'Vancouver Review' is Brainy but No Snob

TheTyee.caIt takes a lot of nerve to start a new independent magazine - especially in Vancouver, far from the country's already small publishing hub in Toronto. After all, the Canadian print cemetery is filled with periodicals that had to be taken off life support. People are busy, advertisers picky, printing costs prohibitive, and competition on the newsstand steep.

That's why many publishers play it safe: they create bright, bubbly slicks about food (69 Ways To Prepare A Tomato!), fashion (22 Hot New Ways To Ditch That Pathetic Old You!), and health and wellness (Just 2 Minutes A Day To Nirvana!) because they sell - not only to readers, but to advertisers.

So with mortality rates so high, it's jarring to see the first issue of a magazine sport a photograph of a morgue on the cover, with the words "Graveyard of Ambition: Does Vancouver Murder Dreams?" sitting in a drawer that a body once occupied, and may occupy again.

That reaction is exactly what the publishers of Vancouver Review - ironically, a magazine which passed away in 1997 and they've decided to resuscitate - were going for.

'Maybe there's a critical mass'

"It's a bit of a provocation, and it certainly is risky. I mean, we could be accused of being negative, but we were hoping to make people laugh - if only in recognition," says Gudrun Will, a Vancouver writer who used to work on the old Vancouver Review and is now managing editor of its latest incarnation."

We said, 'If we can sell based on this cover idea and this cover image, then we'll be fine,'" adds photographer and Will's partner Mark Mushet. "And in fact, many people who are fairly mainstream in their sensibilities laughed and got it right away. So we thought, 'Ok, maybe there's a critical mass here."This magazine is not the art snob at the party who sits in the corner grumbling about how Vancouver is a lost cause but never bothers to leave; nor is it the suit-and-tied guy yapping loudly about how fantastic the city is ("You can ski and sail on the same day," he'll say, having never done either).

The Vancouver Review definitely doesn't shy away from being critical (in "Sounding Off," John Keillor takes on the shiny acoustic reputation of the UBC Chan Centre, and touches on the fact that even raising such issues within Vancouver's cultural community is akin to spitting on a puppy), or from being controversial (in "Global Donuts," John Harris challenges Brian Fawcett's dismissive view of globalism, Starbucks and all).

But it's not afraid of being thoughtfully entertaining, either. In "Mutts," Christopher Brayshaw plays homage to his favourite comic strip; in "Future Wheels," the magazine's designer, Marian Bantjes, assesses the look of today's new cars (The Mitsubishi SE-RO, she writes, is made from "shiny aluminum with bulges and curves that make you want to rush up to it with sliced bread and make toast."); and the literature section provides snapshot reviews of the latest reads.

Pleasure or power?

The look of the magazine makes it all the more readable. Mushet's images are beautifully clean and evocative, the writing is unapologetically intelligent without being overly conspicuous, and the layout includes something that is rarely found in print these days: breathing room.

Yes, in the cover feature, John Delaney does assert that Vancouver is a place where ambition can be lost to the ocean, the mountains, and the high-rises, but he goes far beyond facile grumblings: perhaps it's time to simply accept that Vancouver values pleasure above power, he asserts through a discussion of politics, architecture and social values. Or maybe not."We want to provide more of a big picture take on culture and the arts, with more reflective and sometimes more provocative slant on things," says Will, whose definition of "culture" goes far beyond the arts, and includes things like life in a small town in the Interior or the tensions between urban and rural life in B.C. "We are very deliberately doing something that we feel is not being done. And we want the ideas to be fairly sophisticated, but we also want it to be very readable. This is definitely a journalistic endeavor - not a literary or academic one.

"Now gearing up for their second quarterly issue, Will and Mushet have already found a great deal of success with the first. They landed enough advertising contracts to cover the cost of their 5000-issue print run, and they're having to get more copies to the independent newsstands that ran out within the first week.

Fast sales

Major chains like Chapters have also picked it up (not surprisingly, the magazines have to be sent to Toronto before they are sent back here for distribution), and just a few weeks in, they've sold more than 2,000 copies - something that is nearly unheard of for an independently funded, independently produced magazine. So it seems their ambition is paying off - even if they did start in the morgue."Everybody is telling us, 'This city needs a magazine like this,'" says Will, who also adds that Vancouver Review plans to include stories from around the province. "Vancouver is growing, and as much as we like to pooh-pooh it, it's gradually developing sophistication and cosmopolitanism. So it's good timing for us and we hope it's good timing for the city," says Will. "B.C. should be exporting more than bud," adds Mushet with a wry smile. "We should be exporting ideas."

Jennifer Van Evra is a Vancouver-based writer and radio producer.