Canadian magazine readers who value the beauty and strength of accurate facts, immaculate punctuation and elegant, precise prose have lost a best friend. Cynthia Brouse, the country’s finest fact-checker, copy editor and teacher of those same skills died on June 19, 2010 at age 52.
For 30 years, Cynthia’s diligent and spirited behind-the-scenes labour has burnished articles and news features in all of Canada’s top-rung publications. She worked as a copy editor, researcher and writer for Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Toronto Life and Saturday Night (where she was also managing editor for two years), Report on Business Magazine, Canadian Business, and the Globe and Mail. A natural teacher, she trained scores of current magazine editorial staff in the best procedures for fact-checking contentious quotes, assessing the credibility of sources and avoiding lawsuits they could ill afford. Her book, After the Fact, A Guide to Fact-Checking for Magazines and Other Media, is the go-to manual for both magazine interns and corporate communicators nationally. In 2009, she received the National Magazine Awards’ most prestigious individual honour, its Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement. She was the longtime co-ordinator of the Magazine Publishing Certificate Program in Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, and for five years a member of the communications faculty at Toronto’s George Brown College. Although her ability to save the world from misplaced modifiers was prodigious, she strived to never make any writer feel diminished. She approached her calling with the same counsel she gave every new fact-checker: "Don’t be snooty. If they didn’t make mistakes, you wouldn’t have a job."
In addition to excelling as an editor, researcher and instructor, Cynthia was also an accomplished writer of creative non-fiction and personal journalism. Her painstakingly well-researched pieces earned her two National Magazine Awards. The blog entries she wrote after her breast cancer reoccurred in late 2008 were so rich with frank, funny and jargon-free details about being a seriously ill patient that both intimate friends and complete strangers admitted to her, with no small bewilderment, that they "enjoyed" the read.
Just as she always had your back if you were a freelance writer without the time or ability to hand in pristine copy, Cynthia was a stalwart friend and often the connecting thread between unalike communities in her wide and diverse circle of acquaintances. She publicly supported gay rights before many of her contemporaries understood how important it was for straight people to do so. She startled many a hip Torontonian with her rhapsodies on the glories of Alberta, and Edmonton in particular.
She had a lovely singing voice and adored John Lennon and Max Webster, punk rock, and folk music, symphonic and popular choirs in equal measures. Although she never achieved her desire to become a mother, she was a cherished friend and guide to her nephews and niece, and a vibrant, much-admired significant other to her friends’ offspring.
A native of Massey, Ont., Cynthia was a small-town girl deeply enamoured of northern Ontario and rural Canada. But she was also a booster of micro communities in the city, such as she found and enriched during her 14 years as a resident of Toronto’s Little India district. A recording of Cynthia describing one of her ’hood’s favourite retail sections can still be heard if you press a button on a certain north-side corner of Gerrard Street.
She leaves her parents, Jean and Terry Brouse, her siblings Mark, Paul and Lori, their spouses Susan Fullerton, Mirella Diodati and Robert Brazeau, and her beloved nephews and niece, Terence and Nicholas Brouse, Hannah and William Lamoureux, plus scores of dear friends and hundreds of colleagues. All of them will miss her chatty postcards, book recommendations and great meals, her incisive observations and uncensored anecdotes, her gifts of tolerance and kindness, and her vast capacity to love us all.
A private family service and interment will take place in Massey, Ontario. As well, a memorial service will be held in Toronto for family and friends in September.
Donations in Cynthia’s name should go to the building fund of the Massey Area Museum, 160 Sable St., Massey, Ont., POP 1PO.
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