the camrose review: a journal of lutheran thought


For the second time since he's lived here (that I've been aware of), former Alberta and current Ottawa poet Monty Reid has gone through his storage unit and pulled out t-shirts and back issues of the long-defunct poetry journal The Camrose Review (what later became The Dinosaur Review) and distributed copies to the group of us (yes, kemeny babineau, that does mean I'll be sending you that package soon…). Publishing (at least, but not much more than) ten issues throughout the mid-1980s out of Camrose, Alberta, the journal was edited by Monty Reid, Robert Kroetsch and Wade Bell (soon replaced by Aritha van Herk), and some of the features of the magazine included one on the writers Myrna Kostash (issue #3) and Andrew Suknaski (issue #6) [watch for our forthcoming selected poems by Andrew Suknaski], the "strange" issue (#10), as well as work on but predominantly by Dennis Cooley, Bronwen Wallace, Wayne Oakley, Rudy Wiebe, Colin Morton, Judith Kalman, John Barton, Barbara Carey, Kristjana Gunnars, Lake Sagaris, Birk Sproxton, Gwen Hauser, Jeanette Lynes and various others. On Sunday night, Reid showed up to the hospitality suite of the ottawa international writers festival with a stack of issues and shirts, and distributed them to whoever was interested.
With photographs taken by Cathy MacDonald-Zytveld, here's the group of us in the hospitality suite (at least, those of us who decided to participate; the final late late night of our ottawa international writers festival) wearing our too-small The Camrose Review: A Journal of Lutheran Thought t-shirts; from left to right: Paul Douglas, Carmel Purkis, rob mclennan, Nicholas Lea, Genevieve Wesley, Max Middle, Nick Tytor and Kathryn Hunt. Who could ever accuse me of not having the greatest ideas in the entire whole world? Who could ever say we aren’t entirely the most fun?