Luminato festival teams up with...The Atlantic magazine?

[This post has been updated]Luminato is a Toronto festival of arts, culture and creativity that is driven in large part by the ambitions of co-founder and co-chair Tony Gagliano, the executive chairman CEO of St. Joseph Communications, which publishes some of Canada's largest and most successful magazines -- Toronto Life, Wedding Bells, Fashion, Canadian Family and so on.

Now in its 3rd year (it runs June 5 t0 14) and growing like a weed (in part because of a major funding injection from the federal government), Luminato is a multi-disciplinary celebration of theatre, dance, classical and contemporary music, film, literature, visual arts, design and more. As such, promotion is not only in order but imperative.

However, all that still leaves us scratching our heads about the release this morning of news that Luminato has teamed up with The Atlantic magazine (which Tony Gagliano doesn't own) in a "multi-year partnership...to promote and invest in imaginative literature across a variety of platforms." According to a story in the National Post, Luminato will be "exclusive advertisers" in the magazine's annual summer fiction issue, of which 25,000 copies will be distributed at the festival.

“In establishing this partnership, Luminato and The Atlantic are reaffirming their shared belief that literary fiction remains as important as ever in the modern era – as entertainment, as a means to share new ideas, as a guide for how to live, and as an exploration of what it means to be human,” said James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic in a statement.

(One of the several ironies in this story of course, is that Toronto Life last year ditched its annual summer fiction issue after its 2006 issue.)

“Luminato continues to demonstrate its strong commitment to literature through this innovative partnership with The Atlantic,” says Janice Price, Luminato’s CEO. “We are delighted to work alongside The Atlantic to further promote the arts and bring visitors to Toronto to experience all that Luminato and its cultural partners have to offer.”

According to the Post story, one of the ventures growing out of the partnership will be a panel discussion called "Why Fiction Matters", featuring writers Anne Michaels, Tim O'Brien and Alexi Zentner, and Atlantic deputy editor Scott Stossel, and fiction editor C. Michael Curtis.

According to Tuesday morning's press release, the panelists will discuss "the short story in modern life, what makes good fiction effective, and how fiction – and in particular national literature – has been changed by a borderless global culture."