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Apologia A public execution is a fine thing to watch, and there are many in these early days of the New Reformation. Pick a profession, any profession, and someone is being indicted, perp-walked through hell and thrown in cupcake prison. It could be worse. I have found myself entranced in front of PBS’s Wives of Henry VIII lately, thinking “cor, I’m glad I’m not her,” as another weeping, soon to be ex-wife places her head on the chopping block, while the crowd cheers and mocks. Except that I am her. A modern version, but a humiliated and executed her all the same. For a few moments on the first weekend of my public disgrace, I found myself saying to my mother, “Gosh, I must be very very grand and important to be fired on Page A2 of the Friday National Post and A12 of the Saturday Globe and Mail, in the week of an historic Presidential Election!” We’d laugh, and I’d take another call from a horrified friend or former editor asking “What happened?” I dropped the attribution of four sentences. That’s what happened. Or, the attribution could have been dropped in the editing, there is no way of determining which. Nevertheless, as every reporter knows, I’m guilty. If not specifically here, then somewhere else, sometime. It can be sloppiness, the heat of the moment of filing, the conflation of a hundred different sources in your head, the confusion during one of the 75 run-throughs I inflict upon an 850 word piece in the course of that panicked hour before deadline. As every editor who called me said, “it happens to everyone, especially everyone who writes and publishes a lot”. Yes, it does. It sure does. And over the past six years, I have published about 400,000 words. Little wonder I was fired. Everyone is sick of me. I am particularly vulnerable because I work across such a broad spectrum, which was an enormous privilege, accorded me, by the way, only by the National Post. That means I would read vast amounts of policy research every week, as well as anything published about the subject in the mainstream press, then pile expert interviews on top of that. Then I’d try to write it as if it were emerging from the head of a very silly girl, which made it readable fun. The next week, a new subject, and that dramatically different. The column about spoiled celebrity behaviour, which earned me my public disgrace, was written as a lark, because I needed a break. Eight years ago that great wit Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay for Vanity Fair in which he identified the great works of plagiarism: most of Martin Luther King’s famous speeches, works from T.S. Elliot, Coleridge, George Harrison, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Julian Barnes. Most of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s biography of Picasso was found to be cribbed from another writer. Hitchens says that an editor could assign a reporter to the plagiarism beat and find the poor soul worked nearly to death. How am I any different? Colour me mystified. The hooting crowd at Frank Magazine who broke the story called me aristocratic and uber-distinguished. Aristocratic would come as a surprise to the 12 generations of yeoman farmers who preceded me on this continent. And uber-distinguished? Why thank-you. But not so distinguished that the boys at Frank weren’t able to get me fired for failing to attribute four sentences. Some kind readers have suggested I was Asperized. I am not entirely sure what that means. Others have said that I was too conservative and that Canwest Global were catering to their liberal bosses in Ottawa. Just possibly I suppose, but a little too paranoid for me. I think it’s because we’re all running scared these days. We are re-configuring our moral positions, trying to codify better ways to behave, and we’re coming down hard on everyone in the public eye. If you are in the public eye, your behaviour must not only be beyond reproach, but seen to be beyond reproach. A weekly columnist in a national newspaper is very public. Will I miss it? Oh my God, yes. I have made two or three thousand friends over the last five years of weekly column writing. The letters I get from readers astonish me, over and over again. If anyone thinks that ordinary citizens are passive sheep, they can just come right over to my house and read the wonderful writing from impassioned, often anguished Canadians and Americans who care deeply about what is, and is not happening. What am I going to do? Penance. I shall work on my second novel, which has, to date, taken ten years. I shall hang out with my boyfriend, and not put him through the wringer, out of the sheer insane terror at the risks I’ve taken that week. I shall rest my tired mind. And maybe, in six months or a year or two, someone will let me back into the game. I hope so. It was the best job I ever had. This website, www.elizabethnickson.ca, put up by a kind reader, will archive my work. Many readers have asked for old columns. Here they will be, such as they are. You can contact me through the website, and maybe when I am a little less distressed, I’ll write a little. A very little. And I swear it’ll be all me.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.