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Antigonish
Review # 144
Richard
Cumyn,
Fiction Editor |
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Cover:"Looking Back"
by Ron McFayden
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TARnations: The Starting Line
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With this issue, we inaugurate an international fiction series we're calling TARnations. It will remind you of a chain letter and a relay race, in that the author of the current story will choose the next contributor in the series, to be published in the issue of The Antigonish Review immediately following it. The only stipulations, aside from literary excellence, will be that each new writer will live at least a time zone away from the person who nominated her or him, and write a short introduction to his or her successor in the chain.
I got the idea for TARnations from Canadian dramatist, Lee McDougall, whose Governor General's Award-nominated play, High Life, I had recently seen in Ottawa. My brother Steve was performing in the play, and I recognized Lee from his program photo when I saw him a few weeks later in the departures area of Halifax International Airport. He was busily transcribing an interview he had done, and when I introduced myself he explained his assignment. A magazine had commissioned him to conduct a series of interviews with Canadians from across the country. His only rule was that the current subject had to pick the next person to be interviewed, someone she or he knew and who lived in another province. There didn't have to be anything extraordinary about these people; the idea was merely to show the far-flung and intricate web of personal connections supporting each of us. By the time I met him, Lee had already traversed the country a number of times recording his interviews.
It is fitting that Thomas J. Hubschman, a wonderful writer and the publisher of the online journal Gowanus (www.gowanusbooks.com), should launch our series with his story, "The Devil You Know." Gowanus is the name of a canal, a bay and a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, where at one time immigrants from India and Southeast Asia tended to settle. His magazine is dedicated to publishing writers from all over the world, especially those voices who might not otherwise be heard, and its contributors come from the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Canada, the U.S. and all points in between. I hope that the spirit of Gowanus will help propel TARnations in its meandering path many times around the world, bringing to print enlightening stories and illustrating the ties that connect everyone.
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