You start a literary magazine and one day you wake up and 10 years have gone by. When you tell people, they say things like “Wow!” and “10 years?” as if turning 10 is a real accomplishment that no one, least of all yourself, ever thought would be achieved.
This is because literary magazine years are different than people years—they are more like dog years. Each year is an adventure: What amazing submissions will we discover? Will we get this issue published on time? What can we write in this year’s grant application? And, if you happen to be an online magazine like we are, can we keep up with the new technology? Sometimes each year does feel like seven.
But the amazing part is, that each time we discover a new writer or artist, publish a new issue, or meet a new reader, time seems to stop. The year no longer goes by in months but instead is marked by people and progress: that magical first issue that started it all; publishing Elise Moser, Gina Roitman, and Mélanie Grondin—names that are probably familiar to those of you in Montreal; adding graphic fiction which grew into comics (thank you Matthew Forsythe, Salgood Sam, and our current comics editor Georgia Webber); opening up our doors to international submissions; the interviews we have done (Sheila Fischman, Kathleen Winter, Catherine Kidd, to name a few); the amazing photo essays we have received—including Paper Person Gets Cheered Up from a group of entries from high school students; our 3Macs carte blanche Prize prizewinners; the audio stories (the amazing production that is the Benjy poems); putting on This Really Happened at Blue Met and WordFest—and so much more.
It turns out that in literary magazine years, 10 is just the right age to be. To misquote words of the great A. A. Milne:
But now I am ten, I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be ten now for ever and ever.
Thank you to all of our contributors, readers, supporters, and colleagues! We couldn’t have done it without you.
And, of course, thank you to all of the magazine’s founders: Sandy Wolofsky, Jennifer Zakutney, Barbara Rudnicka, Claire Helman, Mary Lynn Deachman, Elise Moser, Rhonda Mullins, Maria Schamis Turner, and Peter McFarlane.
Note: Issues earlier than Issue 8 of carte blanche can be found here: http://archive.carte-blanche.org/. We are still in the process of importing old issues into the new system.
Maria Schamis Turner is the editor of carte blanche, and she doesn't want to talk about her age, even in dog years.