What The Font?

Okay, so I came across this little diversion in The Globe and I couldn’t resist.  If you’ve got five minutes to spare and are in the least bit curious as to what type (yes, as in font) you are, take this short—four question—survey offered by the British design firm Pentagram, here. For the record: I am Archer Hairline.  So are 19, 377 other people. Are you one of us?

I’m dying to meet a Plastica. Or maybe a Cooper Black Italic…

TNQ How-to: Save on your subs

I subscribe to a handful of Canadian mags, for two reasons: love and principle. The love part needs no further explanation; as for principle, well, as a publisher, I understand how important subscriptions are, particularly to small magazines. I realize that our fates are being decided by the length of our mailing lists, though I’ve yet to entirely–honestly–to make my peace with this. Yet my available funds for subscriptions are, er, limited, so dollars figure into this equation too. If you share any of these sentiments, here’s a simple tip—I give it out as a managing editor and follow it myself as a mag-addict-on-a-budget.

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Fiction fights to the death

If you’ve never experienced Broken Pencil’s “Indie Writers’ Death Match,” today’s a pretty good day to take a look, as the grammar commentary and barnyard animal mentions in recent responses are delightful. At the time of writing, the two current stories are split in the polls about 50/50.

The IWDM exists in a space somewhere between the worlds of literary contests, UFC championships, and reality television. Broken Pencil’s editors choose the short list for the short story contest, and then put two stories at a time in head-to-head combat on their website–the voting public of the internet gets to determine who gets to move on to the next round. The prize is cash, publication,”and deep psychological scarring – which, lets face it, is inevitable when 50,000 people on the internet tell you what they think of your writing.”

I’m not a fan of combat sports, but I have learned, in watching the death match, that I like a fight to be a little dirty.  And like many things on the internet, the comments are comic gold.

Commas save lives

via @late2game

New Quarterly Road Trip

While Melissa was enjoying the hot tub in wine country and learning about circ, I made the trip to Ottawa (28 below plus wind-chill factor) for the launch of our winter issue. I flew on Bearskin airlines, a small (16 seater?) prop plane with a ceiling so low you have to bend at the waist to navigate the aisle. I had arranged a meeting at the Canada Council on Friday to discuss some of the challenges TNQ faces in the next few years—some we share with all print publications (see Rosalynn’s post on the complexities of sustaining a print publication in a digital age) and some unique to our own journey. On Saturday, I was to have the great pleasure of introducing the readers at the issue launch.

The evening had been arranged by Ottawa board member, Melissa Hammell, as part of an on-going reading series at the Manx pub orchestrated by poet David O’Meara.  Melissa and I prepared by (a) getting our hair cut and (b) cajoling our husbands to undertake “duties as assigned,” in this case lugging a suitcase full of issues and TNQ t-shirts to the pub, setting up a display table, and handling sales (both, it should be said, are mathematicians and the accounts balanced perfectly at the end of the night).

The Manx is a nifty little bar on Elgin Street. Tucked below street level, all dark wood except for the small brass-topped tables jostling for room between bar and entry, and with a kitchen serving up hearty pub food, it’s as close to cozy as you can get on a wintry Ottawa night. When we arrived, David was oiling the hinges on the door so stragglers wouldn’t disrupt the readings. Many old friends and TNQ writers had made their way there, among them Kathleen Winter (all the way from Montreal!), Wendy Brandt, Mary Borsky, Colette Maitland, Matt Payne, and Jean Van Loon. It was fun to catch up with those we knew and to put a face to those we’d encountered on the page only.

Reading were Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell—our “Writer-at-Large” both literally (she’d come from Toronto) and figuratively (she was the featured “travel” writer in the issue)—and Ottawa poet, story writer, and novelist Elisabeth Harvor. Heather read from “The Mr. Shredder Man,” an affecting account of a chance encounter on the streets of Toronto with a dangerously ill man. The immediate predicament of getting him help triggers memories of Heather’s father’s untimely death. The essay ends with a clear-eyed, heart-wrenching meditation on grief in its various guises. Harvor’s story “A Postcard from Iceland” (ditto this blog entry!) was one of several that defined the issue’s theme, but she read instead from her poetry. In both the story and the poems she shared, she grapples comedy and anger, longing and loss. It’s a fun and often instructive mix.

The program ended on a warm note as Elizabeth Hay, winner of our Edna Award for the best non-fiction published in the magazine in the previous year, reading from her winning memoir, “Last Poems,” conjured “a particularly hot and hellish summer” when she and her growing family were facing eviction from their third floor flat in a working-class neighbourhood in Brooklyn. In the section she read from, her younger self  rages against her Italian landlord, a man who both cowed and infuriated her, and who became the exemplar of the many self-appointed tyrants under whom her neighbours suffered. She understands, even though she doesn’t yet see how, that she will eventually escape these oppressive circumstances, and she sets herself the task of telling the stories of those who won’t. Elizabeth, for those who haven’t heard her, reads in a voice that matches the subtlety and timbre of her words. The evening ended with dinner and talk and much jollity as we tried to read the migrating menu board, finally captured on my husband’s pocket camera.

It would be great to travel to all the far-flung corners of the country where New Quarterly readers lurk (though our favorite sale of the evening was of a year’s subscription to a man who had just wandered in for the warmth). Alas, time and airfares prevent, so send us your stories of cold nights warmed by the written word, and we’ll share them here, minus the burgers and brew!

Another Mighty Small Mag: Bywords

Thanks to Amanda Earl for taking time out of (I imagine, thanks to the below!) an extraordinarily busy day to tell us all about Bywords.

What does a day at the Bywords look like?

Bywords.ca is a volunteer non profit organization with the volunteers working primarily on line from Australia, Toronto and Ottawa. There are a lot of different activities, so no day is typical. The selection committee votes monthly on the poems to be published on Bywords.ca and quarterly for the poems published in our printed poetry magazine, the Bywords Quarterly Journal (BQJ). [Pictured at left, courtesy of Justin Van Leeuwen] On a daily basis, I enter poems submitted for consideration, events and news items for the literary events calendar and the news section of the site. Every month, my husband, Charles Earl, lays out the new poems and designs the on line issue and then each quarter he does the layout and design for the BQJ. We have readings four times a year in conjunction with the Dusty Owl Reading Series and a reading at the Ottawa International Writers Festival for our annual John Newlove Poetry Award. Read more »