Q:
How did The Canadian Journal of
Contemporary Literary Stuff first start?
A:
Once upon a time, Tamara Fairchild and I were members of a writers group that
had grown up amongst a circle of our friends. This group rolled happily along
for a while – it was at least as much a social thing as it was a literary thing
– until somewhere along the way someone had the idea that we should put out a
little journal as a vehicle for our writing.
The
first issue of MPD, as we called the
journal (the conceit being that what the letters stood for would change with
each issue), came out in 1993. It was very much on the standard photocopied
& stapled “litzine” model, though I don’t think any of us would have known
that term at the time. We initially had only the vaguest notion that there was
a local literary world out there to be part of.
Although
we tried to streamline the editorial and production process for MPD after the first one – there was a
rotating editorial board of different members for each issue – ultimately, it
was an integral part of the writing group’s identity that the whole thing had
to function as a democracy. Not surprisingly, with a membership that ranged
between nine and at least thirteen people over the years, both MPD and the group itself could be pretty
slow moving projects, with things often only seeming to get done after much
debate, and at the speed of the slowest, least interested, or otherwise most
distracted person involved.
Anyway,
Tamara and I had been friends for a good while before all this, and we ended up
working together as the editors of the 2nd issue of MPD and then
again on the 6th issue – so by the time we were finished putting out
#6 we knew that we were on the same wavelength about a lot of things, and that
we worked well together. After the 6th issue we also knew that
because of the democratic “everybody gets a turn” nature of the project, we
probably wouldn’t be doing another one for at least a couple of years.
At
that point I think we both just realized that we had bigger literary ambitions
than what MPD and the writers group
was going to allow for – and so we decided to strike out on our own.
Q:
How did this translate into The Canadian
Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff?
A:
Deciding that we wanted to do our own thing was obviously the first step. Once
we’d gotten that far, I think we focused in on what we saw as the need for a
strong editorial presence in our (soon-to-be) magazine, and on setting it up to
be – at least in part – a platform for engaging with and looking at the larger
literary landscape.
One
of the things we’d noticed through our ongoing involvement in the literary
world was that few of the literary magazines, journals and zines we’d
encountered seemed to have much of an identity beyond being the sum of their
contents. There wasn’t very much in the way of editorial presence out there,
and even less of a sense that anyone stood for anything or was interested in
anything beyond the poetry & prose being printed in a given issue. It all
seemed to be so humourless too – like latter-day manifestations of those
stories we all read in our high school Canlit English classes, where noble
prairie-folk trudged off into snowstorms to die.
So,
while we certainly intended to publish good work in our magazine, we also
thought that the literary culture in which we resided was worth looking at,
talking about and maybe even showing off. I think we figured that if we could
do this with a sense of fun and a certain level of capaciousness, we’d have a
magazine that could be enjoyed by – and have something to say to – anyone with
a modicum of interest in things literary.
The
first and most obvious manifestation of this ambition was that the magazine
would have to be as big and glossy – as close to a “real” magazine – as we
could make it, and that we would have to get it properly distributed. If we
wanted to invite the larger culture into our corner of the literary world, we
had to be something that looked like it belonged on that larger culture’s
magazine rack – and then we actually had to get it onto those magazine racks so
that the larger culture could find it.
Like
I said, we had big ambitions.
Q:
How was the first issue put together? Did you send out a call for submissions,
or were you predominantly soliciting?
A:
In terms of pulling together the content for Stuff, we tried to have it both ways. We’d given ourselves a lot of
time to put the first issue together – the magazine would be ready to go when
it was ready to go, basically – so we had time to do a pretty intensive
mail-out of our call for submissions. But we also hit up our literary friends,
acquaintances and people we knew whose work we admired.
This
part of it was especially important right at the beginning, because we were
looking for recurring features – comics, comment, columns and such – that we
could run in every issue. We really did want the magazine to feel like it was
an ongoing conversation with and about the literary world – and this was
something best arranged with writers whom we knew well enough to know that they
would have something to say, and be able to say it on a semi-regular basis.
As
it happened, Tamara ended up moving from Ottawa to Toronto almost immediately
after we’d decided to start Stuff.
Though this initially worried us a little in terms of communication and logistics,
I think it quickly turned out to be a very good thing, as it meant we were
physically present in both cities, and involved in both literary communities.
Tamara was very much a practicing poet at the time too, and quickly got
involved in the Toronto poetry world, which meant that we soon ended up with a
lot more personal contact in that scene – the centre of the Canadian literary
universe – than we might otherwise have had.
Q:
How did that personal contact translate into what appeared in the journal?
A: It seemed to work out
that people whom we had come to know and like and whose writing we admired from
the Ottawa literary scene ended up as recurring contributors to Stuff,
writing regular columns or otherwise being generous and flexible with their
work when we asked for it. This would be writers like James Spyker and
Catherine Jenkins, and Chris Pollard and Natalie Hanna, amongst others.
Of course, we were already
familiar with the Toronto literary scene when we began putting the magazine
together – we’d gone to small press fairs and Canzine with MPD, and there was generally a fair bit of communication between
the Ottawa and Toronto poetry worlds. James and Catherine had already moved
there by that point too, so we did have some points of contact there.
Tamara, as I said, was
very much a practicing poet in those days, and got into the Toronto literary
world pretty quickly once she made the move herself, meeting and becoming
friends with people like bill bissett, Jill Batson, Nancy Dembowski and Lil
Blume, amongst others. A lot of the literary friends she made there ended up
writing feature articles or interviews for us, or giving us major poetry
sequences to publish.
Although putting each
issue together was never easy or uncomplicated, this Ottawa/Toronto-centric
nature meant that we usually had a good framework of material ready (or at least
in progress) when we started assembling an issue, which in turn meant that we
were usually just trying to fill in holes or slots with work from other
sources, and not trying to build each issue entirely from scratch.
Q:
You deliberately conceived of a full-sized journal distributed through CMPA
over, say, a chapbook-sized photocopied journal distributed predominantly
through small press fairs and hand-sales. What led to these decisions, and had
you any models when you were shaping these decisions? Given you hadn’t any
funding, what were the benefits and drawbacks to the format?
A: There’s
certainly an element of “what the hell were we thinking?” involved when I look
back at Stuff. I’m glad that we did it – but I think that it was
probably a good thing that we didn’t realize at the time how complicated, how
expensive and how time consuming it was going to become as a project – because
if we had, we might not have tried it... and that would have been a shame.
We did it the way we did it
because, I think, we had this very clear conception of Stuff as
being not just a vehicle for literary work, but also a platform for an ongoing
conversation about literary work and about the literary world. It seemed to us
that there was enough scope in this concept that there might be an audience out
there for it in the literary world beyond poetry zines and small press fairs.
To find that audience though – to get beyond the folded-and-stapled-chapbook
scene and to make it onto the racks at Chapters and magazine shops across the
country – Stuff would pretty much by definition need to be a
proper magazine.
In terms of models, there
were enough “real” literary magazines and journals out there that we knew we
weren’t going to have to re-invent the wheel, and that in some sense, what we
wanted to do was possible. Though I never really liked Broken Pencil much
in terms of its approach, I did like the look of it, and it worked very well as
a production model of what we were aiming for.
I can’t recall if your Missing Jacket started before or after Stuff, but I think we were aware enough of your intentions
for it for that to be a model as well.
In spite of the fact that we
knew Stuff was going to be expensive to produce, we decided
right at the start that we weren’t going to aim for any funding for it. We had
a very particular idea of what we wanted to do, and we didn’t want to have to
dilute it in any way, adapt it to fit a funding model, or even to justify it to
anyone. If it really was a valid concept, then we figured it would eventually
succeed on its own – and if it turned out it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t, and
probably shouldn’t.
That said, I think we were
still surprised by how much work and money we could sink into it without it
being enough, and without making much in the way of forward progress. In
hindsight of course, the idea that two people – one with a full-time job and
the other trying to start her own business – could run something like this
indefinitely on the scale we were aiming for was pretty absurd. With all of the
tasks involved in getting an issue together – soliciting, reading & picking
content, looking for advertising, marketing the magazine, actually laying out,
producing and publishing the magazine – it didn’t matter what we did, there was
always a long list of things that we didn’t have time to do.
The frustrating thing is
that the magazine was quite successful in terms of distribution and sales. We
had a major commercial distributor right from the start, as well as a smaller
but really quite good “alternative” distributor based out west, and by the 2nd issue
we’d joined the CMPA (the Canadian
Magazine Publishers Association, now called Magazines Canada). Although the CMPA turned out to be kind of a dud
– and not just in terms of distribution – we had very good sell-through rates
with the other two distributors and with the shops that we personally stocked
the magazine in. Unfortunately, the economics of magazine publishing was such
that even at the best of times, a copy that sold off the rack barely paid for
the cost of its own production, and any copies that didn’t sell of course were
a dead loss.
We put as much time as we
could into soliciting advertising and subscriptions, which is where we always
knew the magazine would make it or break it. This turned out to be an even
harder sell than we’d anticipated though – there was never enough time to do it
properly, and neither of us were salespeople by nature. The ideal solution
would have been to hire someone to do the ad-soliciting for us, but of course
that would have required money, which we were already spending a lot of on
production and everything else – and so it didn’t happen.
In the end, although we were
always improving issue-by-issue in terms of our sales and our paying ads, our
costs kept increasing too – so we never managed to make any significant
financial headway. Eventually, after four issues spread over three years, we
decided that we just didn’t have the time or the financial resources to go any
further, so we ended it there.
Q:
Through the four issues you produced, what do you feel you accomplished? What
elements were unexpected? What had you hoped to accomplish but never quite got
to?
A: Looking back, I think
we actually managed to accomplish exactly what we were intending to with Stuff in
terms of what we printed, and I think we managed to accomplish it right from
the first issue. We had good literary content – poetry and prose – we had
good pieces about literary content, we had good columns, comment and comics
which amounted to an ongoing and not entirely humourless conversation about
things literary, and we were showcasing chapbooks and work from the small and
micro press end of the literary world. I may well be remembering it all through
a twenty-year-old rose-coloured haze, but I think we managed to do pretty much
exactly what we were aiming to do, and in the tone we were aiming to do it. It
did take us a couple of issues to find our feet in terms of the production end
of things, but I think that right from the start we were putting out a very
good product with very good content.
The thing we didn’t
accomplish, of course, was to have it succeed well enough fast enough to become
a viable proposition... but as I said, in hindsight, given the way we went
about it, it seems unlikely that that was ever a real possibility.
Aside from simply being
successful enough to continue, the one other thing that I know we desperately
wanted to do – but never managed to do – was to be able to pay our writers. It
was and is inexcusable when the writers, artists and creators of cultural
content don’t get paid for their work – and if we could have just gotten into
striking distance of breaking even with Stuff, paying our writers
would have been the first thing we’d have spent money on... but we never even
came close, and we both very much regret that part of it.
The Canadian
Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff bibliography:
Editors
& Publishers: Tamara Fairchild & Grant Wilkins
Design
& Layout: Tamara Fairchild
Technical
Support: Trevor Taylor
ISSN:
1206-8314
Print
run: 1000 per issue
Price:
$4.75 per copy / $16.00 for 4 issue subscription
Issue
#1 (Spring 1997): Editorial: Tamara Fairchild & Grant Wilkins. Features:
Jill Batson, bill bissett, Bob Wakulich, Catherine Jenkins. Regular Columns/Contributors:
Chris Pollard, James Spyker, Valley Swooner, Johnny Steam, Tamara Fairchild.
Poetry: Joe Blades, Donna Kane, rob mclennan, Catherine Jenkins, T. Anders
Carson, Alix Smyth, Phlip Arima, Rob Winger, Rob Fairchild, Ruba Nadda.
Fiction: Matthew Firth, Trevor Taylor, Gerald Noonan. Interview: Tamara
Fairchild with Johnny Steam. Chapbook Excerpts: Stan Rogal, Natalie Hanna, una
mcdonnell, James P McAuliffe. Reviews: Tamara Fairchild, Grant Wilkins.
Proofreaders: James Spyker, Trevor Taylor. Cover photo: Richard Fairchild. 36
pages.
Issue
#2 (March 1998): Editorial: Tamara Fairchild. Features: Sharon H. Nelson,
Charlie Cho, Bob Wakulich, Natalie Hanna. Regular Columns/Contributors: Chris
Pollard, James Spyker, Valley Swooner, Tamara Fairchild. Poetry: LeRoy Gorman,
Stan Rogal, Michelle Desbarats Fels, Sumana Sen-Bagchee, Dennis Dale Palubeski.
Fiction: myrna garanis, J.J. Steinfeld. Interviews: James Spyker with Steve
Venright, Lil Blume with Brian Fawcett. Reviews: Tamara Fairchild, Grant
Wilkins. Proofreader: James Spyker. Cover photo: Catherine Jenkins. 36 pages.
Issue
#3 (October 1998): Editorial: Tamara Fairchild. Features: Nancy Dembowski,
Adeena Karasick, Bob Wakulick. Regular Columns/Contributors: Chris Pollard,
James Spyker, Valley Swooner, Trevor Taylor, Grant Wilkins. Poetry: Nancy
Bullis, John Barlow, elyse friedman. Fiction: Catherine Jenkins. Chapbook
Excerpts: David Collins. Cartoons: Andrew Toos. Reviews: Tamara Fairchild,
Grant Wilkins. Proofreader: James Spyker. Cover photo: Tamara Fairchild. 32
pages.
Issue
# 4 (September 1999): Editorial: Tamara Fairchild. Features: Joanne Morcom,
Paul Vermeersch. Regular Columns/Contributors: Christ Pollard, James Spyker,
Valley Swooner, Grant Wilkins. Poetry: Jamie Gairns. Fiction: Douglas Ord. Contest
Winners: Melanie Fogel, Shane Neilson, Alan Twigg, Dierdre Havrelock, Jean
Leslie. Reviews: Sharon H. Nelson, Grant Wilkins. 32 pages.
