I pick up these magazines and read them knowing from the start that I can’t just read them, that I’m going to also have to say something about them, make some sort of assessment, maybe even judge them, so I’m listening to the voice behind the words as I read, trying to hear what drives certain pieces towards success and others toward irredeemable failure and it seems to have to do with the size, or maybe the shape, of the space these writers are able to inhabit. The pieces that work splash out everywhere, veer off and cover great distances, prance uninhibited into completely unexpected places: “In the cities the visitor gets involved in the affairs of the brother-in-law of someone he half-knows and spends a week visiting car-dealers’ back yards. In small towns he finds himself watching clear felling or spending hours in the back of a truck waiting for someone called John.” The pieces that don’t work are the ones that turn in on themselves, clinging desperately to a single idea, inhabiting a single space, refusing to move on, until that space stinks from being too small and too lived-in: “I will never bathe again./My feet will turn black./Love will be out of the question./Dogs will follow me everywhere./I will be covered in flies./When I sleep in the garbage dump/there will be some confusion:/should I arise in the morning/or the heap of rubbish beside me?” What I wind up asking myself is, What drives these editors to pick these particular pieces? How is it that a beautifully resonant piece like “In Canada” winds up in the same magazine as a silly, inbred thing like “Clean”? You might rationalize the inconsistency by saying that it’s nice they give new, underdeveloped writers a chance, but according to his bio, the guy who wrote “Clean” is “the author of more than 25 chapbooks,” and has two new books about to be released by a couple of the more prominent small Canadian presses. “The Writing Space” is as good a writing space as many. In addition to original writings, they do a lot of little excerpts from well-known and slightly less well-known writers. Always worth a look. (KS)
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