Issue 107: The Salon des Refusés

SOLD OUT!!

Our Salon des Refuses took flight some six months back when I received e-mail from Dan Wells, publisher of Biblioasis Press and its associated magazine Canadian Notes & Queries. Had I seen The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, the recent anthology edited by writer Jane Urquhart?

He felt it was an important anthology, one which would determine which story writers are read in the coming years, and yet it had omitted many of the writers we both admire-accomplished, influential, innovative writers and, not coincidentally, ones we have published and promoted. Might we get up some sort of competing collection, a bit of advocacy on behalf of these writers?

We decided to celebrate twenty of the writers not included in the Penguin across the Summer issues of our separate magazines, tying them together by matching our cover designs and mailing them together to all of our subscribers.

Dan and I chose our writers baseball fashion-we tossed the bat and took turns choosing (though truth be told, Dan took advantage of my dithering to grab a handful at the start). No matter. Given space enough and time, there's no one on his list who wouldn't also be on mine.

Because we wanted to focus on style, we asked our writers to put forward a story that had been, for them, a "break-through story," one that marked a stylistic departure or that opened up new narrative territory.

Each story is prefaced by a short appreciation to let our readers know what we think the excitement's about and followed by the writer's own commentary on what the story taught her or him about what's possible in the story form. 

Leon Rooke once declaimed (as only Leon Rooke can):

People complain about the short story; a lot of people actually hate the form. They love novels because they can get inside those pages and live with the characters. Short stories, for these people, are just too short. Whereas I feel that the short story is a truly exquisite form, that amazing things can be done in a very short space. A truly satisfying story satisfies me in exactly the same way that a novel does. It feels as complete as a novel, for me. So it’s a bias I don’t really understand. The short story is a beautiful form, strikingly close to a poetic form.
                                                                —“Wild Writers We Have Known,” September 2000

We’re with him, and we hope our Salon will bring others into the fold.

                                                                                           -- Kim Jernigan