Issue 104 Launch
Wednesday November 7th, one of the first long nights of winter, saw writers, readers and friends take shelter at the Registry Theatre to celebrate the launch of Issue 104 of The New Quarterly, “The Real Estate Issue,” and our stylish new design. In the cozy theatre guests pulled up chairs and made piles of coats and scarves as the remarkable Theatre Beyond Words performed vignettes from their 30-year repertoire. The troupe of gifted physical actors comically and gracefully demonstrated how the body possesses a particular language all its own. Even bedroom furniture received the TBW treatment in a scene so scintillating that few will be able to see a chest of drawers the same way again. The audience roared its appreciation, and board chair Bruce Johnstone was so moved that he could only express his delight in the TBW dialect of Russian-inflected gibberish. Sadly his eloquence was lost on most of the audience except for TBW actor Harro Maskow who responded artfully, also in gibberish, to the finer points of Bruce’s speech.
We suspect they were also planning how Bruce might run away to join the troupe, having found a new passion. You can find a meditation (in English) on the rhetoric of the body and the challenges of physical theatre by Theatre Beyond Words’s artistic director Robin Patterson in Issue 104.
Onto the newly empty stage Editor Kim Jernigan next welcomed two of the writers in the issue: Tanis MacDonald and Terry Griggs. Tanis’s poems “Promise to the House” and “Renovation Suite” are odes to the intertwining of hearts and hammers, houses and homes, and her words built around the audience a lyrical frame for the evening’s theme. Terry Griggs followed with a comic piece called “Confirmed,” a reflection on her childhood ambition to sell real estate, never fulfilled, though her fiction abounds with “the nosily delving specs on houses, homes, enclosures of all kinds (including heads), what they mean, their value—how they define or confine—even their magical attributes.” The piece was particularly poignant for special guests the ReMax McIntyre Group who partnered with TNQ on the issue. 
After the readings, guests gathered in the lobby for refreshments and a shot at winning some fabulous real estate-themed raffle prizes including a home decorating consultation, a romantic B&B weekend, and a collection of house-related novels. Guests frantically scanned their arm’s length worth of tickets, wishing that the raffle volunteers had had longer arms. Then, after much talk about homes and houses, they spilled back into the night, clutching their issues to their breasts, anxious to get back to their own warm-lit harbours.
For a similar sense of sanctuary lost and found, pick up “The Real Estate Issue ” of TNQ and enjoy it in your own favourite corner called home.
-Grace Johnstone
