Descant, the arts and literary quarterly published independently in Toronto since 1970, has announced that its forthcoming 167th issue, Vol. 45, No. 4, Winter 2014, will be its last.
Editor-in-chief Karen MulhallenĀ posted a farewell note on the magazine’s website, noting that after painstaking efforts to find alternative funding and deliberations among staff and funders, “we have jointly decided that Descant magazine in its present form is no longer sustainable.”
Grants have been in decline for more than five years, although other revenues such as sales and subscriptions have held steady or increased. We have cut costs everywhere we could, but many expenses over which we have no control have continued to spiral up.
Descant has won 6 National Magazine Awards since 1980 for its fiction, poetry and essays, most recently Adam Lindsay Honsinger‘s short story “Silence” in 2009.
What began as aĀ mimeographĀ forty-four years agoĀ evolved into a robust and stimulatingĀ literary magazine thatĀ has published works byĀ Anne Michaels, Timothy Findley, Evelyn Lau, Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Tom McGuane, Jane Urquhart,Ā Dennis Lee, Michael Ondaatje and R. Murray Schafer, among many others. Lately its production office has been the historic George Brown building at the corner of Baldwin andĀ Beverly Streets.
Browse through the back issues of DescantĀ for a more complete perspectiveĀ on what the magazine has published.
From the National Magazine Awards online archive:
“Up the Amazon–1959; Mexico–1960” by P.K. Page (Descant), Honourable Mention, Poetry, 2005
“Fudge” by Alex Pugsley (Descant), Honourable Mention, Fiction, 2010
