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Letter to editor, correspondence course the springboard to 20-plus years of reporting from Snow Lake

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; font: 26.0px Helvetica} span.s1 {letter-spacing: -0.3px} Marc Jackson has a motto: “Everybody’s got a story worth telling, and if it’s worth telling, it’s worth reading.
Marc Jackson is moving to Alberta after nearly five decades as a Snow Lake resident, 20 years as a n
Marc Jackson is moving to Alberta after nearly five decades as a Snow Lake resident, 20 years as a newspaper publisher and more than a decade as a Nickel Belt News columnist.

Marc Jackson has a motto: “Everybody’s got a story worth telling, and if it’s worth telling, it’s worth reading.” That viewpoint has served him well over several years as the owner, editor and reporter for Snow Lake’s Underground Press newspaper, which he shut down in December 2017 after 21 years of existence, all but the first few months with him as the editor.

“It was started by another lady here in Snow Lake back in ’96,” says Jackson. “She left the community shortly after she started. I had written a letter to the editor commending her for starting the paper and I ended up writing a column in the second edition on the council so when she left she just kind of handed it off to me and I ran it for … 21 years. It started out as a free paper. In 2007 when the Snow Lake News, which was the weekly paper here, shut down, I turned it into a paying proposition. Towards the end … the advertising just wasn’t there anymore. I wouldn’t have been writing for nothing, it would have been costing me money to put it out.”

Jackson also wrote the weekly My Take on Snow Lake column, which used to run in the Flin Flon Reminder and still does in the Nickel Belt News and Opasquaia Times in The Pas – unless you’re reading this after Aug. 30, the date of his final column before he moves out to Alberta to be closer to his and his wife Leone’s two children and their grandchildren.

“I think I did The Reminder for about 13 years and I’ve done [the Nickel Belt News] for about 11 or 12 and I think The Pas paper for probably 11 as well,” Jackson says.

In that time, he never missed a deadline.

A resident of Snow Lake for 48 years and of Northern Manitoba for even longer, Jackson moved to Moak Lake from Ontario with his parents in 1956, before Thompson was Thompson.

“My father was … a land surveyor and I guess they sent him up to Thompson to do a lot of the staking,” Jackson recalls. “I lived there until I was 14 years old and then moved to Snow Lake.”

Being a published writer wasn’t something he imagined back as a teenager.

“I quit school in Grade 8 and I was kind of a bad actor, a bit into drugs and alcohol,” Jackson says. “ I’ve been actually sober for 40 years on July 23. I’d come to the realization at age 22 that I was going to kill myself if I kept on drinking. I got help through AA and I’ve been sober ever since.”

Long after turning his life around, Jackson decided to complete his high school education by correspondence.

“I really took a liking to the English component of those studies,” he says. “There was a journalism part too and I really liked that. I’ve always been kind of a letter to the editor guy and had an opinion and liked to express it.”

Finding things to write about and actually doing the writing was never a problem for Jackson, even in a town of less than 1,000 people.

“People talk about writer’s block, I’ve never ever experienced that,” Jackson says. “Usually if I can get my headline or my starting paragraph I’m rolling after that. I think probably all the years that I did the paper I was only stuck once with a front-page article. There’s usually a lot going on if you want to look around for it and I found a lot of times there’s some really interesting people around.”

His son Joel, a sport conditioning development coach at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport & Recreation, affirms this quality.

“I have always been inspired by my dad’s passion for writing,” Joel says. “One thing that I have always marvelled at is his efficiency when it came to writing an article. Something that would probably take me a full day to do, he could bang out in an hour or two. I wished that I inherited some of that when it came to writing papers in university! With that being said he was an invaluable resource to me in school when it came to my writing. If I finished a paper at 4 a.m. he would be up for work at 5:30 a.m. and have it proofed and back to me before he walked out the door.”

As far as photography goes, Jackson said he mainly learned it by doing it.

“I’ve always been interested in photography but never to the point that I’d want to read a book and find out how to really do it. I’m more of a guy that’s got a bit of an eye and put the camera on auto and away I go.”

Not having Jackson around to act as Snow Lake’s window to the rest of Northern Manitoba and, thanks to the internet, the world, will be a loss to the community, say some of the subjects of Jackson’s 500-plus columns in the Nickel Belt News over the year.

“We’re happy for Ace of course but it’s one of those bittersweet things,” says Snow Lake Motor Inn (site of Marc and Leone’s going-away party Aug. 25) owner and Snow Lake Chamber of Commerce president Gerard Lamontagne, referring to Jackson by a nickname he earned as a younger man. “We really wish they could stay. The community’s going to be different, just not having that public voice and that pen-and-paper guy.”

Lamontagne, who was a student when he met Jackson, who retired in 2012 after 35 years in maintenance and custodial with the school district in Snow Lake, also appreciated Jackson’s willingness to ruffle a few feathers in the local political scene by publicizing things some might have liked to keep quiet.

“Ace brought that … out in the public where it should be,” says Lamontagne. “He was the guy that made sure the public knew.”

Jackson admits not everyone was always happy to see him approaching with his notepad and camera.

“I often thought that I saw the odd cringe when I walked into council meetings anyway,” he said.

The Underground Press and My Take on Snow Lake were helpful in advertising and chronicling events at the Snow Lake Mining Museum, says museum chairperson Paul Hawman.

“We dealt with Marc for years,” Hawman says. “We relied on Marc a lot to get the word out. We trusted Marc.”

Hawman says he didn’t always see eye-to-eye with Jackson politically, but found  him to be fair-minded and that both he and Leone were very community-minded.

“It’s a local loss [to have them move away],” Hawman said.

Family members with front-row seats to Marc’s years of writing and publishing say that he and his wife leaving will leave a big gap in the town.

“I don’t think my Dad will ever understand how much people truly appreciate his writing,” said his daughter Jess, a music director and radio announcer at 100.3 The Bear in Edmonton. “He has always loved Snow Lake and wanted to do everything to make the town thrive … and I think he did that for a number of years without even realizing it. A lot of people from all over the country have an attachment to the town they never want to let go of, and my Dad gave them that comfort and feeling of home simply with his words.”

Jackson says he and Leone, who was born and grew up in Snow Lake, will be back for visits and likely for good.

“I think both our ashes will end up here,” he said, admitting that leaving will be hard. “It’ll be tough. It’s bittersweet. We’ve lived here the majority of our lives, Leone all her life. We’ve made some amazing friendships. It’s an area like few others, the beach right in town, the fishing is second to none, anything that a person who’s into the outdoors wants, it’s here.”

That said, being closer to his kids and grandkids in Alberta and having an easier time to go visit his other two children in Nova Scotia is what’s important to him and Leone now.

“You won’t have to drive seven hours to catch a flight to get there,” says. “It’ll basically be 20 minutes and you can leave your car at the airport and there you go.”

Jackson could never have become a newspaper publisher and columnist without his family by his side.

“My wife and kids have always been supportive of pretty much anything I chose to do,” he said. “I get a lot of ideas coming into my head and always run them by [Leone], as she has a very sensible thought pattern. If she doesn’t like something, she always has a good reason for it. As well, Leone proofs a lot of what I write ... and isn’t shy about pointing out the odd mistake when I forget to ask her to do it.  She also did all of the billing when we ran the paper and took care of the accounts.”

Leone says this is the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new one.

“I am very proud of the writer he has become,” Leone says. “His way with words just gets better and better. I hope his future in Alberta will see him writing … maybe for another newspaper.”

Jackson says that’s definitely a possibility. A few years back, he spent a few months of the winter in Devon, Alberta and penned a weekly column for the paper there.

“I like to write and I’ll be looking for opportunities,” he says.

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