Goodbye to Descant

Descant was one of the first literary journals I discovered when I was eighteen years old. I found it on the magazine rack in the old Yorkville Book Cellar and I marvelled at its handsome appearance and the exciting fiction and poetry inside. And when I was twenty it was the first journal to accept a story of mine; reading that acceptance letter was a thrilling experience. (My story was, not inappropriately, a satire on getting rejected, and I still remember the editor writing, "Yes, yes, yes, yes....") The journal has long been a great booster of new and young writers and it's a genuine loss to have its run end after 45 years. I'm going to drop in on the farewell celebration, tonight starting at 7 p.m. at Revival on College St. here in Toronto. I want to give editor Karen Mulhallen a hug and a thank-you. And a thanks to all the editors and staff who worked on the journal over the years.

New Stories

When my collection, My Life Among the Apes, came out in 1212 I was pretty well tapped-out story-wise. So I sat down to begin some new stories and wrote a handful of first drafts one after another. I've been slowly revising them and the first story to appear, "Westfalia," has been published in the latest Taddle Creek. (You can read it online at: https://www.taddlecreekmag.com/westfalia.) I have finished a couple of others and in the next months they will appear in Geist and in Numero Cinq, an online journal edited by Douglas Glover. These stories seem to me in keeping with the earlier work, a step forward rather than a radical change of direction.