High school, adolescence, youth, pubescence — the time when it becomes apparent that you are eventually going to have to take care of yourself, be responsible, stop holding others responsible, cease having others hold themselves responsible for you. One way to deal with this is to generate scenarios where responsibility for what happens to you is taken out of your hands by circumstances beyond your control. So it isn’t surprising that Rover, a magazine of writing by students at Northern S.S., is burdened a little by that “what would happen if I were dead” kind of melodrama. Jack, who got drunk and hit a bus shelter with his cab 20 years ago, goes to visit the grave of the girl he killed to wish her happy birthday. A kid plays Russian Roulette while his parents are downstairs having a cocktail party. But most of the work in this little volume gets beyond melodrama, goes places where people do whatever they have to in order to maintain an identity not delimited by what they see and hear around them. There’s a dramatic monologue where a girl speaks about life with parents who grew up in the ’60s. “I was conceived at a John Lennon concert 18 tiring years ago…Every year instead of ‘Happy Birthday’ my parents sing a hearty verse of ‘Imagine’ to me.” There’s some strange and truly marvellous poems. The final piece is the first episode of a serialized story where Barney and Baby Bop move into the Oval Office after inciting thousands of children to kill “every adult they could find.” Any magazine where Barney is portrayed as the kind soul-sucking purple monster he truly is has got to be on the right track.
literary magazine / no known publisher / main creator: Katie Allan (editor-in-chief – and don’t you forget it!!) / free / Northern Secondary School, 851 Mount Pleasant Road, Toronto, ON M4P 2L5