Matrix 84 is out now, with a dossier on new Vancouver writing (which I co-edited with Sachiko Murakami).  Our intro:

The work collected here reflects some of the ways that the Vancouver writing scene has constituted itself through ties to the visual, to social critique, and to genre-busting. Aaron Peck’s protagonist performs a post-Benjamin tour of the Richmond night market (a time-honoured pilgrimage among bargain-seekers and certain of the Vancouver intelligentsia), his thoughts turning to a visual and material analysis of what appears in his path by happenstance and by design. Charles Demers’ protagonist, no less the contemporary flaneur, performs an astute social analysis of place and class set off by the purchase of a one dollar slice of pizza. Meredith Quartermain’s assay into historical fiction sees her character’s biography focussed through the narrowest of prisms (a language of “footings and slip joints”), reshaping the genre.

Daniela Elza’s poem evokes Mountain View Cemetery, a large inner-city graveyard that straddles a dozen city blocks (the crematorium’s contrails are said to distract local highschool students); it is a historic Vancouver site, literally graven with memory, but also the recent site of cultural activities including a Vancouver Biennale vernissage and Capilano University Editions book launch. Social issues and writing have long been entwined in Vancouver, and Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Reg Johanson offer up important social critiques in poems that are political, tactical, and deftly languaged. In these, meaning accrues through feints and imputations, images are glancing and meaning is unsettled: Wong’s piece, a non-fiction meditation, poem, and call to action at once, traces the devastation wrought by our contamination of water as life source; Lai deftly connects commodified substances with natural sources — so long uncoupled that the reconnection of leaf and paper is felt as small shock; and Johanson offers up, in his “Escratches,” a glimpse of the social outrages mounted in the name of Vancouver’s upcoming Olympics. In the poems of Scott Inniss, history emerges alongside place names to collide with the present, and tensions mount between “affluence” and “effluent.” Nikki Reimer offers accounts of the RCMP’s tasering of Robert Dziekanski at YVR. The poems stutter through distorted grammar and syntax, echoing both the failure of communication that contributed to Dziekanski’s death and the debacle of public inquiry that followed. Jacqueline Turner turns her attention upwards to the ubiquitous building cranes at sites of development that more familiarly define to a Vancouverite the cityscape than the buildings they create; Ray Hsu questions whether it is the Empire or its inhabitants who define a city. Inhabitants abound, from the “barrage of khaki pants” in Dina Del Bucchia’s tribute to Nyac, longtime Vancouver Aquarium resident and YouTube celebrity otter, to those “busy loving everything” in Jen Currin’s “You are on Yew Street.”

In the world of images, Vancouver veers between utopia – a fabled city of glass rimmed by mountains – and city of bedlam, in which images of the Downtown Eastside’s inhabitants are portrayed as irrationally drug-ridden and intractably poor. Bastin and Van Camp avoid such narrow representations of the city: Richard Van Camp’s lens captures a whimsical and nuanced Vancouver in the scrawled and hand-made signage this city’s occupants sometimes use to hail one another and Sarah Bastan’s diptychs offer views of the city and its citizens, separated. While at first glance Bastin’s pictures — like the poems and writing gathered here — might appear to be of any city, in the details one sees that these could only be, powerfully and unmistakably, portraits of Vancouver.

Sachiko Murakami & Anne Stone, eds.

September 2009

Poetry: 3-5 poems. Prose: 3000 words max.

Edited by Sachiko Murikami and Anne Stone

Deadline: 15 August 2009

Email submissions preferred: vancouver@matrixmagazine.org

Issue 80: The Gallows Humour Issue

Matrix magazine is now accepting submissions for its Gallows Humour dossier. We are looking for your darkest, most absurd and sardonic, witty, acerbic, ironic and sarcastic unpublished writing. Edited by Mike Spry. Poetry: (3-5 poems). Fiction: (3500 words max.).

Deadline: April 11th, 2008.

Electronic Submissions Preferred: spry@matrixmagazine.org

On Gallows Humour:

“The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”
– Sigmund Freud,“Humour (Der Humor)”

“When Oscar Wilde allegedly gestured at the garish wallpaper in his cheap Parisian hotel room and announced with his dying breath, “Either it goes or I go,” he was exhibiting something beyond an irrepressibly brilliant wit. Freud, you see, wasn’t whistling “Edelweiss” when he wrote that gallows humour is indicative of “a greatness of soul.” The quips of the condemned prisoner or dying patient tower dramatically above, say, sallies on TV sitcoms by reason of their gloriously inappropriate refusal, even at life’s most acute moment, to surrender to despair.”
–Tom Robbins, “In Defiance of Gravity”

If you’re viewing this page spectrally and lack an email account, but still want to submit, send your hardcopy to:

Matrix Magazine
The Gallows Humour Issue
1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., LB-658
Montreal, QC
H3G 1M8

We are looking for the best unpublished writers in Canada for our 79th issue.

We are looking for innovative short fiction and poetry by young or emerging writers.

Eligible applicants include Canadian citizens who have NOT published a trade book. People who have published chapbooks or have been published in anthologies or magazines may submit.

Edited by Ian Orti and Maya Merrick

Electronic submissions only. (Word or text files only)

Send to: ian[at]matrixmagazine[dot]org
Due date: December 5th

The Narrative “I”: Autobiography in Film and Fiction
edited by Taien Ng-Chan

How does film and fiction fit into your life? From lurid confessionals, diary entries, screenplays and first-person accounts of historical moments (real and unreal), from the poetic to the absurd, any genre, any medium from page to screen. Matrix 78 will include a DVD anthology of short films, videos and animations to be featured with the theme section. Please send your time-based media (on NTSC DVD or as Quicktime files preferably) as well as your short fiction, comics, poetry, screenplays, essays, and art forms to:

Matrix Magazine
The Narrative “I” Issue
1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., LB-658
Montreal, QC
H3G 1M8

Deadline for submissions is August 1st, 2007. Contact Taien Ng-Chan for more info or go to Matrix Magazine’s submission page.

And for anyone in the Vancouver area, I’ll be reading this Thursday in the Open Text Reading Series from the new (about to be put to press) novel, Delible. Here’s the details:

Thurs, March 22nd, 2007.
Capilano College.
12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Reading followed by Q&A session.
(Cedar Bldg. Room 148)

The cover is a picture of Rob when he was small. At his sister’s, a week after he was gone, we all gathered and in her bedroom, she’d put on old home movies of when they were children. They had pictures of Rob in blankets, a baby. So strange, so strange to have lost your friend and see him, for the first time, so impossibly young and unmade. He was one of my closest friends, and someone I lived with, too, for many years. I’ve got a piece in it about meeting him and about losing him. I wasn’t sure I could write it. Anyway, the piece I wrote is up on the site.