Esteemed Lit Mag Switches to Digital
Founded in 1970, The Antigonish Review is a quarterly Canadian literary journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. They publish poetry, stories between 500 and 3,000 words, essays, translations and book reviews. While they place a special emphasis on writers from the Canadian Maritime region, they accept work from writers of all nationalities, and strive for a balance between emerging and established authors. They pay their writers professional to semi-professional wages. While many of the contributors to this issue have been widely-published, several have no previous publications. With 15.79% of writers, and 8.11% of submissions accepted (according to Duotrope), this is a good literary magazine for new writers to submit to, one which displays a high-quality of work but with editors willing to take a chance on fresh voices.
The review is currently in a state of transition. As they announce on their website, they are making a “very significant change” and moving from a print magazine to exclusively digital. They also plan on increasing the size of the magazine, which is good news for writers. It’s encouraging to see a long-standing journal open to innovation. As the editors say, “We are shifting our interest from the cerebral to the visceral, from intellectual writing to writing about the guts of experience -- the heat of the sun, the dust of the road.”
A commitment to striking and sensual language can certainly be seen in The Antigonish Review’s 190th issue. In Wayne Curtis’s “Homecoming,” for example, when the narrator’s father returns from World War II and embraces his wife, “Mummy’s knees were bent and the dirty bottoms of her bare feet pointed at the sun.” The works in this volume explore mostly traditional themes: family and its breakdown, nature, the passage of time, death and destruction. Many of the pieces are set in past centuries. Of the five short stories in this issue, Teresa O’Brien’s “Birmingham Small Arms,” “Homecoming,” and Sherry Mendelson’s “Nourishment” all take place around 1950. These works are elegies for a past that never really existed, “picking blueberries and constructing myths of childhood,” and describe the dysfunction that lies beneath the placid and idealized surface of the family (Carolyn MacLeod “Searching for Sarah Mhoire”).
In “Birmingham Small Arms,” O’Brien writes about family traditions, “Christmas holidays. Crisp air and the smell of mince pies…the roar of the fire.” But there is sickness beneath this facsimile of the happy family; the girl’s uncle is molesting her. And in Joe Davies’s “The Thermometer,” a family reunited, the “white grandfather [and] black grandson,” who plant potatoes together and drink “steamed milk with nutmeg and honey” are haunted by the spectre of racial inequality in a “faceless” black suspect on the television.
This issue explores how the everyday can “slip into myth,” “blood humming river music,” the wildness and violence beneath the veneer of civilization (John Danlon, “Two Foot”). In “The Ice Cutters,” David Mohan describes the old fashioned practice: “the lake is tilled with knives/the thresher, a cutting machine….In burning slivers…the ice [is] chill enough to numb a grief/that breaks and breaks/like melt through a stream.” In Hugh McMillan’s “Accounting for Elspeth McQueen, 1689,” one of the many historical poems in this issue, a suspected witch is burned at the stake. In Tom Wayman’s “The Accident” a motorist hits a deer, and in Patrick Vitullo’s “Spring Lamb,” a ten year old’s view of the world is darkened by watching his father and uncle slaughter a lamb. Sherry Mendelson, in her story “Nourishment,” uses violent imagery to describe a family meal, “the crooked neck with its tiny bones jutting out from the skin lay next to the body of the bird, disjointed, like a severed limb.”
In Wayman’s “The Change,” “no amount of moisture could save a world about to be harvested.” A sense of loss pervades many of these works. Water, the steady drip of time and the rhythm of the seasons are present throughout the fertile imagery of this issue. The natural world is richly detailed. In Mollie Coles Tom’s “Shaman’s Mound,” the narrator of the poem walks carefully among a field of snails so as “not to crush their bones, oozy hearts, darkness they drag with them.” Jennifer Houle explores the mating and feeding rituals of different species of sea sponges in her poems; they “pull the soft pulp of their catch/in through the walls, and leave/the hulls to sink.” And in Chris Oke’s “Bioluminescent,” the bacteria that light up the ocean, the “loose-jawed caretakers of spilt secrets,” are also “the drowned, still passing through our stages.” Death and beauty coexist throughout this volume.
Movement and lack of movement obsess many of the writers featured here, particularly female writers. In Kat Cameron’s poems, “the female form twisted into stillness, ready for display,” is exemplified by “teenage mannequins,” and “a broken silver heel stuck in wet grass.” In “Birmingham Small Arms,” the female narrator finds freedom in a bicycle, “the road reeled out like a silver fishing line.” Marion Quednau’s review of Year of The Horse: A journal of healing and adventure by Marjorie Simmins, notes the magic of riding horses, the ability to “gallop away from what comes next, the dullard duties of growing up.” The preoccupation with momentum and stasis in this issue reflects the changes occurring at The Antigonish Review. While none of the pieces can be described as experimental, baby steps towards more modern and risqué material can be seen here.
In the issue’s final piece, Susan Fletcher’s story, “Anchor,” the narrator describes her daughter, who is a stripper/performance artist. She “struts barefoot onto the stage wearing a nearly finished chunky knit tunic,” and continues to knit during her routine, finishing by “pull[ing] a loop and unspool[ing]…Then she prances off the stage, leaving a tangled mess behind her.” With writers of many nationalities and an emphasis on evocative language, The Antigonish Review is much more than just a regional magazine.
