Paul Vermeersch

from the editor: from across time and space

Dear reader,

What are we doing here? You and me?
I am writing an editorial letter, and sometime after I have finished writing it, you will be reading it, and through the words on this page—this bridge across time and space—we will be ... we are ... connected. By the act of writing, and by the act of reading, we are now in community with one another. It’s really quite astonishing when you think about it!
I want to dispel old assumptions of writing and reading as solitary activities. Writing and reading are acts of communication. How can communication be solitary? Communication forges connections, and connections build communities.
At The Ampersand Review, we are always thinking about the ways we can build our community. We are a magazine, so with each issue we publish we bring writers and readers from across Canada together. While that is the foundation of our work, we have been exploring new ways of building community with writers and readers over the past year with a particular focus on live events. This way, our work not only reaches across the country, but also it has a profound local impact.
Last fall, for example, we held The & Festival, a two-day program of literary talks at Sheridan’s campus in Mississauga. The festival welcomed writers, publishers, students, and members of the public to take part in discussions about issues facing our literary culture. It also included a daylong small press fair curated by the Meet the Presses collective, concluding with a stirring keynote address by poet and novelist Gary Barwin. Plans for this year’s festival are already underway, and I am pleased to announce that the award-winning and internationally acclaimed writer Canisia Lubrin has agreed to be this year’s keynote speaker. Make sure you read our feature interview with Lubrin later in this issue of the magazine.
We have also started The Ampersand Review Reading Series at our campus in Mississauga. Each event showcases featured authors followed by a community open mic. To date, our reading series has hosted Stuart Ross, Kate Caley, Sydney Hegele, Cassidy McFadzean, and Johanna Skibsrud, and we are looking forward to expanding the series this fall with even more events and more writers.
Finally, we are grateful that you, dear reader, are a part of this community too. If you want to continue to be a part of what we do, the best way to do that is to keep reading The Ampersand Review. Subscriptions to our magazine are available on our website. You can also sign up for our mailing list or make a donation to support our publishing and community programming endeavours. In the meantime, please enjoy Issue No. 6. We have worked hard put- ting it together, and we hope you’ll enjoy the range of styles, voices, and points of view that fill these pages. And we hope you will join us again next time.

From across time and space,
Paul Vermeersch
April, 2024

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