This week, we fly the flag at half 'Chaff' - The Chaff with Scott Stephenson

Well, that was unpleasant. After a month of involuntary confinement in Hell, the regular staff of The Chaff have finally returned to the land of the living, having secured our release through an elaborate, questionably legal and decidedly fish-scented extradition arrangement brokered by Ignatius Grimwort, demon, former Pumpkin impresario and, most recently, enthusiastic explorer of Canada’s east coast. We had intended to return with a comprehensive, hard-hitting, thoroughly newspapery account of our time in the Underworld but sometimes the news intervenes, and this week it did so in a way that calls for something more important than a few dispatches from the bowels of the Earth.

 

Keith Roulston passed away on Nov. 1. For those of us who have spent years occupying the peculiar little patch of newspaper real estate beneath his column, this is a loss that reaches well beyond the usual boundaries of a newspaper page. Keith was the reason The Chaff exists. He created The Citizen, the newspaper that has provided this column with its home, and he wrote the column directly above ours for much longer than The Chaff has been around. That arrangement has always struck us as rather extraordinary. Above us, thoughtful consideration of the people, places, ideas and cultural life of rural Ontario. Below, a collection of increasingly unstable individuals arguing about demons, pumpkins, municipal statues and the proper place of Betty White in the history of human civilization. It is a peculiar editorial sandwich, but one for which we have always been grateful.
We’ve had the good fortune to interview Keith on several occasions, and he was always gracious, informative and funny. He was generous with his time and knowledge, and had a way of making a conversation feel genuinely enjoyable rather than like an exercise in extracting information from someone who had better things to do. He knew an extraordinary amount, but never made you feel you should have known it already. He could be serious without being stuffy and funny without being dismissive. He was, in the best possible sense, a very cool person.

 

Keith’s story is also a reminder that some of the most important cultural ideas don’t necessarily originate in the places that receive the most attention. In the 1960s, Keith attended Ryerson Polytechnic Institute in Toronto to study journalism. He encountered the city’s vibrant cultural scene and saw something worth bringing back to Huron County. He didn't believe that meaningful cultural life should be the exclusive property of large cities, nor that rural communities should be content to watch from the sidelines while someone else decided what constituted art, theatre or cultural achievement. He believed this community had stories worth telling, artists worth celebrating and ideas worth sharing. He helped turn that belief into reality, most notably as a co-founder of the Blyth Festival, which has now celebrated a half century.

 

His writing reflected that same conviction. For years, he consistently made the case that rural Ontario deserves to be taken seriously, not as some charming provincial curiosity but as a place of genuine cultural importance. His columns were thoughtful, informed and remarkably consistent in their attention to the things that make communities matter. They stand up to the test of time because the values behind them never went out of fashion. Keith understood that a community is not simply a collection of roads, buildings and municipal boundaries. It is the people, the stories, the arguments, the celebrations and the shared sense that something worth protecting and nurturing exists here. 

 

So we are back. We have escaped Hell, reclaimed our desks and resumed our campaign for Betty White. We will continue to write about the strange, the silly, the inexplicable and the occasionally important, sometimes managing to distinguish between them. We will keep celebrating this community, even when our methods of doing so involve demonic intervention or a suspiciously large likeness of a television star. And we will do it with an appreciation for the person who helped make this little corner possible. 

 

Keith Roulston spent his life making sure Huron County’s stories were told, its culture was valued and its people were given the recognition they deserved. We are grateful to be part of the newspaper he created, and to have been given the space to make our own small contribution to the conversation.

 

There is a lot of wheat in this community, and Keith spent decades helping people see it. We have been fortunate enough to be allowed to make a little chaff. 

 

Thank you, Keith, for the newspaper, for the example, for the conversations and, above all, for making space for us.
Let’s build the statue! Let’s do it for Keith!