Winner : Western Magazine of the Year
20
year
GEIST retrospective
: Special Collector’s Edition
W
Fall & Winter
78/79
$9.95
e keyed everything into the database in the afternoons, and unwound in the evenings with a glass of Savage Caves, a can of Kokanee, a
bottle of Moosehead beer. Twenty years passed and we had 3,383 things in the database, a tidy collection of top-notch work. But where was the pain, the struggle, the agony? Where was the hijacking of No. 8, the whole edition snatched from the loading dock by faceless
villains? Who would steal 5,325 copies of a literary magazine, said the officer attending. No one had any ideas, but one fact remains: Geist No. 8 is the most completely collected issue in the twenty-year history of the illustrious magazine that you hold in your hands at this moment, with 1,388 writers and artists of the first calibre in the database, along with 302 poems, 404 fiction pieces,740 narrative pieces, 175 comix, 295 essays, 108 “other” things, and hundreds of photographs, maps, puzzles and illustrations, reviews of 1,558 books, films, zines and comix. Some-
one said the numbers don’t add up. Well, some of the records are multiples. And don’t forget the readers, the illustrious 22,580, every one of them keyed into the database with loving attention throughout the same period, readers who followed these same writers and artists of the first calibre through 5,248 published pages, a lot of page turning, a lot of keyboarding, but no smoking, not any more, not in this century anyway. We outgrew our tiny office, and booked meeting rooms in the public library until the librarians threw us out for laughing too loudly too often: it was time to move on . . . continued on page 82 Fact & Fiction Made in Canada by Annabel Lyon t D.M. Fraser t Edith Iglauer t Paul Tough t Miriam Toews Charles Bernstein t Meandricus t Mary Meigs t Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas t TOM WALMSLEY
Soren Bondrup-Nielsen t MandELbrot t bill bissett t Yoshihiro Tatsumi t Jane Awde Goodwin t Clem and Olivier Martini t Bakir Junaideen t Edward Hoagland t Jennica Harper t Patricia Young