Some people get fed up, quit, and go away, while others get fed up and then quit as a means to create. With a whirlwind of positive energy like Suzanne Craig-Whytock, her reaction was doubtless. After retiring from a lifelong career as an educator, and already established as a published writer, Suzanne began work as a submissions editor for an American literary magazine where enjoyment quickly dissolved into disappointment. Every time she read a story she loved, and passed it on for publication, the editors rejected it, time after time after time, until Suzanne tired of the growing number of stories she thought were great but went nowhere. Her response was to leave that publication and establish her own: DarkWinter Literary Magazine. A creation that led to DarkWinter Press and then Baxter House Editions, all within three years. As a side note, I’ll add that when Suzanne decided she should learn the process of publishing a book by using herself as the experiment, the humorous collection she wrote and published, called What Any Normal Person Would Do, ended up long-listed for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. I know — some side note, right.
I first met Suzanne face-to-face in the summer of 2025, popping into her century old Victorian home, a place grown large over decades with editions and renovations, that is locally known in Drumbo, Ontario as The Baxter House — and that Suzanne cheerfully believes is haunted. By then we had emailed back and forth several times after I’d submitted my novel London Gothic to DarkWinter Press for consideration. After being charmed by a woman of boundless energy and interests, I left with a handshake deal and the knowledge that I would soon ask her to share her life with me so I could write this profile. As another side note, the handshake deal was ratified with a publishing contract and London Gothic will be published in October. Right, I know — for me, some side note.
Born in Belleville, Ontario in 1965, Suzanne moved to Galt with her family when she was two years old. Readers unfamiliar with the history of Ontario municipal amalgamations should know that Galt, Preston and Hespeler merged together to form Cambridge in 1973. Both parents had immigrated from Great Britain. At the age of twelve her mom sailed over with her family on the Empress of Australia, and her dad, on his own at twenty-one, came from Paisley, Scotland. He first arrived in Montreal, carrying one bag, a guitar, and his papers certifying him as a tool-maker. After working in the Montreal shipyards for a while he ended up making his way to Kingston where he took up his tool-making trade and met his future wife. But what her father really wanted to do was teach. Accepted to teacher’s college in the technical program, he became a high school tech teacher. After a stint teaching in Belleville, he obtained a full-time contract with Southwood Secondary School in Galt, eventually moving to Kitchener-Waterloo, first as the assistant head of technical studies at Forest Heights Secondary School and then finishing his career as the head at Waterloo Collegiate Institute.
Looking back, Suzanne thanks her parents for establishing a keen sense of humour by, as she says, “feeding me a steady diet of Monty Python”. Her father’s role as teacher was also a strong influence. “I remember him coming home with stacks of test quizzes and exams, sit there marking at the table, very professional and I thought, I’m gonna do that one day.” She did not, however, take a straight line through high school to university to teacher’s college. At one point Suzanne decided she wanted to study film and television but couldn’t get into the Humber College program because of her marks. Surprisingly, for a woman who became a career educator, she didn’t have the grades. “Oh, I was a terrible high school student,” she candidly told me, “my marks were terrible.” At the time the family still lived in Cambridge and Southwood — the school where her father had previously taught — was on a semester system so she returned to Grade 13 and “worked really hard to get my marks up and decided I wanted to be an English professor because I loved writing.” Persistence and hard work paid off and she was accepted into Waterloo’s Sir Wilfrid Laurier University.
Writing comes from a love of reading and for Suzanne that meant “Stephen King under the covers. I was nine years old reading Salem’s Lot, terrified and then Flowers in the Attic when I was thirteen.” She laughed and added, “That whole V. C. Andrews series was really not appropriate for thirteen year olds you know. Early reading of that kind of dark, dark fiction influenced a lot of my writing. Shirley Jackson, too. I love Shirley Jackson.” I’m not sure how dark her early writing was but at eight she did have her first poem published by the Galt Reporter newspaper, and submitted short stories to the Waterloo County English awards every year through high school, gaining honourable mention three times. Later in life, as a teacher, Suzanne became an organizer for those very same awards.
A number of different situations occurred during the time that Suzanne finished up her undergraduate English degree at Laurier and began her Masters at nearby University of Waterloo. A self-described “club kid”, she had started going to a local dance bar at sixteen, “completely immersed in New Wave and I spent a lot of time in the club either posing dramatically or dancing. I grew up listening to classical music — my parents were both classical music aficionados — but my taste veered towards The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Japan, other British New Wave groups. I suppose the kids today would call it goth.” That love of the club, and her constant need to be busy, led her to being a DJ. Actually, she’d already had some experience working at the University of Waterloo’s radio station CKMS. (That gig almost forty years ago has come full circle as Suzanne now hosts a monthly series highlighting authors called Readers Delight on CKMS.) As much as she enjoyed DJing she walked away from a gig one night — when the club owner decided to hold a Wet T-Shirt contest — and chose not to look for new opportunities. (You can check out that full experience in this link to Suzanne’s blog.)
At the same time, her plan to become an English literature professor ended with her post-grad experience because, she says, the fixation at Waterloo was on technical writing and rhetoric. “I hated it. We had to do presentations dressed in business suits. All of my literature classes were secondary to the main focus of this program, and I just was not enjoying it.” The administration allowed her to withdraw after the first semester without penalty. She’d already been volunteering at the local high school and doing summertime teaching for the school board so she decided, “forget being a professor, I’ll become a teacher like my dad.” And that decision launched a thirty year career which dovetailed nicely with the man she’d started to seriously date. She met Ken Whytock while at Laurier and not long after they were married they’d each finished teacher’s college, took on early teaching assignments in different places, and then ended up with full time positions back in the Waterloo region.
While always connected to literature through teaching, and to supporting the writing of others, the busyness of life disconnected Suzanne from her own writing for over a decade. She and Ken moved into a house in Washington, Ontario where they began their own antique business, and had daughter Katelyn. When they moved to their beautiful Victorian home in Drumbo, local zoning laws wouldn’t allow them to continue to have an antique store on site so Suzanne began selling out of different markets owned and operated by other antique dealers. By then she’d become the department head at the high school and stress began to build which, interestingly, is what brought her back to writing. “I was going through a difficult time at work, and I decided that I needed to focus on something funny every week to take my mind off the stress. I started mydangblog in 2014. It became a wonderful creative outlet and allowed me to connect with a lot of very cool people, a lot of them other humour bloggers, but also poets and novelists, many of whom I’m still in contact with today.”
Perhaps a regular measure of humour created a new energy for Suzanne because in 2015 she decided to change up her career by pursuing a secondment with the Ministry of Education. “I’d already been doing a bit of work with EQAO and I really enjoyed that work and so I applied for it with the intention that I would come back to the Board eventually.” EQAO is the Ministry’s Education Quality and Accountability Office and part of their mandate is to create the provincial assessments for Ontario students. After eighteen months a permanent position came up and Suzanne realized how much she enjoyed both the work and her colleagues, so she officially retired from the Waterloo Board of Education and became the Program Manager of Literacy with EQAO. The job did come with a significant commute, however. While on secondment, the government had provided an apartment close to the downtown Toronto offices but once full-time she had to either pay for that herself or commute. Thankfully for her, Via Rail began a commuter service from Brantford, which lessened the drive to thirty minutes back and forth to the train station but, still, after an hour on the train, and the time to get to the office, you’re looking at two hours each way.
Along with writing and publishing her blog, Suzanne had been working on a novel. When she finished, Suzanne mentioned it to one of the women she worked with, who was a professional editor, and the colleague asked to look at it. After reading the book she came back to Suzanne saying “I really like it. You should try and submit it somewhere like Bookland Press. I know a couple of people who are published by them.” That’s what Suzanne did and in 2017 her first novel, Smile, was published. The writing floodgates opened, first with another novel, The Dome, and then a series of short stories she submitted to literary journals which she eventually turned into two separate collections that were published. In all, from 2017 until 2024, Suzanne published three novels with Bookland, two short story collections with Potter’s Grove Press along with the novel, Charybdis, and a short story collection, Dark Nocturnes, with JC Studio Press. Not to mention the fact that Arab Scientific Publishers put out an Arabic translation of The Dome and another publisher, Intellekt, released a Georgian version of Smile.
I’m sure I don’t need to remind readers that during this time period a certain plague named Covid descended upon the world. In June, 2021, Ken retired and grabbed a part-time job on a hot air balloon crew, chasing down the balloons when they landed. “He was coming home happy and just relaxing and I loved my job but I was exhausted. After Covid we worked from home and as a program manager I was at my desk from eight o’clock until four-thirty going from Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting. So I retired in September, 2021.” With her energy levels, though, Suzanne wasn’t going to sit back and put her feet up. She began working in the antique business again and at a bookstore. She continued writing and took that submissions job at an American literary magazine which motivated her to start DarkWinter Literary Magazine. When a few writers approached her about publishing novels, she stepped back and took a good look at Potter’s Grove Press in Arizona who had published her short story collections.
“They were using Amazon KDP and I loved it. They had accepted both of my manuscripts and put them on Amazon worldwide, so my family in Scotland could buy copies of my book. It was never out of print. I looked at their model and thought, I can do this as well, in conjunction with the literary magazine. I started a press that’s basically print on demand but now I’m using Ingram Spark too.”
Getting distribution into local bookstores is not easy but that is one area where Suzanne is looking to expand. And her list of authors grows — novelists, short story writers and poets — as does Suzanne’s reputation. In 2025, DarkWinter Press published Irina Moga’s Quantum, Irina’s sixth poetry collection, and during the time I was drafting this profile word came out from France that Quantum had been awarded the Claudine de Tencin Academy International Poetry Prize. When I reached out to Irina about her thoughts on being published by DarkWinter Press she told me that she thought Suzanne had “a sharp ear for poetry. I found Suzanne to be an incredible supportive and dedicated publisher with high ethical standards. Through DarkWinter Press and DarkWinter Literary Magazine, she has built and energized a community of writers across a region stretching from Kingston through the Greater Toronto Area to Ingersoll, Woodstock, Hamilton, and St. Catharines. Being an indie publisher is no small feat—it requires a passion for books, risk-taking, an entrepreneurial spirit, and very long hours. I, for one, am grateful that our paths have crossed.”
Stephanie Wyeld is another writer recently published by DarkWinter Press. I’ve known Stephanie for a number of years and watched first hand as she went through the gauntlet of submitting her debut novel to Canadian publishers. (I really do mean first hand because I was on a parallel path to her, submitting London Gothic, often communicating daily with Steph on our trials and tribulations.) The interesting thing is that Stephanie “bumped into” Suzanne online while sharing the same woes of submission. She says, “I met Suzanne because of our identical rejection letters from a publisher. She asked me about my novel, The Book of Maggie, and then to submit it to DarkWinter Press. A week later we were negotiating a contact. She has been an absolute pro to work with, and I’m so glad my debut novel has found a home with her.”
Regarding those rejection letters for Suzanne, that was rectified when she received word from Running Wild Press that they wanted to publish her novel, a piece of speculative fiction about a post-apocalyptic world called Nomads of the Modern Wasteland. And her work continues in expanding the business. Potter’s Grove Press decided to close which meant their existing titles were “unpublished”, including Suzanne’s own collections of short stories. Her response was to reach out to some of those authors she knew and offer to reprint their books by creating a new division of DarkWinter — Baxter House Editions. Beyond those initial books, they will look to reprint other literature that Suzanne believes should continue to be available. In her community spirit, she’s also supported the Drumbo and District Heritage Society by reprinting a local historian’s book, A History of Drumbo. Suzanne provided her time without charge and is personally donating back the publishing costs the company billed. Her daughter Katelyn joined the business as an associate editor after she and life-partner Max moved into Suzanne and Ken’s sprawling Victorian home. And now Suzanne is focused on further support for DarkWinter’s authors by applying for a “literary organization project grant” so she can hire a professional publicist to increase their marketing efforts.
In the last thirty years or so the terms “economic disruption” and “disruptive innovation” have become commonplace but, really, it’s only that the pace has accelerated — individual business models have changed and entire business sectors have risen and fallen since the world has had complex economic systems. These changes dismay and discourage many but others, whether they see themselves as entrepreneurs or not, respond by finding new solutions. While perhaps best described as an educator and an author, Suzanne Craig-Whytock has also became a very needed entrepreneur. When faced with dramatic changes in the publishing world, she has responded by creating a new Ontario based publishing enterprise with the sole focus of supporting Canadian authors. That she does it with grace and humour is a bonus for everyone who is touched by her.
If you want to keep up with Suzanne and all that she does, sign up to follow mydangblog — you can even choose to lose yourself within her archived posts which span a decade.
Next up is John Hughes, otherwise known as “The Commish” to a motley crew of golfers who invade Huntsville, Ontario every September for The Fall Classic. It’s easy to be cynical about this often inhumane world we inhabit, so when you meet and become friends with someone who is thoroughly decent and responsible and hardworking and fun-loving you count yourself lucky. And I indeed feel lucky to be able to write a profile about my friend John Hughes.
I hope you come back.