Building Bridges, issue by issue
Local mag scores 10 award nominations
It has been said that those who venture into the perilous world of magazine publishing might just as wisely throw their money into a little pile and set it all ablaze.
Some magazine types might say the same thing about the newspaper business, I suppose, but hey, it’s my column. Besides, I come to praise magazines, not to bury them. Specifically, the fledgling Edmonton magazine, Eighteen Bridges, which has already established a level of excellence that’s certainly worthy of notice.
At the National Magazine Awards gala in Toronto on Thursday, Eighteen Bridg
es will be in the mix with 10 nominations. Pretty good for a publication that’s only put out four issues to date, with only two of those qualifying for this year’s awards. It’s a finalist for another 14 Western Canadian Magazine Awards later in the month.
“Obviously it’s no picnic trying to establish a national print magazine in the current climate,” says Lynn Coady, who co-edits the magazine with Curtis Gillespie.
“We don’t have a corporation behind us, or a millionaire supporter or anything like that. We have the kind of budget and resources that prompts people to maybe churn out a little literary journal or something very small scale, but we had kind of big ambitions for Eighteen Bridges.”
Eighteen Bridges debuted in the fall of 2010 with a mandate to champion long-form narrative journalism. It premièred with the tag line “stories that connect,” and described itself as “a heady mix of narrative journalism and first-person essay.”
Coady and Gillespie hoped to publish as a quarterly and two years later they’re still hoping to do that someday. It’s not like they don’t have other things to do. Gillespie has a new family vacation memoir, Almost There, fresh out and Coady has just closed a deal with Anansi to release a new collection of short stories for fall 2013. And Coady’s latest novel, The Antagonist, is a finalist for the $10,000 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award, which will be presented June 9 in Calgary.
Amid all that, the two have managed to pull together a Spring issue of Eighteen Bridges that’s now available at selected newsstands — Greenwoods’ and U of A Bookstore had copies, last I checked — with the next issue expected to come out in late fall.
“We’re still working on a shoestring but our feeling was if we could make the magazine what we’ve always been touting it to be, and if we could prove that we’re doing what we said we would do, which is feature some of the best writing in Canada, with really high journalistic standards and a great-looking package and all the rest of it, then that would help us build our subscriber base and attract more funders and donors,” Coady said.
“Now we’re really hoping to just capitalize on this momentum and take the magazine to the next level.”
Going into Thursday’s awards gala, The Walrus leads all Canadian magazines with 34 nominations, followed by Report on
Business (30), Toronto Life (24)
and L’actualité (22).
Eighteen Bridges snagged two of its nominations for Don Gilmore’s reminiscence about the late Paul Quarrington, published in the magazine’s Spring 2011 issue, and single nominations for pieces by Greg Hollingshead, Tim Bowling, Chris Turner, Caroline Adderson, Russell Cobb, Jane Silcott, Alissa York and Omar Mouallem.
If you go online and visit magazine-awards.com you can read the complete articles of each finalist.
Coady singled out Mouallem, an Edmonton rapper and journalist, for particular praise for his Under the Veil essay.
“That was in some ways the ideal Eighteen Bridges piece, if we’ve even established a standard for that yet,” Coady said with a little laugh.
“It was really personal without falling into that personal essay mode of writing. It still managed to be quite journalistic and analytical. It was about the veil and sort of modern Canadian women from the Islamic tradition who have the choice not to wear the veil but decide to anyway. His example of that was his sister and it centres around this incident where he asks to accompany her to her hair salon and watches her get her hair done, which he’s allowed to do as her brother, and just talks about the traditional taboos.” The current issue of Eighteen
Bridges features an article by Toronto playwright Jonathan Garfinkel recounting his travels to violence-torn Pakistan, a Gillespie profile of TV writer and producer Hart Hanson, and a first-person piece by former Globe and Mail fashion editor Jessica Johnson that attempts to take a strip off Brazilian beauty culture.
Eighteen Bridges is published through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta, with one year subscriptions going for $25.95.
SEX (still) SELLS — Falling under the breaking news category of “Ocean deep; wet too,” comes word that Random House has sold north of 800,000 copies of the bondage-themed
Fifty Shades of Grey novels in Canada in just over six weeks.
The erotic books of E L James’s Fifty Shades trilogy — Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty
Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed — started out as bestsellers in the digital format, but now they’re bestsellers in that dowdly old print form as well. Since March, North American sales have exceeded 10 million copies in all formats.
So what’s driving all this, apart from the obvious? A recent article by Smart Money magazine points to the spike in e-reader sales. By stripping romance and erotic books of their steamy covers, e-readers have eliminated much of the embarrassment of toting them around. You can read the stuff anywhere.