This morning I followed a link to a Toronto Star story about Geist editor, Stephen Osborne, winning the National Magazine Awards Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement.
The award is a super testament to the dedication of Osborne and the rest of the Geist staff. Congratulations!
Honours pouring in for Geist and its editorPosted by James Sherrett at June 11, 2004 02:55 PMLiterary mag lives on a shoestring
NMA award is 3rd so far this yearJUDY STOFFMAN
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTERStephen Osborne can't get over it. For the founder of Vancouver's Pulp Press and editor of Geist magazine, 2004 is already an annus mirabilis — and it's only June.
In February, he won a CBC Literary Award for his travel story "Girl Afraid Of Haystacks," in March he won a Vancouver Arts Award for writing and publishing, and tonight at the National Magazine Awards gala being held at the Carlu, he will receive this year's outstanding achievement award for his contributions to cultural journalism.
"It came as a real surprise because I had spent my whole life on the literary fringes. And there I am in Ottawa, shaking hands with the husband of the Governor General, accepting the CBC prize," said Osborne, 56, yesterday. "You are suddenly aware of people looking at you. I can't think properly."
Tonight's award (a certificate and framed portrait), says Terry Sellwood, president of the National Magazine Awards Foundation, "recognizes Stephen's talent, his passion, his building of the largest literary magazine in Canada."
Geist has a paid circulation of about 5,000 and a readership of about 15,000. Each issue is an off-beat mix of stories, memoirs, photographs, comics, reviews, little-known facts, extracts of work in progress, bits of poetry, a crossword puzzle, a thematic map of Canada by Melissa Edwards (for example: the Menstrual Map of Canada, the Fairy Tale Map of Canada) and witty letters from readers. It adds up to a snapshot of "the imaginary country we all inhabit," as Geist's Web site puts it.
Geist is the descendent of 3 Cent Pulp, a free magazine Osborne started while he headed Pulp Press (now Arsenal Pulp Press).
"We started Geist in 1990 with $7,600, as a kind of Canadian Harper's. We bought the Harper's Canadian subscription list," he says. "But unlike Harper's, we avoid politics. We are all about culture and ideas."
The name means "spirit" in German.
"It's a very big word, part of the vocabulary of German philosophy," explains Osborne, who writes and contributes photographs to the magazine under the pseudonym Mandelbrot, after Benoit Mandelbrot, a Polish-born mathematician who developed fractal geometry.
That this improvised publication has managed to survive through almost 14 years and 52 issues on a shoestring is due to Osborne's optimism and ingenuity, and to the volunteer efforts of his many friends in the writing world willing to pull all-nighters.
His staff and contributors are fiercely loyal, despite being ridiculously underpaid.
Only recently has Geist managed to pay editorial fees comparable to what newspapers pay freelancers — about 40 cents a word, a third of what a mainstream magazine offers.
His contributors subsidize the magazine, Osborne told a forum of editors and publishers at the Old Mill this week, along with government granting agencies. Since 2003, he has also received support from the Tula Foundation in Stratford, the creation of Eric Peterson, who made his fortune in medical software.
"Geist has enabled me to stretch myself," says columnist Stephen Henighan, who recently wrote a fascinating column about the spelling chaos in Canadian-published books that he observed while acting as a judge for the Governor-General's Award.
"Geist expresses a kind of post-nationalist Canadian nationalism, which is unheard of in a magazine coming out of the West. That peculiar vision that is Steve Osborne's ... He encourages his writers to be cosmopolitan and write about other places but he wants to know what it means for Canada."
You won't find Henighan, the Guelph-based author of three novels, two books of short stories, and two of criticism, appearing regularly in any other Canadian periodical. Annabel Lyon, whose novel The Best Thing For You was recently published by McClelland & Stewart, essayist Alberto Manguel (Stevenson Under The Palm Trees), and historian Daniel Francis have also found a home at Geist.
Francis is the author of the provocative The Imaginary Indian: The Image Of The Indian In Canadian Culture (edited by Osborne for Arsenal Pulp Press in 1992), the book that appears to be the unacknowledged source for Thomas King's recent Massey Lectures titled The Truth About Stories.
"We are an established magazine now and my hair has turned grey in the meantime," Osborne says ruefully. The magazine's current issue is a healthy 84 pages, yet Osborne feels keenly the fragility of both Geist and the culture it documents.
"The forces at work to destabilize local culture are enormous, from the political clout of U.S. magazines on our newsstands to Hollywood movies. If the blockbuster becomes the preferred method of selling books and movies, what happens to young writers, to 'zines, to small publishers?" he wonders. "The rug could be pulled out from under us at any time."