At risk of sounding plebeian, your “note” has impelled me to comment.
I have been a subscriber now for almost a year, and I am still trying to understand your magazine’s raison d’être. You refer to your predecessor Saturday Night and its many iterations. I cannot make a comparison here, because I knew it only in its terminal throes. However, I have subscribed to The Atlantic, to which you also refer, for many years. They are only a shadow of their former selves, and are struggling financially; but with their long history among the American liberal intelligentsia, although a small fish in a large pond, they will likely survive for some time to come. You do have something in common with The Atlantic though: prolix, fustian writing with a narrow focus.
You seem to be aiming at being a very small fish in a very small pond. You have managed to snare a couple of well-heeled supporters, and by waving the flag, received financial assistance from provincial and federal cultural councils. So far, so good. Nevertheless, you remain a publication with a very narrow readership, somewhere to the left of the liberal elites.
One thing really puzzles me. In your Letters pages, you often publish letters to the editor provided “online”, or via “Twitter.” Call me old fashioned, but I find it rather distracting and discordant in the pages of a wannabe sophisticated literary publication.
You might take some lessons from Maclean’s, who, while not a literary magazine at all, did re-invent itself and escaped from publication purgatory by the skin of their teeth. You, however, seem content to remain in the antechamber of the literary world.
