Issue 104: The Real Estate Issue
In an earlier issue of TNQ, Canadian poet Robyn Sarah wrote about poets’ propensity for seeing, and hearing, double. They see instructions on the side of a matchbook—“Strike anywhere.”—and take it for an artist’s manifesto. They hear the phrase “the cost of living” and think, yes, living exacts a huge cost. They pick up a roll of masking tape and begin brooding on guilty secrets. The phrase “real estate” has always set up just such a resonance in me. What is it about a place of habitation that makes us real? that defines or confines us? that reveals our true selves or projects the selves we want to be? that makes us more or less than what we imagine?
This issue of The New Quarterly is all about domiciles—a book, a body, a home. And such homes: a tent, a fort, a pit, a rain-soaked trench, a backyard shed, a railway station, a room, an apartment, a house for rent or purchase, a place of refuge or remembrance. To begin: a book.
The New Quarterly’s digs have changed over the years, both our office locale and the book itself, the book that’s the home for the words we publish. We started out with modest means: hand collated, staple bound, printed in the basement, readied for press with an exacto knife and a pot of hot wax. Eventually we switched to an outside press, a perfect binding. We added colour to the cover, a photograph. Our typeface got larger and then smaller. We changed our masthead, spiffed up the interior design, much like a couple moving from apartment to townhouse to country house, acquiring more and better furnishings as they go. Still, though we were not unhappy, we began to yearn for a change, a roomier interior, a more contemporary look. So we applied for a mortgage, or at least for a grant (the Support for Art and Literary Magazines component of the Canada Magazine Fund), and began to shop around for an architect. We found him in Dave Donald.
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