It’s humbling to take responsibility for a literary magazine that’s 10 years old. If carte blanche had not enjoyed a decade of success, a growing readership, creative partnerships here in Montreal and beyond, a deluge of submissions from Quebec, Canada and internationally, perhaps the feeling would fill us with less awe. But all of those things, and more, did happen. Under the stewardship of co-founder Maria Turner, who then became editor, and now stays on as creative non-fiction editor and co-curator of This Really Happened, carte blanche has gone from strength to strength. A huge thank you also goes out to all the other editors, current and former, and all the contributors, who made this magazine what it is today.
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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. Read more →
It is hard to be an Argentina fan when the World Cup rolls around. Not because our team is not up for the job (hey, we do have Lionel Messi, even if he hasn’t had his best season and some people think he’s more Spanish then Argentine), but because Argentina has a reputation.
From Maradona’s infamous handball to the theatrical fake fouls that the Argentines—among many others—like to perform (though not Messi, it should be said), Argentina is thought of by some as a manipulative and melodramatic team, at least here in North America. This melodrama is the reason why some North Americans don’t like soccer. Read more >
Ever since we launched our magazine in the fall of 2004, we have been receiving email for what we fondly refer to as the “other” carte blanche.
It is clear that the messages aren’t for us; subject lines range from “Poor conditions at public hospital,” to “Scamming under our noses.” Some of the stories these email tell are tragic, others are expressions of frustration, a last ditch effort to get a company to behave by trying to get the attention of the local media.
Congratulations to Juliet Waters, the winner of the 2013 3Macs carte blanche Prize for her work of nonfiction, Bluefooted, published in Issue 19.
Because we are publishing online, people expect us to keep up with the web-based Joneses, that is, those websites who publish new stuff every few hours, and constantly update their social media. The ones who make the World Wide Web seem like one giant news service ever ready to post the next status update. Because, as we all know, Stuff.Is.Happening.All.The.Time.