HEADLIGHT anthology 6

2004, english department, Concordia University, Montreal, 96 pages
isbn 0-9683264-5-5, $4.95

I’ve always been partial to the Headlight anthology, a product of the creative writing program at Concordia University. Something I try to pick up every time I’m through The Word bookstore in Montreal, it always has interesting work by a range of writers at various stages of development. The exciting part of such a publication is the notion of discovery, and where I first started reading various Montreal authors, including Jon Paul Fiorentino from Headlight 3, that included his brilliant “prairie long poem.” For some reason, there seems no reason to invite comparison with Headlight’s far-lesser cousin, Montage, published through McGill. Headlight, called a magazine/anthology for former and currently Concordia University students, is the best advertisement for the creative writing program at the University, called one of the best in the country by those who claim to know, along with programs at UBC, UVic and York. The program itself has been affiliated with various kinds of publishing over the years, whether through former creative writing professor Gary Geddes acquiring materials for publication when he still ran Cormorant Books (Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints was an MA thesis), or the anthology 32 Degrees: An Anthology of Prose, Poetry and Drama (DC Books, 1993), edited by Raymond Beauchemin, publishing the work of various former students, including Mark Cochrane, Ray Smith, Elisabeth Harvor, Su Croll, Robert Mazjels, Nino Ricci and David McGimpsey.

This edition of the Headlight series includes Jon Paul Fiorentino’s brilliant short story “I Wanna Be Your Alpha Male” (also included in the recent DC Books / Moosehead Anthology IX: Career Suicide), that writes: “My parents tried to convince me that I would never marry. They told me I was too fat and asthmatic for marriage. They told me that the most I could hope for was to be a general labourer who pays for sex on a monthly basis and has a disturbingly large collection of fetish pornography.” (p 50), and Sierra Dante’s “Letters to Tahoe” – “I am more aware / of my blue veins, / my lucid skin. / Freckles can only hide / so much.” (p 74). There is also the wonderful collapsing effect of the Pasha Malla piece, or Ian Ortis’ lovely prose fragment from “And then the Disco Came to Ecuador.” Concordia writers are from everywhere, with writers included that originated in Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver (for those who even admit to origins), but somehow find themselves in Montreal at Concordia, and rightly so, if Headlight is any indication. Why can’t other universities sustain such publications? The only equivalents I can think of would be the previous incarnation of QWERTY at the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton), or filling station, dANDelion and (orange) magazines out of the University of Calgary, or, hell, even Matrix. There is a vibrancy that lives between these sheets that will somehow never find their way into, say, The Malahat Review or The Fiddlehead. And that’s a shame.