Launch party for Vancouver's Sad Mag will be anything but

This Thursday, in Vancouver, there's a launch of a brand new local arts and cultural magazine called Sad Mag, which seems to be a misnomer.

In fact, it seems like a joyous celebration of the writers and artists of Vancouver. Here's what could well pass for the magazine's mission statement:

We wanted to tell beautiful stories in rich, vibrant language that made Vancouver’s most interesting personalities come alive; the kind of folks you wouldn’t read about because they’re not hawking goods or winning awards or 50-plus with a chic manor in Kitsilano. We wanted to publish gorgeous, original photography that made the grittiest, most colourful corners of our city come alive.

The magazine is run like an artist-run centre, published four times a year by The Sad Magazine Publications Society as a non-profit and entirely volunteer-run organization with a mandate to

"advance artistic achievement through the promotion of literacy, art, and public discourse, and of course, advance the creative profiles of Vancouver’s artists under 40."

It is going to have a free distribution of 4,000 copies and its website already gets 2,000 visits monthly. According to its media kit(which, strangely, carries no ad pricing information), the eidtor-in-chief is Deanne Beattie, formerly arts editor of the Simon Fraser University student paper The Peak and a writer for The Tyee, Ricepaper and Geist. Creative director is Brandon Gaukel, a Vancouver-based photographer who works as an artist and commercial photographer for Xtra West and other Vancouver publications.

According to a nice Q & A posting on The Literary Type blog by The New Quarterly's managing editor Rosalynn Tyo, the founders and recent college graduates were drinking sangria one day in April 2009 and decided to start a magazine for Vancouver's young artists and writers. They found that, while they could get published in larger local publications, their articles could get drowned out in "a sea of ads". Success, they say, will be "supporting gifted artists on the periphery and bringing them to the fore to herald their talents". They also acknowledge the help they've received:

At the start, we received support from Geist Magazine, which fully invested their trust into the talent behind the magazine and gave space on their website for our editor in chief to blog about publishing magazines and the process of making Sad. That a magazine as established as Geist believed in our project was one major measure of success.