Scott Henderson grew up in Carleton Place, Ontario, a small town just west of Ottawa. In the summer of 1987, after his first year at Queen’s University, he took a job at the town’s Victoria School Museum and, as part of it, co-wrote a local-history column for the Carleton Place Canadian. The assignment was simple: find the stories in the old buildings and records, and put them in front of the people who walked past them every day. It was his start in storytelling, and though the stories would change, from his hometown’s past to the country’s culture and entertainment, the work never really did.
At Queen’s University in Kingston he studied History and English. The city’s limestone streets and nineteenth-century institutions became familiar long before they became the setting for a book. Toronto came next: a post-graduate certificate in public relations from Humber College, an internship at the Canadian Film Centre, and a stretch as a unit publicist on Canadian film sets, where the job was making sure the country’s movies found their audience.
In 1998 he joined The Comedy Network, then a brand-new channel, and spent more than two decades with the company that became Bell Media, named Vice-President, Communications in 2007. He led the publicity behind some of the most-watched programs in Canadian television history, among them Corner Gas, Canadian Idol and Flashpoint, and later Orphan Black, Letterkenny, Cardinal and Transplant. In 2010 he crafted the story of the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games for Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, including the men’s gold medal hockey game that remains the most-watched broadcast in the country’s history.
Along the way, Scott worked on the Giller Prize, the country’s premier award for Canadian fiction, and the Juno Awards, its annual celebration of Canadian music, and on launches for countless Canadian series whose casts and creators he considered it a privilege to represent.
The work he is proudest of happened off the clock. For more than a decade he served on the board of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, latterly as Secretary of its executive committee, helping to shape the Canadian Screen Awards into the country’s annual celebration of excellence for film, television and digital creators. He also sat on the boards of the Banff World Media Festival, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and the Toronto Entertainment District BIA, and on the advisory boards of Made|Nous, the industry-wide campaign showcasing Canadian creators, and Content Canada, C21’s annual forum on the future of content. The common thread was never the company or the platform. It was the artists, and the conviction that Canadian stories deserve an audience at home.
In 2022 he returned to Kingston, and the championing came with him. He is the vice-chair of the Kingston Canadian Film Festival, the largest all-Canadian film festival in the world, where the mission is the one he has always had: put Canadian film and television in front of an audience, and increasingly Canadian comedy and music too, which have become a growing part of the festival. Each winter it brings the country’s film and television industry to Kingston to gather and celebrate, and in doing so it feeds the city’s own creative community. He also serves on the board of Tourism Kingston, where his aim is simpler to state and harder to do: make sure the rest of the country knows what a dynamic and culturally significant city Kingston is.
Home is Muckleston House, an 1843 limestone residence built when Kingston was the first capital of the Province of Canada. Cut into its exterior stone is a single name: Alfred. There is no family connection, no record, no explanation. The same instinct that once sent a first-year student into the archives of a Carleton Place museum sent him into Kingston’s, and the question that came back, Who was Alfred?, would not let go.
The Name in the Stone is his first work of fiction. After three decades spent helping others tell their stories, he has finally told one of his own. He still lives in the house where Alfred’s name is carved.
