What we forget when we forget about magazine awards

As the recent leaf storm of magazine awards fades completely but not quite from memory, I can still (barely) recall observing aloud the day before the so-called gala evening of the National Magazine Awards that cultural magazines can barely afford to participate in these events in a meaningful way—a meaningful way being to enter as many contenders in as many categories as possible—as Maclean’s and The Walrus have demonstrated (once again): if you spend a lot of money you can make the awards “meaningful.”

For the cultural magazines, which can be defined as small-circ magazines whose subsidy derives largely from non-advertising sources, nominations and instances of meaningfulness are few and far between. Every year at Geist we ponder again this question of the money and the enormous amount of time required to complete the application process, and in the end someone (often an idealistic intern who feels that we owe it to our contributors) bites the bullet and arbitrary choices are made and hefty, expensive packages go out to Toronto and Vancouver. And every year we regret having bitten the same cliche yet again. The person to whom I made this observation (at the Mags Canada lunch), I also recall, was a director of the National Magazine Awards and I did not wish to be entirely unfriendly to her cause. “What we need is a separate set of Awards for the cultural mags,” I said to her, in a tone that suggested that I had been pondering this idea for some time. “Call it the Arts and Letters Awards, or something like that. Lower the fees, cut back on the glitz and that ghastly dinner, and move it around from city to city. Let the cultural mags celebrate themselves and award themselves plenty of nominations.” (I quote from memory.)

Plenty of nominations would inject meaning into the event for the small mags, and perhaps even make news. The cultural publishers I know would be happy to participate, especially if they can remember how dreary and expensive and meaningless the last rounds of awards were—not easy to do as we see, because it is in the nature of awards to fade rapidly from memory, leaving behind only a faint trace of regret, to be rekindled once again, and always too late, in the weeks following next year’s awards.