Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty.

        We accept PayPal, Visa & Mastercard
        through our secure checkout.

 

Mastercard                              

 

Never Shoot a Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo

Never Shoot a Stampede Queen<br> by Mark Leiren-Young Never Shoot a Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo
Your Price: $19.95 CDN
Author: Mark Leiren-Young
Publisher: Heritage House Publishing
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 224
Pub. Date: 2008
ISBN-10: 1894974522
ISBN-13: 9781894974523

About the Book:

Winner of the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour

"The cops wanted to shoot me, my bosses thought I was a Bolshevik, and a local lawyer warned me that some people I was writing about might try to test the strength of my skull with a steel pipe. What more could any young reporter hope for from his first real job?"

Never Shoot a Stampede Queen is a collection of true-life tall tales about a rookie reporter's adventures in Canada's still-very-wild West.

The night Mark Leiren-Young drove into Williams Lake, British Columbia, in 1985 to work as a reporter for the Williams Lake Tribune, he arrived on the scene of an armed robbery. And that was before things got weird.

For a 22-year-old from Vancouver, a stint in the legendary Cariboo town was a trip to another world and another era.

From the explosive opening, where Mark Leiren-Young finds himself in a courtroom just a few feet away from a defendant with a bomb strapped to his chest, to the case of a plane that crashed without its pilot on board, Never Shoot a Stampede Queen (which takes its name from a kerfuffle that erupted over photos he took of a rodeo queen contest) is an unforgettable comic memoir of a city boy learning about and learning to love life in a cowboy town. Not only does Mark Leiren-Young recount his encounters with the police, loggers, the fire department, fellow workers and yes – beauty contest aspirants for the local rodeo – but he tells his story with both humour and compassion. As you will find out, it is a wonderfully amusing story.

What people say:

"Mark Leiren-Young is the funniest writer you've never heard from. Never Shoot A Stampede Queen is a terrific debut; funny, moving and profound. You will laugh out loud." — Will Ferguson

"Mark Leiren-Young has earned an enviable reputation as a Canadian comic and storyteller, but here he expands his literary horizon. His portrait of small-town BC is a mixture of Leacock (the wry humour and evocative literary style) and Freud (psychoanalyzing the rural psyches of his cast of kooky character). It's a must-read, and fun too." — Peter C. Newman, author

"Never Shoot a Stampede Queen… the most fun I've had this year… Mark Leiren-Young is a natural storyteller, a peer of writers like Stephen Leacock, W.O. Mitchell, Jack Douglas and W.P. Kinsella: quietly hilarious, effortlessly moving, and always surprising. Like them, he makes it look easy." — Spider Robinson, author

"If you are a young journalist you should read this book. If you're an old journalist, you should read it. If you're a young rodeo queen, or an old rodeo queen or any member of any kind of royalty at all, you should read it. Heck, if you can read and you are mostly alive, you should read this book. We did, and we are better for it." — Bob Robertson and Linda Cullen, a.k.a. Double Exposure

"Mark Leiren-Young is the funniest guy I know… Watching him perform, I think I'm too old to giggle, but giggle I do… The first sentence of each tale grabs my attention and holds on tight. Ninety or so lines later — three or four pages (I have counted them!) – he leaves me smiling and anxious to begin yet another of his improbable tales about the life of 'a reporter in the boonies'. The Cariboo has never looked so… dangerous! If Never Shoot a Stampede Queen is not short-listed for the Leacock Medal for Humour, the ashes of old Stephen should turn over in his urn." — John Robert Colombo, author and anthologist

About the Author:

Mark Leiren-Young is a Canadian author, screenwriter, playwright, satirist, performer, and environmentalist. After graduating receiving his BFA in Creative Writing and Theatre at the University of Victoria, he was hired as a reporter at the venerable Williams Lake Tribune (a stint that inspired his first book, Never Shoot a Stampede Queen). Since then he has been a full-time freelance writer working in a variety of mediums and genres. His plays have been produced throughout Canada and the US as well as in Europe and Australia. He has written over a hundred hours of television for shows including adult dramas like Psi Factor and The Collector.

Related Products

Articles of Faith: The Battle of St. Alban's
Your Price: $17.95 CDN
Articles of Faith: The Battle of St. Alban's
Mark Leiren-Young, Preface by John Juliani