Paul Vermeersch

From the Editor: one line at a time

Every line we succeed in publishing today—
no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—
is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness.

—Walter Benjamin

Dear reader,

When Benjamin wrote these words in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem in January 1940, it was with a sense of dread and desperation. The Second World War was well underway, and the powers of darkness were all around him. That his words survive to inspire us now is a testament to their lasting truth. They have become a lodestar to publishers around the world, and in remembering them now, I want to reflect specifically on the first two words of his sentence.
“Every line...”
The contributions a publisher makes to society are not always a grand gesture; they are made, line by line by line, one line at a time. Day-to-day publishing is modest work, even when its cumulative effect is world-altering. “Every line...is a victory.” As I write this, eighty-one years since Benjamin wrote his letter, the powers of darkness—from old political divisions to global pandemics—persist. In light of this, and with what we hope is a sense of optimism, we present our own modest contribution.
You are holding the very first issue of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing, a new biannual literary magazine published by the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College. We look forward to bringing you—line by line by line—captivating poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, feature interviews, and book reviews in every issue that we publish, starting with this one.

Our mission at The Ampersand Review is rooted in the belief that reading is both enjoyable and enlightening, and that writing in Canada is dynamic, diverse, and worth celebrating. In our pages we seek to provide a venue for excellent, innovative writing from across the country, representing literary voices from a vibrant spectrum of identities, intersections, backgrounds, creativities, and lived experiences.
Because the “Ampersand” in our name signifies the essential relationship between writing and publishing, we also seek to encourage and promote—through book reviews and other features—a vital and inclusive domestic publishing industry that will allow Canada’s remarkable variety of talented writers to thrive.
We hope that in carrying out our mission, we can spark curiosity, fuel the imagination, and even inspire compassionate civic engagement and social change.

In this debut issue, we are proud to include new work by some of Canada’s most exciting contemporary writers, many of whom are already award-winning authors or otherwise on their way to becoming household names, including two former Sheridan writers-in-residence: Liz Howard and Gary Barwin. Joining them in our poetry section are, among others, Canisia Lubrin, a recipient of this year’s prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize; and Eva H. D., whose work received international recognition after her poem “Bonedog” was included in the 2020 Charlie Kaufman film I Am Thinking of Ending Things (adapted from Iain Reid’s internationally bestselling novel of the same name).
In our fiction section we have “Stiffness,” a new short story by Jess Taylor, a past finalist for a Lambda Literary Award as well as the Journey Prize, and a gold-medal winner in fiction for the National Magazine Awards. We also have an excerpt from Jordan Abel’s work-in-progress, Empty Spaces, which begins by extracting descriptions of land and nature from James Fenimore Cooper’s 1757 novel, The Last of the Mohicans, and then, as Abel describes, “I started writing over them, writing through them, writing around them, writing between them, and writing with them. So Empty Spaces, at least as it starts out, is an impurely conceptual project that both animates and reanimates Cooper’s representation of land as terra nullius. In a sense, this is primarily a project about refusing the projection of colonial emptiness in Cooper’s writing, and likewise it is also about affirming and rearticulating Indigenous presence.”
Publishing conceptual work like Abel’s is one of the ways we aim to include a variety of creative practices in our magazine, and including graphic work is another. We love how writing creates vivid imagery in our mind’s eye, but also how it makes use of visual images on the page. That’s why we’re so pleased to include some of Gary Barwin’s visual poetry, two concrete poems by Daniel Scott Tysdal that were inspired by illustrator Al Jaffee’s iconic “fold-ins” from Mad Magazine, as well as Sarah Leavitt’s compelling nonfiction comic “Doors.”
Also in nonfiction, journalist and explorer Jennifer Kingsley brings us scenes from the weeks she spent in Russia’s Chukotka region—the northeastern most corner of that country and right across the Bering Sea from Alaska. In a region that is still so marked by the Soviet era, she contemplates the future rather than the past, and how she began to make a connection to the place through the food she was offered. Then, in our cover story, TAR’s managing editor Robyn Read interviews Amanda Leduc, the communications and development coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity and author of the recent books Disfigured and The Centaur’s Wife, works that respectively examine and recontextualize the historic role that fairy tales have played in dehumanizing people with disabilities.
This short introduction can only begin to touch on what you will find inside this issue of The Ampersand Review, so let’s begin with an invitation. We invite you to read and discover, in addition to those writers already mentioned here, new work by Jacqueline Valencia, Peter Norman, Randy Lundy, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Nick Thran—and 2020’s Bronwen Wallace Award winner for poetry, Alexa Winik. We invite you explore and enjoy, line by line by line, the rich variety of styles and forms of expression gathered here. We invite you to find, among our book reviews, your next favourite summer read. And, finally, we invite you back again to see what further victories against the powers of darkness we have in store for our next issue, coming in winter 2022.

Thank you for joining us,

Paul Vermeersch
2021

Paul Vermeersch is the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing