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

Respond to the first renewal letter the magazine sends you. Really. I’m not just saying this because, as management, I really want those orders in early so that I can begin to see the shape of TNQ’s (financial) future, though that’s also true.

The first letter you get will always—always—have that magazine’s very best deal in it, whether it’s a glossy commercial mag or a tiny not-for-proft outfit like TNQ. Why? Because we don’t really want to nag you with additional letters. They cost money, time, and trees.  So as a thank you in advance for saving us the money, time, and trees, we offer you the best rate we can.

Sometimes the best rate means a longer commitment—in fact, for TNQ, this is always the case. However, if you’re a little commitment-shy, know that you can always change your mind later and ask for a refund of all un-mailed issues. I’m not sure that all magazines will give refunds if you cancel…I’ve never done it. But they should, in my opinion.

Yes, you can wait for subscription to run out and re-subscribe again when the mag is offering a special promotion for new subscribers. You can even do this every year, because most magazines do have a few such promotions per year–and I know people who do this like to think they’ve beat the system. But honestly, you’re not fooling us, not in this information age, my friends. The savings, in comparison to the best rate we offer in our early renewal letter, will be marginal, if any.

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.

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!

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.

How long has Bywords been in print, and what sets it apart from other mags on the shelf?

Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal are in the eighth year of existence. Bywords existed before that as a monthly magazine from 1990-2001.

We publish poetry, following in the tradition of the monthly magazine first set up in 1990 and also because when I became managing editor,  that was where my primary literary focus was and still is.

Also, there are a lot of excellent poets in Ottawa, but many of them were not that well known and we wanted to give them an opportunity to be published.

We publish current and former students, residents and workers from the National Capital Region.

We select poetry via blind vote, in that the work is the only thing the editors consider when choosing poetry for selection. They don’t see the name of the writer. This gives a level playing field to everyone who submits their work.

What are some of the things Bywords does to support Canadian writers, besides publishing them?

One of the most notable activities is our John Newlove Poetry Award.  Each year we invite a poet living outside of Ottawa to select a poem published on Bywords.ca. The winner and honourable mentions read at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. The award recipient is given the opportunity to have a poetry manuscript edited by the Bywords team and published in the form of a chapbook. Judges for the award have included Gary Hyland, Stuart Ross, George Elliott Clarke, George Bowering, Stephanie Bolster and this year’s judge, Jason Camlot. The winner also receives a copy of one of John Newlove’s books. For the past two years, the winner has received A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Chaudiere Books).[Sean Moreland, winner of the 2007 John Newlove award; photo credit Charles Earl]

We also promote current and former Ottawa writers on our website through a calendar of events, links and blogs pages and the news section for publisher’s news, contests, workshops and calls for submission from other publications. We sell works of small press fiction and poetry at our on line store and at small press fairs in Ottawa and occasionally in Montreal and Toronto.

In addition, we publish local photographers’ and artists’ work  on the cover of the BQJ and we invite local musicians to perform at our readings.

We hold quarterly readings with attendance ranging anywhere from 30 to 60 people.

Consumer mags measure their success in sales figures, but for not-for-profit niche mags like ours, these are hardly the most important metric. How do you define success at Bywords?

Many of our writers had their first poetry published on our site and have read for the first time at a Bywords reading. Sandra Ridley, co-recipient of last year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award, read for the first time at a Bywords reading, for example.

One of the things I love about Bywords is that we have the opportunity to discover emerging writers and see them improve. For instance, Marcus McCann [pictured at left, photo credit Charles Earl], who had poems published by Bywords.ca and the BQJ early on, recently had his first book Softwhere published by Chaudiere Books last year. He is this year’s recipient of Bywords’ John Newlove Poetry Award. I have watched his poems grow and develop into masterpieces.

Furthermore, many of the writers we have published were new to publishing, particularly small press publishing, and have gone on to start presses of their own. For example, Melissa Upfold of Sarnia publishes the wonderful artzine, Variations and Ottawa writer Cameron Anstee started Apartment 9 last year. Bywords selectors Andrew Faulkner and Leigh Nash are the publishers of Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press based in Toronto. I also started up my own small press, AngelHousePress, in 2008 to publish, promote and celebrate the art of risk.

We are fortunate to have received the support of the City of Ottawa and also private sponsorship.

I am also proud of our participation in the community. We hold a fundraiser every year for Cornerstone, a local women’s shelter. This year we raised $430 thanks to the generosity of our readers.

We participate in the local Walk for Life to raise awareness and funds for AIDS/HIV.

We are in the process of organizing, with the help of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, a poetry contest for secondary school students in the National Capital Region to raise interest and awareness about poetry, especially poetry by living poets.

Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal are successful because of the thriving literary community that we have in Ottawa. There are all kinds of literary events taking place here throughout the year, witness the Bywords.ca calendar of literary events. There are several reading series in town, including the innovative a b series focussing on sound and experimental poetry, the Factory Reading Series, the informal and unnamed readings at the Carleton Tavern hosted by rob mclennan, the Tree Reading Series and the Dusty Owl Reading Series. Aside from the small presses I’ve already mentioned there is also the prolific above/ground press and long time local publisher Buschek Books. There are several on line magazines based in Ottawa, including Ottawater, 17 Seconds and Experiment-O. There are numerous groups holding workshops and writers’ circles. There are excellent local independent bookstores such as Collected Works and Mother Tongue Books. There is a wonderful writers’  festival, the Ottawa International Writers Festival, that takes place twice a year and holds even more events throughout the year. Both Carleton and the University of Ottawa have literary journals: In/Words and the Ottawa Arts Review respectively. There is even a sex mag here in Ottawa via Carleton U: the Moose and Pussy and some of its editors have been published on Bywords.ca and the BQJ also.  I am pleased that Bywords is a major contributor to Ottawa’s dynamic literary community.

By far, the most interesting and thoughtful take on this topic I’ve read comes from Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian. He suggests that publishers deciding whether or not to institute a pay wall, and in particular a ‘universal’ pay wall (in which every article is behind the barrier, not just a ‘premium’ few) need to carefully consider the following issues:

- The first is about ‘open versus closed’.  … If you universally make people pay for your content it follows that you are no longer open to the rest of the world, except at a cost. That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms. It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.

- The second issue it raises is the one of ‘authority’ versus ‘involvement’. Or, more crudely, ‘Us versus Them’. …  Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn’t. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority. Journalists may remain one source of authority, but people may also be less interested to receive journalism in an inert context – ie which can’t be responded to, challenged, or knitted in with other sources. It intersects with the pay question in an obvious way: does our journalism carry sufficient authority for people to pay – both online (where it competes in an open market of information) and print?

You can read the rest (for free–natch!) over here at The Guardian’s website, and I strongly suggest that you do. It’s longish, but absolutely fascinating. If you’re short on time, watch this video interview with Rusbridger instead.

Another argument which has stuck with me since I read it, in favour of the wall, comes from Leah McLaren. Her case in point?

swag. For many years, I worked in the fashion media, an industry kept afloat on a sticky sea of complimentary champagne and freebies. Everywhere you looked offered some sort of swag, from designer goods for celebrities and VIPs to cocktail-party gift bags so laden with tat we’d “forget” them in taxis on purpose.

She later notes that she’s happier with a full bottle of her favorite, purchased shampoo than with a handful of those tiny, sample-size tubes of the really ritzy stuff. I one hundred percent get that. I don’t want some cheapo pen with some company’s name on it. I have a favorite brand of pen that I’m happy to purchase.

I understand that the argument she’s making is that offering one’s content for free cheapens its value.  But swag and free content online don’t really link up this way in my mind.  My anti-swag stance has zero to do with my desire to freely access and share all kinds of information—be it news, fiction, video—on the internet. My aversion to swag has to do with my aversion to clutter, and my standards for material ’stuff.’  Unless it’s edible, if it’s free, it has to also meet my specifications for whatever it is (be it a pen, an umbrella, a t-shirt) for me to bring it home. Not bringing home random free stuff has to do with not filling up my life with things I don’t really need. I’m happy to leave that stuff for the people who love it (they do exist–I know some of them!).

So, though I don’t bring home much swag, I love to fill up my head with free content—articles I read online, mags I borrowed from a friend, books I checked out of the library for that matter.  I certainly don’t expect the entire issue of a print publication to be available, and if I like what I’ve read for free well enough, chances are pretty good that I’ll pay for the exclusive stuff in the print version. (Somehow, multiple, precarious stacks of mags don’t qualify as ‘clutter’ in my house…)  But I had to pay to read everything I’ve ever read, well….I’d either be broke and smart or terribly stupid.

So, I’m both anti-swag and in favour of a publication that is, as Rusbridger puts it, ‘open to the world’.  To my mind, setting up a universal pay wall around your content today is the equivalent of driving a tricked-out Hummer. Venturing behind the pay wall to read The Times instead of, or as well as, The Guardian or The Globe is going to be for people who get turned on by elite status, to borrow a phrase from Up in the Air (an awesome film, btw). These are really strong value statements….not ones I’d like to make about myself, as a consumer or a publisher.

Friday

My train arrives in Niagara Falls around 10:30am.  I take a walk around the station in the hopes of finding a way to kill time, but there’s something post-apocalyptic about the area.  I settle in to the train station for a 3-hour wait for my shuttle, when a stylish couple ask me if I know the area.  They are from the Literary Review of Canada (not a couple) and we share a cab into NOTL.  At the hotel, they let us check in early and I get lost trying to find my room.  Having lost the LRC folks, I waste what in retrospect I realize is prime naptime eating and walking around the “city” for 6 hours.

At 7, I get a knock on my door, and it’s Brian from Alternatives, TNQ’s neighbours on campus.  We’ve only met on twitter, but he doesn’t seem like a serial killer, so I let him in and we chill until the welcome reception, which I swear was billed a “wine and cheese” reception, but there is no cheese.  I complain about this repeatedly, which everyone I meet finds incredibly charming.  We are then split into groups to form a hypothetical magazine, but everyone is jet-lagged or just tired.  We decide ours will be about family health, and give it the incredibly brilliant name of “Family Health.”  We get kicked out of the reception at 10, and I recruit anyone whose face I recognize to join me in the wine bar, where we also hang out until we get kicked out, first subtly, then with a  “I have to go home now” from the bartender.

Saturday

comes early, as breakfast is at 8am.   Our first lecture begins at 845am, strongly scented with coffee.  By lunch we are already reeling with info about Circulation types and audits.  We eat too much and sit bloatedly learning about circulation sources and Search Engine Optimization.  Fabian from Daily Commercial News tells us about his $1200 subscriptions (that’s not a typo).  At 430, we get back into our groups to plan world domination—er, the target audience and marketing strategies for Family Health.  We do what we can until someone tells us we have 45 minutes until dinner.  I pop into the jet tub (!) in my room for 25 minutes, and realize, with 5 minutes to spare, why they usually have health warnings at hot tubs.  Dinner is spectacular, even with heart palpitations.

We’ve caught wind of an ice-wine festival downtown, and the folks from Geist, Grain, Alternatives, and the MagsCan 3 for 2 campaign make it down for the last hour. It is amazing, but an hour really isn’t enough time, and we rearrange my room when we get back and stay up until 230am talking about renewal letters.  We’re seriously that nerdy.

Sunday

Most people are late for breakfast.  The day is long, but we hear from Faith Drennan of the Oyster Group, Keith Fulford from Rogers, Ethne McCredie from Abacus, and Darlene Storey from St. Joseph Media.  At 430, our imaginary magazine tries very hard to build an imaginary audience.  Dinner is pizza and beer at Michael J. Fox’s house, which looks like it fell out of the pages of Canadian House and Home. The walk there is the first we have been outside all day, but we hear it was beautiful. I make the mistake of bringing up the CPF, and get a little… passionate. We all walk back to the hotel in the rain, and I invite everyone up to my room afterward. We probably make terrible neighbours, and at least two people leave with the wrong room key around 130am.  But we’re on a magazine roll.

Monday

We talk digital editions and covers, twitter and tag lines. For our workshop, we try to create a budget without the whole picture, and conclude by drawing a cover (evidently the first in circ school history), which features “an eight pack for your eight year old” as we dissolve into our exhaustion. Having finished in record time, I foolishly attempt to nap before dinner, but voices in my head keep talking about magazines.  I open the window and realize that Amanda from Explore is talking about her magazine’s obscene budget in the hot tub outside my window.

Tuesday

We find out that Family Health is about 1.5 million hypothetical dollars over budget, and spend the rest of the morning trying to get it down to $500k without losing our 15000 new readers.  Finally, we pack up to return to the real world, where we just have to figure out how to come up with 5000 annual circ on nothing.  It’s not just the food (or the company) that I’m going to miss.

What is it like to put out TNQ today versus eight years ago?

Well…some things never change. I mean, eight years ago, TNQ was worried about paying our writers competitively, about the cost of printing and postage, about growing our subscription list at the rate our grantors expect, about having enough human resources to keep the magazine going, about keeping up with external changes in the industry, the economy, etc.  We’ve made a lot of progress, and I’m proud of what we’ve done in the past eight years. But oddly, though we have far greater resources now than we had in 2002 (a bit of rainy-day money in the bank, paid staff, a board of directors, computers that aren’t minutes away from crashing, sufficient elbow room), none of these worries have gone away—rather, some have only intensified.

Eight years ago, we were publishing very fine writing—work that could compete with any lit mag, even ones with far greater resources. In fact, it did compete—we won the gold medals for fiction and poetry at the National Magazine Awards in 2002. So, in terms of our editorial, we were front runners, the small mag to beat. With no disrespect to our fellow, wonderful lit mags, I still believe our editorial and aesthetic are first rate.  That’s another something that hasn’t changed, of which we’re all very proud. But in most other respects, eight years ago we were a decade or more behind the ‘modern’ publishers, especially in terms of technological capacity. I suspect the same could be said of most small, mostly volunteer-run lit mag which had started in the 80’s or earlier.

For example, before I arrived, TNQ’s books were kept in hand-written ledgers. Has anyone reading this ever used these? I hadn’t even seen one, outside of A Christmas Carol. Shortly after I started as Managing Editor, our then-Board Treasurer converted the ledgers to MYOB accounting software…but then she left me (me!!) in charge of it when she left the mag to pursue other challenges. I did my best, tracking our sales and paying the bills on time most of the time, but really, only since our current Board Treasurer arrived about four years ago, have we had the to-the-minute reporting and analysis of our finances that (I think) even a mid-size magazine took for granted in 2002. Today, I believe our books are probably some of the best-kept in the small mag industry.

In a similar vein, in 2002, our mailing list and manuscripts under review were tracked on 3×5 index cards. You know, like the card catalogs at the library. I suspect mine is the last, or one of the last, generations to even remember researching in a library pre-computers.  Anyway. Both our subscription and manuscript submission tracking systems are now computerized, and though far from perfect, a vast improvement.

In 2002, TNQ had a website, but no one in the office had a clue how to update it, let alone the time, so it just housed a modicum of necessary information—how to submit your work, how to subscribe (mailing a cheque was the only option!) and so on.  Today, we have a website that even I, with next-to-zero html, can update, as well as this daily blog, a Facebook group, and, just as soon as Melissa shows me the ropes, a Twitter account. We can accept purchases online. We even have a digital edition.

Looking at all of these changes, I feel we’ve narrowed our capacity gap to a year or two. We’re equipped to deal with what the future brings, even if we don’t know how we’re going to do it just yet. We have the staff, the computing power, much hard-won knowledge of things that don’t work and what we do best.  We still have a ways to go, especially online, I think. (Did I mention that the Internet pretty much exploded in this time period? Yeah, there’s that.)

The biggest change, at least from my perspective, is that I feel a lot less sure of the solutions to the worries listed at top. Eight years ago, I’d look to the commercial magazines.  I figured, if we can just get some funds to do what they do, we’ll have a bit of success, a bit of traction under our wheels. Today, I realize, they don’t have all the answers, and many of their strategies aren’t really right for our mag anyway.

To explain what I mean by that—eight years ago, the Canada Magazine Fund had just opened, and they gave little mags like us the means to do the things commercial mags were doing—like direct mail, for instance (you probably know it as ‘junk mail’).  A renewal series of 5 letters. Oooh. These were big steps for us, five years ago…and my 24 year-old self thought they would launch our mag to the next level.  But these things proved very hard to manage for our small mag staff, most of whom were (are) volunteers. While they did make a big difference, they did not work magic for TNQ.  And today, as I’ve bemoaned enough here on this blog, the Canada Magazine Fund is closing its doors.

So, to sum up, in many respects, publishing TNQ today is a lot like publishing TNQ eight years ago. It’s hard. Really expletive hard. But it’s also wonderful.  Ask me again in ten years.