Maisonneuve magazine lecture series is about Doing it Right

Maisonneuve magazine is launching a lecture series called Letters from Montreal, on Wednesday May 13 at 8 p.m. It's being presented in collaboration with Café L'Artère, coopérative de solidarité, 7000 Avenue du Parc. 

Talented performers from different backgrounds have been asked to address one topic: Doing It Right. The moderator will be the magazine's editor Halley Cullingham and the speakers will be

• Fariha Roisin, a freelancer writer & the co-host of the podcast Two Brown Girls. Her lecture will be about "Doing the Right Thing: what's feminism got to do with it"
• Rollie Pemberton, a DJ, rapper, poet & person. His lecture will be about "Playing the game the right way"
• Meags Fitzgerald, a graphic novelist, illustrator, improviser and vintage photo booth expert. Her lecture will be about the tension between "Correctness and stubborness", specifically as it relates the clash between innovative design and nostalgia-rooted design.
• Jacob Wren, a writer, novelist, performer and expert at sharing literary quotes on social media. His lecture will be about "Stumbling towards art and politics"

Starnino leaves Maisonneuve to join Reader's Digest; Drew Nelles new EIC

Nelles and publisher Varkhonyi

The longtime editor-in-chief of Maisonneuve magazine, Carmine Starnino is stepping down. He co-founded the Montreal magazine with Derek Webster in 2002, who left to become managing editor of Reader's Digest in 2009. For the past year, Starnino has been working as a part-time editor at RD and will now be joining it full time as senior editor. Starnino will stay on the Maisonneuve board of directors and will be an editor-at-large for the magazine.

"It's heartbreaking to leave Maisonneuve. So much of my identity is bound up with this organization," Starnino said in a release. "Four times a year, bleary-eyed and over-stressed, we scrambled to produce one of the best magazines in the country. It's been exhilarating. But the opportunity to work editorially with Derek again, on the scale of a magazine like Reader's Digest, was too good to pass up."

Drew Nelles, who has been with Maisonneuve since 2009, lately as senior editor, is the new editor-in-chief. Madeline Coleman, who joins from Concordia's the Link, becomes associate editor.  Nelles was a contributor to Maisonneuve's much-missed daily briefing called MediaScout and, at one time, he too worked for Reader's Digest as associate web editor.

An award-winning poet, Carmine Starnino has written four collections of poetry. His most recent book, This Way Out (2009), was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry.

Maisonneuve will continue its quarterly publishing schedule under the direction of publisher Jennifer Varkonyi, and Anna Minzhulina will stay on as art director. In 2010, Maisonneuve was nominated for ten National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year.

The Spring 2011 Issue—Nelles' first as editor-in-chief—includes new writing by Sheila Heti, Pasha Malla, Naheed Mustafa, Ira Basen and rapper Cadence Weapon. "Captain Poetry,"  Starnino's essay on legendary poet bpNichol, will also appear. The issue will be on newsstands March 25.

MediaScout & Maisonneuve: a mystery

Today in the email, another edition of MediaScout, the news digest prepared daily by Maisonneuve magazine in Montreal, containing another brilliant precis (by Daniel Casey) of the so-called news of the day. The topic is the Montebello Summit as covered (or not covered, or covered up) in what MediaScout calls the Big Seven (Globe & Mail, National Post, La Presse, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star, CBC TV News and CTV News). As is often the case, the report today in MediaScout is much better written and more to the point than any of the accounts that it summarizes. The question is: how does Maisonneuve, a literary quarterly with the limited resources of a “cultural” magazine, continue to produce such a high quality news publication? And who are these people, the writers of MediaScout: Daniel Casey, Daniel Tencer, Jordan Himelfarb, Valeries Howes, Claire Ward? We imagine them locked in an attic somewhere in Montreal, speed-reading the news and then writing about it in well-formed sentences, all before dawn—how much black coffee does it take? Since signing on for MediaScout a couple of years ago, I haven’t paid for a single newspaper. (Out west of course we supplement MediaScout with the excellent online coverage at The Tyee.)