One spring evening last year, Tia Glista hosted a dinner party for a few friends; she has the very good habit of connecting people from disparate parts of her life together. Not long before the dinner party, Glista, Winnie Wang, Adrianna Michell and Emma Cohen had discussed their struggles writing freelance and had tossed around the idea of starting a literary magazine. After dinner, Michell remembers sitting on the floor of Glista’s apartment, looking around the room at her friends, and pointing out their complementary strengths could make such a concept truly possible.
Toronto Review, the aptly named literary magazine borne out of that fateful dinner party, officially launched on April 27, featuring works from Haley Mlotek, Zak Jones, Furquan Mohamed and Claire Foster, among others.
“An exciting idea that everyone had been ruminating on began to feel possible when we noticed that we were a resourced group of people in terms of the gifts that we could offer one another and the complementarity of those strengths, but also literally our resources beyond the initial group,” says Abby Lacelle, who rounds out the editorial team alongside Glista, Wang, Cohen and Michell, with Sonja Katanic helming the visual design. With one new piece online every week, Toronto Review operates without a paywall to ensure the accessibility of their work.
Mlotek’s inclusion in the first batch of writing published by Toronto Review feels like a full circle moment to Wang, but also serves as an illustrative example the necessity of an outlet like Toronto Review. Last year, Wang had a lot of difficulty finding placement for a review of Mlotek’s best-selling and critically-acclaimed memoir, No Fault. Though Mlotek is Canadian, national publications didn’t bite; Wang’s review found a home in the Los Angeles Review of Books instead. Many writers, facing similar battles, have been forced to outsource their work to publications outside of the country because there’s a lack of diversified infrastructure here in Canada.
“The whole industry seems to be quite precarious,” Michell says.
The problem is compounded by the fact that Canadian publicists at publishing houses oftentimes only have jurisdiction over Canadian publications, meaning that access to books for review or writers for interview may be withheld or impinges upon the placement of a piece in a Canadian newspaper or magazine. The literary world, from a business perspective, has become this strangely siloed monster, where no one — authors, critics or publishers — is fully satisfied. One of Toronto Review’s primary aims seeks to remedy the issue Lacelle highlighted, that “many skilled and talented writers that we do know who are generating amazing work are not getting the coverage they deserve either internationally or in Canada.”
Though Toronto Review aims to champion local and Canadian writers, there are no limitations as to who can write for the magazine. Rather, the editors want work published to reflect the spirit of the city instead.
“We’ve got tons of linguistic diversity, tons of people coming in and out. It feels really special and important to me that we’re foregrounding Toronto — not because we’re only going to publish people from Toronto or writing about Toronto, but because there’s something we can take from the unique character of our city that’s really diverse and really energetic and really central and also quite diffuse. You have connections across the country, but it seems like Toronto’s a nexus point,” Michell says.
As many writers have to find work elsewhere, Toronto Review wants to highlight the great art being created here. “We’re a city of so much cultural production and we want people to recognize that and to respond to that in a critical way and to show that Toronto is not just New York-lite,” Wang adds. “We are a city with our own unique characteristics and it is possible to be an artist and to be a writer and to be an engaged reader or audience member in Toronto without having to look elsewhere.”
Over the past few years, many publications have begun to reserve less and less resources for books coverage. Look no further than the Washington Post, one of the last major news organizations that had consistent, critically shrewd reviews — they had their books section gutted entirely in the mass layoffs earlier this year.
Stripping publications of robust books coverage not only devalues literacy, but also limits critical coverage. The discourse machine that fuels much of the internet prioritizes thoughtless takes, where the masses anoint art as relevant in so far as how angry it makes people. This is especially the case now that artists (typically musicians) have been somehow empowered to sic their armies of fans in response to critical, or oftentimes just lukewarm, pieces about their work.
Yet it is criticism that bestows longevity, Michell argues. “The reason literature and film last beyond just a moment is because we have people thinking about them and critically engaging with it and helping us read and interpret and make meaning out of it.”
For artists working outside of major cities like Toronto and Montreal, the situation is even more dire; with so few publications covering the arts in a meaningful way, simply just to point to the occurrence of art — the publishing of a book, the screening of a film, a show at a gallery — feels monumental. To then take what limited space there is to criticize an artist may feel, to some, like punching down.
At the same time, for critics operating in niche and independent spaces, writing negatively sometimes risks developing fraught relationships with publicists, publishers or production and distribution companies. Wang experienced this while writing about Canadian independent cinema, but the same goes for small presses.
“There are so few indies and it feels like we have to support them and we can’t say anything negative. It’s such a small community. You want to maintain a good relationship with the publicist but I would love to show that it’s possible to be critical and challenge a work without being nervous about what implications it’s going to have. It’s like I care about you enough to tell you there’s something in your teeth,” Wang says.
Toronto Review’s editors see the magazine as a centralizing force within the city’s existing literary scene. A number of successful reading series emerged in the years following the pandemic, such as Cohen and Emily Wood’s Pack Animal, Esmé Hogeveen’s Oral Method, Café Sprinkle and Saffron Maeve’s Crit Salon, and the magazine provides a place for pieces read during these events to live long after the night is over, bridging members of the literary scene together beyond the ephemerality of the present.
As Lacelle points out, Toronto Review is one small piece of a much bigger puzzle. “The greater the chorus of voices coming in on this critical conversation, the more likely we are to inspire in one another these challenges that push the threshold of artistry and criticism and literature.”
