beyond magazine

Many thanks.

Thanks to all those kinds souls that showed up for the production and design panel at Mount Royal College this morning. And for those of you who were at Word on the Street and received a sample magazine, we hope you'll subscribe and become one of our merry band of readers.

(Watch the pocket watch. Listen to scary wobbly voice: "Subscribe. Subscribe.")

I had a little freshman flashback this morning when I went to the wrong building and then tried to tunnel my way out to get to the panel on time. But it was all okay. Everything will be okay.

Now onto pulling together the last bits of Beyond Issue 16: Small.

Blood, sweat, and tears.

Ani Difranco has released her first retrospective, Canon,  celebrating nearly twenty years of making music. Her website says the following:

"After over a decade of hard work, Ani DiFranco's career has blossomed into one that is successful in the rarest forms. Ani has proved that if you shed enough blood, sweat, and tears, you really can do what you want in your own way."

We have heard this many times as we wander around making a piece of independent media and talking to others doing the same. We're just wondering if we could change the "blood,sweat, and tears" part to chocolate chip cookies, milk, and naps. Just this once?

The story behind magazine awards.

Stephen Osborne of Geist magazine wrote about the barriers that face small magazines when it comes to entering award contests:

As the recent leaf storm of magazine awards fades completely but not quite from memory, I can still (barely) recall observing aloud the day before the so-called gala evening of the National Magazine Awards that cultural magazines can barely afford to participate in these events in a meaningful way—a meaningful way being to enter as many contenders in as many categories as possible—as Maclean’s and The Walrus have demonstrated (once again): if you spend a lot of money you can make the awards “meaningful.”

We are still very fond of the gold star that one of our readers sent to us. We've also tossed "Good job!" stickers around the office from time to time.

And our congratulations to Geist. We're about to reboot our website and we noticed that they have have a lovely new web presence. Up with magazines. And balloons. And airplanes. And some birds.

Elves.

We're busy like little elves working on the next issue of Beyond. It's an enormous amount of fun getting permissions, sending of the last issue, and hooking up folks for interviews and the like. This is what we love best. The paperwork, the administration, the constant appeal for subscriptions - all these things fade into the distance as you see content and artwork come to life. Ahhh! Stay with us. More Beyond is on the way.

In the meantime, may we direct your attention to Leslie Harpold's beautiful advent calendar. Always great fun at this time of year.

Literary worth.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to someone in their early twenties about how real change comes very slowly. I mentioned a book I was reading, Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and the fight against apartheid. The young man answered "What is apartheid and who is Nelson Mandela?" I tried to quietly answer despite the screaming in my head and my instant loss of faith in the Canadian education system.

Rewind again to the Word on the Street book fair in Calgary. Beyond was hoping to put a booth in at one of these fairs but time, money, and volunteers were allotted elsewhere. The local university always has a great book table at Word on the Street and I spent a good deal of time reading the spines of books and rejoicing in a wonderfully thick but remarkably affordable Czeslaw Milosz: New and Collected Poems, a Cash by Johnny Cash, and a collection of C.S. Lewis.

Throughout my browsing, there was a loud and ongoing commentary by a small group of university students. They picked up books, announcing or deriding authors with their tone. Or they would simply hold up a book between thumb and forefinger and proclaim, "Oh, who would read this?" To emphasize their superior taste, they would punctuate their announcements with gunshot words like "machiavellian" and "literary worth" to make sure that the rest of us, the unenlightened souls of varying ages, were aware of our bad choices. A good walk spoiled.

I have been struggling this year with grant proposals and what category Beyond fits into. We are not "literary" enough to be a literary magazine and for some readers, this is not enough. I think that's fine. There are a lot of excellent magazines with a focus on the arts or literature. Some of these publications focus on specific forms - film, poetry, fiction, visual arts etc.

Many parts of Beyond are used as an introduction to different aspects of being human either through the arts or reflective writing or reprints. Reprinting a portion of a work in a different context (with Beyond's emphasis on the visual) allows people to revisit something they have already read or invites them to explore the life and work of someone that we may assume is widely known (ie Nelson Mandela). While I am a fan of underground or alternative work, what is "underground" to a reader is in relation to where she finds herself standing in the landscape.