Today, Anthony Bidulka tells me how one of the worst ‘reviews’ he received led to him getting his agent. This is a great story about how you cannot please everyone, so write what you want to write.

Answering the question of WHY DO I WRITE? (something I encourage all writers to do), I have concluded that my WHY is this: I write to tell stories about underrepresented people and underrepresented places in a way that is accessible, and hopefully, entertaining.

The underrepresented place I most often write about is Saskatchewan, my home province. The underrepresented people I most often write about are members of the LGBTQ+ community. The combination of the two is, I feel, truly underrepresented and rarely found in Canadian mystery genre material.

As a writer writing about LGBTQ+ characters, I have on occasion encountered people, usually interviewers or reviewers understandably looking for an angle, decide that I am the spokesperson for that community. They are mistaken. I am one person, one voice. Deciding I am the spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ community is like a Martian, freshly landed on earth, deciding I am the spokesperson for all humans.

That being said, as a mystery writer who is a member of, and advocate for, the LGBTQ+ community, my hope is that my singular voice, my presence and representation in the publishing industry, encourages more voices to speak out and helps to move the community out of the category of being underrepresented.

Even so, I have found you cannot please everyone, outside or even inside your own community.

I was fortunate to find a publisher for my first book without agent representation. I was about 4-5 books into my first mystery series when I received a letter from a graduate student completing his Master’s thesis at Carleton University. I was quite surprised—and I must admit, rather flattered—to learn that the subject of his thesis was my Russell Quant series.

He sent me a copy of the abstract which, in part, read…now, keep in mind the series has a main character who is gay:

“With Russell Quant, Bidulka has shifted the originally well-defined, straight-forward, stolidly masculine identity of the hard boiled, urban crime-fighting hero to a marginal landscape, where subversion, introspection, and humour reign.

“In this paper, I contend that Bidulka’s writing queers not only for the detective fiction genre, but also the regional landscape that his imagined communities inhabit, and myths of Canadian nationhood that bind them.”

Making no claim of being a great academic or literary scholar, I readily admit I didn’t really understand most of the abstract’s claims—but it sounded pretty good.

Some months later, this same grad student sent me a copy of his now published thesis. Once again, this was a high-minded, rather lengthy, scholarly document, but I was smart enough to recognize that in slow methodical fashion this student had deconstructed every book in the series and then completely tore them to shreds for:

“carelessly giving voice to the “homonormalization of the entire lesbian and gay community in Canada today.”

So, yup, if you were wondering, that was me. I did that to the entire LGBTQ+ community in Canada.

Lesson learned. You can’t please everyone all of the time. But—and here’s where light comes from dark—about a year later, this same graduate student was delivering his paper at a conference in California. In the audience that day was another gentleman who, for some inexplicable reason, after hearing the same conclusion noted above, felt compelled to read my books. And today, that gentleman is my literary agent.

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Anthony Bidulka’s books have been shortlisted for Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, Saskatchewan Book Awards, a ReLit award, and Lambda Literary Awards. Flight of Aquavit was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Mystery, making Bidulka the first Canadian to win in that category. In 2023, in addition to being shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award and Alberta Book Publishing Award, Going to Beautiful won an Independent Publisher Book Award being named Gold Medalist as the 2023 Canada West Best Overall Fiction novel and was awarded the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence as Canada’s Best Crime Novel for 2023. https://anthonybidulka.com/

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