This Magazine relies on individual donors like you to support our brand of independent, no-compromises reporting. Magazines of all sizes are struggling, and while we’re actually in relatively stable shape, to be sustainable in the long run we need a base of subscribers and donors who believe in the magazine’s mission just as passionately as we do—and who are willing to support it financially. The kind of journalism you read in This Magazine often turns heads—but it seldom turns profits. Issues of social justice, labour, poverty, progressive economics, aboriginal peoples, queer identities, feminism, environmental sustainability, political art and the artists who make it—we commission and publish these kinds of stories because we believe they’re important. But they’re not the kind of topics (cars! makeup! celebrity diets!) that commercial magazines build their big business on. So we rely on a small but fiercely dedicated and discerning group of subscribers and donors to keep us going, because they want to read about the things that really matter too.

If you’re already one of those supporters: thank you. We literally could not do it without you. If you’re not a subscriber or donor yet, we’d love it if you’d consider taking out a subscription, making a tax-deductible donation to the foundation, or both. And if you aren’t able to do either of those things right now, that’s OK too! We make our stories available for free online because we think they need to be read, shared, debated, and responded to. Thank you for reading.

Click here to donate quickly and conveniently online. And remember, if you donate $100 or more, we’ll send you Rogue Stimulus, the most incendiary book of Canadian political poems published this generation. Now back to our regular blogging!

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The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology is a fundraiser to restore the Ontario home where he nurtured aspiring young poets and made a mean wild-grape wine.

The ramshackle A-frame house Al Purdy built still stands by the lake in Ameliasburgh, Ontario. A place “so far from anywhere,” he wrote, “even homing pigeons lost their way.”

Inside, it’s nearly as it was when he died 10 years ago. His drawers and cupboards still hold the flotsam and jetsam of a well lived life.

Outside, wild grass has reclaimed a shed that was once a guest house for young poets like Michael Ondaatje. Purdy’s writing room, another shed, sinks slowly into the muddy earth. The main house is badly in need of a new foundation.

That’s where the Al Purdy A-frame Trust comes in. A collection of poets, authors and CanLit lovers want to raise the money to buy the land, save the house, and start writer-in-residence program in the A-frame.

“Nurturing young writers was a second vocation for Al,” said Jean Baird, the project’s head. “And he was blunt!”

Canada hasn’t done a great job of preserving its physical literary history, Baird says. The childhood home of author Joy Kogawa is preseved in British Colombia, but 60 years passed between it being her family home and becoming a historic site. Purdy’s house is still owned by his wife Eurithie, and remains largely untouched since his death.

The book The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology is an amazing piece of Canadian literary history, and a fundraiser for the project.

The anthology has the same cobbled-together yet built-to-last feeling as the A-frame itself. It’s a summer scrapbook of essays, poems and pictures by authors including Denis Lee, F. R. Scott, and Margaret Atwood. Purdy’s own essays and poems flesh out the famous cottage that was once CanLit’s own homemade-wine fueled summer camp and setting for many of his poems.

The A-frame was the go-to spot for aspiring Canadian poets and acclaimed wordsmiths alike for 40 years. Many of the aspiring poets, like Ondaatje, later became the acclaimed in part due to their visits to the A-frame to hone their skills.

Many of the book’s contributors, including Eurithie, credit the house as the catalyst that transformed Purdy’s writing from his awkward early attempts to the beautiful and often brash verses he wrote in his middle years about the land and our history.

So we built a house, my wife and I

Our house at a backwater puddle of a lake

near Ameliasburgh, Ont. spending

our last hard-earned buck to buy second-hand lumber.

-Al Purdy, from “In Search of Owen Roblin”

Baird says it’ll cost about $900,000 to buy the house, upgrade it to current safety codes, and establish the writer-in-residence endowment. So far, most of the money the trust has received has been in $10 and $20 increments from poetry-loving Canadians. The push is on now to get several large donors to really get things rolling.

For more information about the project, or to make a donation, visit Harbourfront Publishing’s website.

Contrary to what the Harper government would have Canadians believe about the “chattering classes,” people are expressing their outrage over Harper’s unilateralism at family dinners, in the workplace, in social media and in print. Professional and aspiring writers across the country have been invited to submit poems for the anthology which will be published by Mansfield Press just in time for the reconvening of Parliament on March 3.

A book launch and protest will be held at or near Parliament Hill on March 5, 2010.

The book will be titled Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. We’ll keep you posted on purchasing details as we get closer to publishing day.

The almost-bare shelves of Toronto's Pages Bookstore in its final days. Daniel Tencer writes about the plight of independent booksellers in the November-December issue of This Magazine.

The November-December 2009 issue of This Magazine is now snaking its way through the postal system, and subscribers should find it in their mailboxes any day now. We expect it to be available on newsstands next week, probably. (Remember, subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too.) We’ll start posting articles from the issue online next week. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other sweet, sweet This action.

This issue is our annual mega-hyper-awesome edition (64 pages instead of 48!), as we bring you a special supplement with the winners of the 2009 Great Canadian Literary Hunt.The winners this year were:

On the cover this month is a special package of articles we call Legalize Everything! — five writers tackle five things that should be legalized, and the activists who are fighting to make that a reality. Katie Addleman witnesses the madness of the drug trade, and the misbegotten “war on drugs” that criminalizes the mentally ill, funnels billions of black-market dollars into the pockets of narcoterrorists, and never actually reduces drug use. Tim Falconer asks our politicians to legalize physician-assisted suicide and allow Canadians to die on their own terms. Jordan Heath Rawlings meets the artists who believe that online music sharing may actually be the future of their industry, not its end. Laura Kusisto says criminalizing hate speech erodes Canadian democracy and offers no meaningful protection for minorities. And Rosemary Counter hunts down the outlaw milk farmer who wants all Canadians to have the right to enjoy unpasteurized milk, even if he has to go all the way to the supreme court to do it.

Elsewhere in the magazine, Meena Nallainathan surveys the state of Canada’s Tamil community following the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam last spring, and meets four Tamil activists who may hold some answers for rebuilding a Sri Lankan nation tormented by decades of civil war.

All that, plus James Loney on the Canadian government’s attitudes towards its citizens trapped abroad; Bruce M. Hicks on what Canada’s new Mexican and Czech visa restrictions are really about; Paul McLaughlin interviews B.C.’s Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, on the eve of his American incarceration; Dorothy Woodend on a new crop of documentaries that dissect the workings of our capitalist world; Darryl Whetter gives his picks for the must-reads of the first decade of the 21st century; Navneet Alang warns that when it comes to online charity, sometimes clicking isn’t enough; Lisa Charleyboy profiles Nadya Kwandibens and her photographic exploration of the urban Aboriginal experience, “Concrete Indians”; Aaron Cain sends a postcard from San Salvador, after a chilling meeting with some right-wing politicians on the verge of a losing election; and Jen Gerson ranks Canada’s political leaders on their Facebook and Twitter savvy.

PLUS: Daniel Tencer on the plight of independent bookstores; Sukaina Hirji on Vancouver’s Insite safe injection clinic; Lindsay Kneteman on Alberta’s Democratic Renewal Project; Melissa Wilson on getting the flu shot; Graham F. Scott on Canada’s losing war in Afghanistan; Jorge Antonio Vallejos on a remembrance campaign for Canada’s missing Aboriginal women; Jennifer Moore on an Ecuadorian village that’s suing the Toronto Stock Exchange; Cameron Tulk on Night, a new play about Canada’s far north; Andrea Grassi reviews Dr. Bonnie Henry’s Soap and Water & Common Sense; and Ellen Russell on Canadian workers’ shrinking wages.

View (slightly altered!) from Sacred Sueños, outside Vilcabamba, Ecuador. Read Jenn Hardy's cover story on permaculture in the July-August 2009 issue of This Magazine.

The July-August issue of This Magazine is now in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on better newsstands coast-to-coast this week. Two pieces from the issue are already online: Jenn Hardy‘s cover story on the new generation of farmers using the principles of permaculture to radically reshape our food system; and Navneet Alang‘s column on emergent “real-time citizenship” on the web. Everything else will gradually trickle online in the weeks ahead, so keep checking back for more. You can subscribe to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, or follow us on Twitter for updates and links to new content.

Here are some of the other features you’ll find in the July-August issue: Dawn Paley writes from the Cauca Valley, Colombia, about the plight of sugar-plantation workers there, and the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement that threatens their already tenuous working conditions. Morgan Dunlop‘s feature on modern church sanctuary tells the story of three Canadian church congregations who took in refugees whom Immigration Canada wanted deported, and the larger fight for a more just and humane refugee system in this country.

There’s more: Paul McLaughlin interviews Gordon Graff, the archictecture student who proposes a 59-storey “SkyFarm” for downtown Toronto, which he says could feed 40,000 people; Craig Saunders finds that Environment Canada appears to be muzzling its own researchers; Adel Iskandar asks the CRTC to finally bring Al Jazeera to Canadian airwaves; Veronica Islas parties with Ottawa’s Gay Guerilla Takeover;  Andrea McDowell has strong feelings about Wind Turbine Syndrome; Nick Taylor-Vaisey surveys the recession’s effects on Canadian arts and culture; Elaisha Stokes sends a postcard from Lusaka, Zambia, about new anti-smoking laws that have locals lighting up in strange places; Bruce M. Hicks finds the Green Party of Canada skewing electoral strategies for every party, left and right; books columnist Darryl Whetter on creative-writing masters degrees; Dorothy Woodend on exploitation, documentary, and Jackass; Sean Michaels profiles the “conceptual comedy” duo Life of a Craphead; and returning economics columnist Ellen Russell dismantles the rhetoric around so-called “big government.”

PLUS: a new short story by Elisabeth de Mariaffi; new poems by Kathryn Mockler; Erica Butler on urban chickens; Rosemary Counter on electronic cigarettes; Anna Bowen on what stimulus dollars are buying; editor Graham F. Scott on applying Canadian law abroad; Graham Lanktree on electronic musician Tim Hecker; Terese Saplys on Nicole Brossard’s latest novel, Fences in Breathing; and an expanded letters section with your feedback on our May-June cover story on nuclear power.

bp Nichol. Courtesy bpnichol.ca

And it is true that in these tiny works of ephemera have been published some of the most experimental and best work of Canadian poets such as Gwendolyn McEwen, Jay Millar, and of course bp Nichol. Moreover, like the Canadian poetry they contain, chapbooks possess an intimate quality, are disarmingly ordinary though exquisitely rare, and remain frustratingly absent from mainstream Canadian bookstores.

This is all part of the appeal of the annual bp Nichol Chapbook Awards, hosted by the Phoenix Community Works Foundation. The $2,000 prize for the best chapbook released by a Canadian publishing house was initiated in 1984 by the B.C. poet bp Nichol, and named after him following his death in 1988. This year, the award will be given out at a ceremony on Wednesday, June 24, 7 p.m. at Augusta House in Toronto’s Kensington Market area. This free event promises to gather together the city’s literary community, with poetry readings, live music, raffle prizes, and a tribute to Nichol himself.

There is also good news for those who can’t make it, or for others who like me are frustrated by the elusiveness of chapbooks in bookstores and online: The winning book will be featured for all to see on bpnichol.ca, a new website dedicated to reproducing Nichol’s work online. The website, which was developed by the Artmob project in collaboration with bp’s widow Ellie, features an interpretive archive of Nichol’s work “curated” by members of the country’s artistic community. Right now the site covers only a tiny fraction of what was produced by the prolific poet with the tragically short career, and it can still feel a little thin. But the site is trying to encourage (unpaid) submissions, so undoubtedly it will grow.

Hopefully the website will also branch out further than just memorializing Nichol’s work, into more projects like the Chapbook Awards that showcase emerging talent. Nichol was a great believer in the quaint chapbook as a medium for poetic experimentation; but more than that he was a great believer in just about anything as a medium for poetry – including visual art, music, videos, and, even a 1977 Apple IIe computer. Or since he can say it so much better than I:
If [the poet’s] need is to touch you physically he creates a poem /object for you to touch and is not a sculptor for he is still moved by the language and sculpts with words … I place myself there, with them, whoever they are, wherever they are, who seek to reach themselves and the other thru the poem by as many exits and entrances as are possible.

The bp Nichol Poetry awards will take place Wednesday, June 24th at 7 p.m. at the Augusta House, 2nd floor, 152 Augusta Ave. For more information contact natalie@pcwf.ca.