The Cartography of Q

Journals are magical spaces, slimmer wardrobes hiding doorways to other realms behind the last woolly coat and a pile of yesterday's shoes. These covers are a secret alignment of the stars which tweak the time-space continuum. Every poem is a werewolf.

Canada's literary magazines make up dozens of smaller, faster national railways. With a puff and a wink our first issue collapsed Canada. In a few short months we received submissions from across the country. Our pages cozied writers from Winnipeg up against those of Montreal; GG winners and young writers. The Last Spike is a sham.

Submissions are now arriving from Japan, the UK, and Australia like weary but determined travellers smoothing rumpled clothes and nosing around for familer faces. The Net surrounds all of this motion like an electromagnetic jet stream and our web-site is taking more hits and making more links than the proverbial Canadian hockey player.

Hemingway compares writing to an iceberg in that nine-tenths of it floats by unseen (unlike this unsubtle allusion). With enough new subscribers we hope to send out X-ray glasses with our spring anniversary issue (send three proofs of purchase; bonus potato guns for the first 42 responses). Of course that's just a money-making sham, the glasses won't show you anything, everything is on the page. Our secretly encoded message is dangerously simple: Stop, cock an ear, peel an eye. Everything is a map.

Look out, our next issue might be a pop-up book.