Tell us a bit about your press.
CAROUSEL (est. 1983) is an exquisitely produced hybrid literary/arts magazine representing new & established artists, with a focus on positioning Canadian talent within an international context. This innovative journal itself on presenting work across many genres: if it’s original & engaging, we want to give it a home!
What will CAROUSEL look like in the future?
We recently announced one of the most significant changes to CAROUSEL that has ever occurred: after almost 40 years as a print journal, the time has come for us to revisit our mandate and revise our future path. Beginning this fall, all of our new issues will be released exclusively on our website — and importantly, they will be free to read & enjoy from cover to cover, accessible to all!
Two annual issues will continue to come out as usual, but will be exclusively available for free online beginning with CAROUSEL 44, which will launch in November 2020. As previously stated, no one will need to subscribe/pay for access to our content any longer, which is sure to greatly expand our readership.
Also, our submissions process recently changed in many ways for the better! While we will still be using Submittable, it is now free for everyone to submit without having to be a subscriber! We are aiming for quicker response times, and for those whose work is accepted, shorter publication waits. We’ve tweaked the details related to submitting poetry and fiction, and we added a new ‘creative reviews’ category.
How have the current multiple global crises impacted your work with the press?
Since the pandemic began, CAROUSEL has been a lot more active on social media. We update Twitter, Instagram or Facebook several times a week with regular updates about what we’re doing, including information about our new submission calls.
Freed from the need to focus all our decisions through the lens of magazine sales, we recently began posting archival selections to our BLOG, our little part to help with social distancing efforts … in early July, beginning with CAROUSEL 15 (from way back in 2004, the first issue that, editorially speaking, really feels like the journal we publish today), we began selecting a few exciting works from each issue in our vaults — you’ll be able to see poetry, fiction, comics, visual art and interviews — and are releasing them into the cyber-wild, providing our audience with a small sampling of one issue every week for the foreseeable future. New posts are scheduled most weekdays.
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The summer 2020 issue of CAROUSEL — our final print issue — is out now featuring Poetry, Fiction, Comics, Interviews & Artwork by: John Barton • Gary Barwin • derek beaulieu • David James Brock • Sue Chenette • Jeremy Colangelo • Adam Day • Leesa Dean • Jonathan Duckworth • Jonathan Dyck • Kenneth Jakubas • Karl Jirgens • Carol Krause • Mark Laliberte • Aaron Linton • Mark A. McCutcheon • Conor McDonnell • miriam putters • Frédérique Rusch • Lauren Turner • P.C. Vandall
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Poetry, Fiction, Reviews & Artwork by: Rachel Cloud Adams • JC Bouchard • Tim Conley • Rocco de Giacomo • Jean deMers • Nicholas Di Genova • Tanis Franco • Eleanor Gray • KIRBY • Mark Laliberte • Evelyn Lau • Khashayar Mohammadi • gustave morin • Kamila Rina • Helen Tran • Daniel Scott Tysdal • Christine Walde • Jade Wallace • Myna Wallin • John Sibley Williams • Bänoo Zan
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• we happily adapt a charming little sequential vispo work by Canadian creator Hart Broudy originally published by Gronk waaaay back in 1971: seen again from a slightly different cultural lens, When I Was Young One Summer: A Concrete Picturepome certainly speaks to today’s experimental comics movement — a lost micropress classic, historically revisited
• we look at Canadian illustrator Dani Crosby’s latest series of large-scale ‘life portraits’, created for the Durham Region Portrait Project; each complex figure is based on personal stories told to her anonymously by members of her local community
• we present a large, wonderfully bizarre portfolio of b&w drawings by French artist Léo Quievreux; borrowing heavily from the cut up, Quievreux composes his pages in a quasi-musical way, creating works of montage that puzzle together in clever, complex images and sequences
• Toronto creators Robert Dayton and Andrea Werhun conversationally tag-team one another in a long double-interview, playfully probing at the contents of their latest books, and how these themes intersect with their personal lives and life philosophies