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WRITER'S PUBLISHING HOUSE
Douglas H. Young
About The Author/Publisher Relationship:
Douglas Young, a Canadian, has always been interested in both writing and international law. At the University of Toronto he submitted short stories and essays to various literary journals and was a finalist in the E. J. Pratt prize for poetry. After graduating from Osgoode Hall School of Law in Toronto, (1962) he went on to take a Masters degree in International and Comparative Law at New York University 1963.
From 1962 - 68, while in New York, he came in contact with many struggling actors and writers, such as Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards, Paul Newman, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Lowry, Elia Kazan, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson and Terry Southern. Other beginning entertainers that he bumped into informally included Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, and Jonathan Winters, all of whom in the future were to add variety and spice to their different areas of art and performance.
In the 60's he was offered jobs at the World Bank, UN, and Canadian Foreign Service, but instead struggled with a first novel (unpublished) and worked for Celanese and Exxon Corporations in Manhattan with their Law and Secretary's Departments.
The Counterculture movement was in full swing during those years and political and protest conflicts in which he participated ranged from Berkley in California to the Village in New York and student/administrative battles at Harvard Yard. As administrative assistant for a year and half to the Secretary of the largest oil company in Latin America, Exxon's subsidiary, Creole Petroleum in Venezuela (1967-69), he had a bird's-eye view of gun battles raging between government troops and student activists at the university nearby his apartment. He was also assigned for several weeks to oilrigs working the huge Lake Maracaibo area of the state to get a first hand look at the basic operations of oil exploration and production. While in Venezuela, he completed another unpublished novel. At twenty-nine, he went to Harvard for a second Masters degree in International Trade and Investment Law (1970), then traveled for a year across Canada and the US involving himself in various political and student ventures.
He then taught in the Graduate School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada beginning in 1971. In his thirties, he left academe to pursue other enterprises and involve himself in legal and political issues pertaining to special education, the environment and human rights in Canada and Florida. Another novel based on land-use problems jeopardizing Sanibel Island, on which he owned property, was turned down. Through the 80's he became deeply involved in the widely publicized Bruce Curtis case concerning the young Canadian teenager, with outstanding credentials, who was arrested in New Jersey and given the maximum sentence of twenty years for aggravated manslaughter on trumped up charges pertaining to two killings. He was finally freed and went on to attend Queens University in Canada.
Also during the 80's, as Mr. Young began to have more success with his writing, he became involved with an informal association of entrepreneurs/artists from Boston and New York who rather bombastically referred to themselves as the Creative Vision Group. Their problem and quest: How did unknown artists of any stripe get to effectively bring their work before the public?
Many of the original Creative Vision Group later became allied with huge media outlets or became giants in their field. But initially numerous strategies of getting your word before the public (now talk show book clubs, etc.) were discussed and tried by the Group. With the spreading popularity and use of personal computers and dot coms many a writer, even top ones today, such as Dean Koontz and Michael Connelly, have their own private web sites noted in their books, along with the much larger site attributed to the huge publishing house or conglomerate that publishes their work. The personal web site keeps a writer's audience more fully aware of his works, intentions and plans for the future. It's a more intimate connection and considered by many a valuable resource.
The Writer's Publishing House web site is one of Doug Young's ways of keeping in touch with those who enjoy his work, even though he, of course, negotiates with corporations and large organizations that help to finance, publish and market his work and that of many others. He feels it preferable to maintain a healthy balance between the large monolithic enterprises that can through power and control turn your efforts into something you don't feel comfortable with, and the less secure, and perhaps not so remunerative avenue of personal independence. It involves a complex set of contractual relationships and informal association that he so far has successfully maintained.
Mr. Young has attended and participated in numerous writers' conferences and symposiums across North America and has kept in touch with a variety of authors with different specialties in the literary field and will always himself try to provide advice or help on request. He has been nominated for several awards in fiction and his work has been enthusiastically received by critics and the public.
Regarding nonfiction, several monographs of his are included in the United Nations Dag Hammarskjold library, including two written several years ago on an International Criminal Court of Justice and a Model Penal Code that might be appropriate to the Court's jurisdiction. His thesis at Harvard on The Development of International River Systems Connecting Developing Countries was copyrighted and placed into the Harvard Law Library as part of its permanent collection. He was also a co-contributor to a book published by the MIT Press in 1986-How Peace Came to the World-2010 in which he suggested how different international tribunals and organizations could be established to promote human rights and disarmament.
He is included in the 2000-2001 Millennium Edition of the Marquis Who's Who in the South and Southwest United States and its companion volume, Who's Who In America, which can provide additional biographical data if desired. Some of his books are now coming out in second and third paperback editions. But most are available throughout North America in top-notch university and public libraries.
He and his wife, Barbara, who was born in Hawaii, live part time in south Florida and Canada. As his partner, secretary, business agent and jack-of-all-trades, she has been of invaluable help as he plunges ahead or behind in his many endeavors.
His daughter, holding a Masters Degree in Art History, has curator's responsibilities. and is talent coordinator and budget director for the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University. She has recently (2002) written a valuable book on the Group of Seven, a collection of Canadian artists who played a vital role in portraying Canada's landscape and gave to Canadians, through their work, a vigorous and individual sense of the country's national identity.
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