Category Archives: magazines

DM Fraser responds to Margaret Atwood in 1974

Part 3 of 5 in the series 3-​Cent Magazine

In place of feel­ing, we’re served a smor­gas­bord of left­over senti­men­tal­i­ties topped with cheap ironies like stale whipped cream; in place of thought, a cata­logue of lnfor­ma­tion Canada plat­i­tudes; in place of reasoned polit­i­cal analy­sis, an undi­gested lump of anti-​American rhetoric no self-​respecting para­noiac would lay claim to. And, at the end, we have a cop-​out even in terms of the novel itself: another of those weary recon­cil­i­a­tions in which, god help us, Revolt is snuffed out in the great damp blan­ket of lnstant Tran­scen­dence. Women take note: the message here, what Surfac­ing at last comes down to, is that Woman’s place really is, after all, with her Man, just as long as he’s a Cana­dian : “he may have been sent as a trick. But he isn’t an Amer­i­can, l can see that now; he isn’t anything, he is only half-​formed, and for that reason l can trust him.”

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Digested!

In the mail today a copy of Read­ers Digest arrived contain­ing a cheque and a story of mine published ten years ago and collected in 2007 in an anthol­ogy called Body Break­down. The orig­i­nal story appeared on www​.open​let​ters​.net, the epis­to­lary venture under­taken by Paul Tough after his tenure as editor of Satur­day Night, the general inter­est magazine […]

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Know when it's over

Part 4 of 5 in the series 3-​Cent Magazine

After seven and a half years, and 117 issues, we put the 3-​cent maga­zine to rest with a final monster edition of 24 pages, a length equiv­a­lent to 6 regu­lar issues and intended to recog­nize outstand­ing subscrip­tio balances. The Last Issue was dated 20 Janu­ary 1980, Sunday of the same week that smug­glers were discovered […]

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Do the math

Part 2 of 5 in the series 3-​Cent Magazine

By our own calcu­la­tions we had in the course of seven years spent $65,000 in the Marble Arch beer parlour, the equiv­a­lent of 130,000 glasses of beer. We had printed a total of 117,000 copies of the maga­zine, half a million pages of liter­ary writ­ing, we had perfected the finan­cial manage­ment tech­nique that we named 100% […]

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Use the technology

Part 1 of 5 in the series 3-​Cent Magazine

By our own calcu­la­tions we had spent $65,000 in the Marble Arch beer parlour, the equiv­a­lent of 130,000 glasses of beer. We had printed a total of 117,000 copies of the maga­zine, half a million pages of liter­ary writ­ing, we had perfected the finan­cial manage­ment tech­nique that we had named 100% Loss Financ­ing. And we had launched the 3-​Day Novel Contest, which is still thriv­ing today, in its pages.

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Launch a 3-cent magazine

Part 5 of 5 in the series 3-​Cent Magazine

The idea for a four-​page maga­zine emerged on an other­wise idle after­noon when we discov­ered that you could get 5,000 words onto an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper in 5 point type if you weren’t too picky about margins.

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