story. She was only 24 when she wrote it.
In 1953, Moon left Maclean’s to edit at Mayfair, a high-end
general-interest title. In an obituary for Maclean’s, Robert
Fulford described meeting her there: “It was as if a bird of
paradise had alighted among sparrows.” He also observed,
“[She] looked like one of nature’s Parisians,a woman who made
chic self-presentation seem easy and inevitable.”
Within a couple of years, Moon was back at Maclean’s as a
staff writer, and stayed until 1964. Her forte was hard-hitting
profiles—among them,actor William Shatner and drama critic
Nathan Cohen—but it was a different kind of piece that won
her the 1962 University of Western Ontario President’s Medal,
for best magazine article of the year.“The Nuclear Death of a
Nuclear Scientist”explored the accidental radiation poisoning
of a young Winnipeg-born physicist and biochemist, reflect-
ing her new-found interest in science writing. Over the next

eight years, she wrote various features at The Globe and Mail;
was part of a blue-ribbon team that produced a“storyline” for
the Ontario pavilion at Expo 67; turned her flare for science
journalism into scriptwriting for the nascent The Nature of
Things and other documentary shows; and was commissioned
to write The Canadian Shield. Published in 1970, the finished
work was an unabashed paean to the rugged landscape and
its place in our collective imagination:“Bedrock, tundra, taiga,
boreal forest, deranged drainage, muskeg, mosquitoes, black
flies: add to these a climate that at its worst is arctic and at its
best offers only four frost-free months a year. Even as far south
as Timmins the yearly average is a mere forty frost-free days.
And that is the Shield.”
A quarter century after it first appeared, writer Greg Hol-
lingshead wrote about Shield,saying,“This is not only personally
charged nature writing of a good kind,but it gives you a sense of
what is so difficult and so magnificent about this country.”The
craft and passion that imbued the text also hinted at another
facet of “nature’s Parisian”: she was an enthusiastic birdwatcher,
a member of Friends of Point Pelee, an association dedicated
to ecological preservation, and was so entranced with the Far
North that on a trip there,she somewhat jokingly suggested to
her husband, Wynne Thomas, that they move there.
It was in 1968, during one of her freelance periods, that
Moon met Thomas, a Welsh-born journalist, who was editor
of a trade magazine covering the advertising industry. He had
noted her byline, and assigned her a story analyzing TV ads.
It was, he recalls,“a crackerjack piece.” They had drinks.A few
months later he proposed,and they were married in a small cer-
emony in St. Catharines.Very small. Moon’s long-time friend
from the Globe, Sheila Kieran, wasn’t invited. Fulford, with
whom she had become close, didn’t learn of the wedding until
A colleague from
the Saturday Night
days says Moon
was straight out of
a film noir: “She
would come to
editorial meetings
wearing her dark
glasses. She had
a certain heft in
the place.With
her deep, growly
voice, she was an
impressive figure”
{
Moon, with trademark cigarette, at The Globe and Mail in 1965. Right, her 1948 Trinity College
graduation photo, just before she joined Maclean's. Opposite, at Spence Bay, N.W.T., in 1983

magaziness at the time,with writers earning $5,000 or more per
feature. Plus, being published there was considered a coup.
But first:“This is a mess.You’re not telling me what I want
to read. Bring it back.” Or,“But what point are you trying to
make?” Or, “What do these things”—tar ponds, perhaps—
“look like? You haven’t described them in a way for me to
understand just yet.” Or,“I will not tolerate that sentence in
this magazine.” These frank, even cutting, critiques would be
delivered in Moon’s distinctive husky voice—some liken it to
Carol Channing’s—tuned by years of heavy smoking.
The dissection of the piece could last several hours and
would not likely be punctuated by much leavening conversa-
tion or gossip. It would culminate in your taking away a draft
heavily annotated in spidery handwriting, and maybe a typed
fix note, too, offering comments like,“That word isn’t working
hard enough in this sentence”or,“There’s too much bulk at the
opening of the story,”or, maybe a kinder-sounding request for
more research. If you were lucky, each subsequent draft would
contain fewer and fewer notes.
Moon arrived at Saturday Night in 1986, after
knocking around the mag trade, spending six months at Cana-
dian Business here, 18 months as editor of a doomed city book,
Toronto Calendar,there.Fulford first hired her as a senior editor
at Saturday Night, though later she would become an editor-
at-large. But her tenure at what was arguably the country’s top
writers’ title and certainly the most award winning extended
someone said in passing,“Well, Barbara and her husband….”
As a later colleague would note,“She wasn’t a person you were
casual with. You know, there are folks you can call up to chit-
chat. Well, I never felt I could do that with her.”
If Moon was your editorat Saturday Night during her
13 years there, your experience with her might have gone like
this: You feel as if you had been summoned; you might even
dress up, at least by freelance writer standards. She worked
in a real office, with a door, four walls and a ceiling, not the
ubiquitous cubicle in which all but the most senior editors toil
these days. If it was the Saturday Night offices at 36 Toronto
Street, there would be a dictionary on her knee, a typewriter
before her and neat piles of manuscripts on her desk. Chances
are the story you were meeting about was one you had pro-
posed, perhaps as short as 1,000 words, but more likely it
was a 6,000-word piece on a lawyer’s fight against a company
that had implanted faulty heart valves in patients, or a look
at how murder methods change over time, or, say, a piece on
the disappearance of a Canadian woman in the U.S. 27 years
prior. Essentially, the kind of articles there is almost no home
for today, pieces that involved a month (or two or three) of
research, often including travel, and another month of writing.
You had handed in your draft a week or so previous and were
understandably anxious to get a sense of how much more work
you needed to do before you could finally finish the story and
submit your invoice. Saturday Night was one of the top-paying
theglobeandMail,farleft;trinitycollegearchives,nearleft

through the reigns of John Fraser, then Ken Whyte.
George Galt, who was also on staff during the Fraser years,
recalls her distinctive presence: she was, he says, straight out
of a film noir.“She would come to editorial meetings wearing
her dark glasses, sitting at the very end of the table. She had a
certain heft in the place. She was much older than any of us,
including Fraser. She had decades on me and John, even. She
was a very powerful presence and with her voice, her deep
growly voice, she was an impressive figure.”Moon at that point
was in her 60s, whereas many of the team had small children,
and although she was interested in her colleagues’lives,as Fraser
remembers, when staff would bring their kids into the office,
her door would always quietly close.
It was the prose appearing in the magazine that had her full
attention. Ernest Hillen, another fellow editor from the Fraser
period, says,“Nothing got in the magazine, if she could help
it, that wasn’t as good as it could be.”If something did happen
to appear that she felt was substandard,“For a certain length
of time, there would be lots of caustic remarks about that
particular piece or a particular writer.” From his perspective,
what drove her was“an anchored idealism. She really believed
in the trade of journalism, and how good it could be.”
What that sometimes translated to, though, was an exas-
perating disregard for time constraints—both the writer’s and
the magazine’s. For some years, Charlotte Gray contributed a
monthly national politics column to Saturday Night. As her
editor, Moon would still be asking her to fix passages or do
more research for what Gray felt were final drafts. Gray admits
Moon was a thorough and an“absolutely brilliant” editor, but
says,“There were other editors I preferred because she was so
demanding and,when you’re doing a monthly column,it’s hard
to keep up the rhythm if somebody is putting so much pressure
on you.”After awhile, Hillen took over from Moon.
Sandra Martin also experienced the less-practical side of
Moon’s editing style. In the mid-1990s, Saturday Night com-
missioned a story on employment equity based on a trip Martin
had taken to South Africa. After seeing the first draft, Moon
wanted Martin to re-research the piece and come at it from a
different angle. Martin protested there was no way she could
do that—she had already gone to South Africa and it wasn’t
feasible to return. The story never made it into the magazine.
A piece of Martin’s that did get published was the 1,600-
word obituary of Moon in the Globe. Moon would likely have
approved—it was neither sentimental nor purely laudatory.The
accolades it did contain,though,were lavish.Fraser,now master
of Massey College at U of T, said simply,“I loved her.” Anne
Collins, a one-time Saturday Night colleague, remembered,
“She was outsized in character and glamour,elegant,ferocious,
witty. When it came to language, she had a finely calibrated
internal Geiger counter that registered the slightest tremor of
Working with Moon was seldom without drama and, not
infrequently, friction, a combination that resulted in both author
angst and award-winning writing
{

bad thinking and bad word choice….I can see her handwriting
in the margins of a manuscript even now, delicately suggesting
six exquisite word choices in place of your inept one.”
Back in 1997, Anita Lahey worked with Moon on “Black
Lagoons,” a story on the possibly carcinogenic tar ponds of
Sydney,Nova Scotia,which won an honourable mention at the
National Magazine Awards. Lahey still has the notes from her
conversations with Moon about the story. In one case, Moon’s
advice was,“Go to a present day scene, maybe November day,
trotting around the pond. Look one way at Eric’s house, the
other way at Jane’s. Doesn’t need to be long. Think about any
brilliant, 30-line poem.” Lahey, who is both a journalist and a
poet,says,“I can’t think of another example where someone I’ve
worked with on a magazine piece has brought in other genres
of writing to help illustrate how to structure a piece.”
It’s not hard to imagine this kind of editorial direction
arising from Moon’s own outsized writing talent. In Martin’s
obit, she called Moon“our Joan Didion,” and quoted Peter C.
Newman’s observation that she was “justifiably considered
one of the half-dozen best Canadian magazine writers in the
trade.”He adds now, she was one of the“best read,”as she was
always very controversial.“People would read her to get mad.”
If Barbara had one maxim when she worked with
writers, it was,“Everyone has a secret. Your job is to find out
what it is.” Of course, she, too, had a secret: Why, after her
early and demonstrable success as a writer, did she suddenly
stop writing in 1984?
There are several theories, but no clear answer. The most
common is that Moon had,as Fulford says,“a writer’s block the
size of Mount Kilimanjaro.”Moon wondered how Fulford and
other writers were able to turn around drafts quickly. Hillen
endorses this notion: “It’s not as if you reach a certain level
and then you can relax, because you’re always trying to top
yourself and you’re expected to top yourself.”He also wonders
if her punctilious editing style might have been due to the“idle
writer”syndrome—the tendency of an editor to tilt a little too
much to the writer role. As Martin says,“The point of editing
is for you to ask questions of the material and of the writer,
but there’s a certain point where it’s the writer’s piece and I’m
not sure that Barbara always felt that way.”
Dianna Symonds, another editor who worked with Moon
at Saturday Night, has another suggestion:“Maybe when she
met Wynne and they got married, that relationship meant
more to her than writing.” Certainly her approach to writing
was all-consuming.When she worked on the story about TV
ads that brought her and Thomas together, she spent a week
locked up in her apartment watching countless hours of ads
a day. Wynne seems to confirm Fulford’s take.“We were very
much in love with each other,” he says, “but I think Barbara
had discovered editing. She found writing incredibly hard
work. She was a perfectionist to the nth degree.And when she
started editing for Saturday Night, she felt she had discovered
her true métier, and in editing she could contribute to the
development of other writers and at the same time could have
her own satisfying career, without perhaps all those agonizing
days of looking for the right word and the right lead and the
right sentence.”
Certainly Barbara and Wynne seemed to find the right life
after she left Saturday Night in 1998. They moved full-time
to their country home in Prince Edward County (a decision
made even though Wynne jokingly pointed out there was no
Holt Renfrew there) and freelanced via their editing consulting
company, Editors-at-Large. Less than a year before Barbara’s
sudden death, they bought a house overlooking the Bay of
Quinte, with Barbara declaring,“I think I have one more reno
in me.” They were due to move in a few weeks after she died.
After the couple’s relocation to the countryside, no one was
too surprised to not hear much from Barbara. “She always
predicted that when she retired she would disappear like the
Cheshire Cat,”Symonds remembers,“And all that would remain
is the shadow of her smile.” R
Above, Moon birdwatching, one of her long-time passions, in
South Carolina. Opposite, at Banff Centre's literary journalism
program in 1992 with Morris Wolfe and Robert MacDonald
donlee,thebanffcentre,left;wynnethomas,right

Barbara Moon

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