Welcome to this Issue

From the Editor, Kim Jernigan.

My father, a student of words, once remarked on how it is often the shortest, most common words which carry the most meanings, words like "take," say, or "help." It was with this in mind that I took out my desk dictionary, a battered Webster's going back to my university days which I favour, for reasons both sentimental and practical, over the multiplicity of digital dictionaries at my disposal, and looked up the word "list."

I had long wanted to build an issue of The New Quarterly around the use of lists as a thematic and structural element in fiction and in verse. To list, to enumerate, to name-all these seem essential to being human, to asserting one's small claim on the world. And I like, too, that the items in a list tend to be verbs or nouns, the parts of speech most essential to human grammar.

Verbs govern the phrases that comprise action-based to-do lists, lists dedicated to providing order and impetus, a sense of control, in the face of a daunting array of tasks, though they are also the stuff of daydreams, as in a things-to-do-before-I-die list. Verbs, we are told, are the essential fuel of fiction. Things must happen if a story is to unfold. But I am also persuaded of the importance of nouns, particularly concrete nouns, the words that comprise inventories and catalogues, to the operation of fiction. They serve as a kind of shorthand. List the clothes someone habitually wears, the contents of her fridge, the books on her shelves, the things he carries, and you have an index to character. We are, in a sense, what we own (or wish to)-a list of such objects is a surrogate self.

My dictionary gave no fewer than nine entries for the word "list," both nouns and verbs: from the Old English lust, to please or suit, to wish or choose, and (continuing the connection between lists and desire) from the Middle English lysten, inclination or craving; from the Old English hlystan, to listen or hear; from the world of making and doing, to cut away a narrow strip from the edge of sapwood or cloth, also to plant in ridges and furrows; to enumerate, register, recruit, enlist, to put (oneself) down, or to enter with a price; to tilt or deviate from the vertical; and, as a noun, a strip of cloth or wood; a roll, roster, index or catalogue; an arena for combat; a field of competition or controversy; a limit or boundary. Lists, it seems, are associated with the human desire to have, to control, to attend, to fix. All the stuff of literature!

So, this issue is a book of lists, and the lists themselves are stories, found poems, reliquaries, prescriptions, proscriptions, or a kind of taking stock. My first act towards compiling it was, of course, to make a list. But is a list really a list if it contains only one item? Here, then, is a list of the one-item lists I compiled: (1) To-do: find a guest editor (2) Writers I'd most want to "enlist" as editor: Diane Schoemperlen.

Diane's own work typically starts with a form and then finds its subject. She has structured stories around lists of clothing, parts of speech, mathematical formulae, questions on a multiple choice exam, encounters on trains, etc., etc. Her 1995 novel, In the Language of Love, is based on the 100 words of the Standard Word-Association Test. Her 2008 "post-romantic" novel, At a Loss for Words, is stuffed with lists to jump-start a stalled imagination. I figured Diane must herself be a keeper of lists and someone particularly attuned to their poetry and portent.

And so she is. She thrilled to the opportunity when I asked her to collaborate, though I said that I wanted her as both contributor and editor, eventually also as illustrator. She came up with the set of list-based collages that graces our cover and another that serves as visual accompaniment to her own story, "A Nervous Race," compiled from a list of phrases from a turn-of-the-century science text. For the wherewithal to reproduce these in colour, we thank The Region of Waterloo Arts Council whose motto is "Make Art Happen."

If I could fit it on the spine, I'd be tempted to title this issue of The New Quarterly "The Blissfully Listful Diane Schoemperlen's Guide to Lists and Their Uses," her sensibility is so strongly felt throughout. Instead, I've called it "To List is Human" though Diane claims "To Err is Human; To List Divine." It is she who made the gift of titles-99 of them, free for the taking-on our website. May they inspire many more poems and stories, list-based or not. If, dear readers, any of you turns one of her titles to good use, we'd love to see what imaginative flights it fuelled.