In a similar fashion to its short fiction and prose site, Joyland founders Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis are working with regional editors to publish poetry from across North America. The hub features work by John K. Samson, Thom Donovan, Johnny Thunders, Mott Hoople, and Harold Abramowitz.

In January, the duo also published the first edition of Joyland Retro, a print anthology of stories from the magazine’s website.

Editor’s note: While we think that Johnny Thunders and Mott Hoople are the best poet names ever, they’re actually placeholders during the site’s soft launch.

“I’m starting to feel like my character, Gordon Small,” responds Schultz, “a copy-editor who somehow manages to get his opus out into the living world through unlikely means.” She continues, “Markham Street Films is a stellar company, and I trust Judy Holm [producer] and Michael McNamara [director] will bring out the comedy and the tender moments of Heaven is Small.”

This is the second movie deal for Anansi in just over a month: in July, Gil Adamson’s The Outlander was optioned for the big screen.

Emily Schultz kicked off the evening with a reading from Heaven is Small.

Brian Francis listens while Schultz reads a passage from a Harlequin novel. Gordon Small, the recently deceased main character in Schultz’s novel, works at Heaven Book Company, the world’s largest romance publisher. Schultz once worked at Harlequin and used some of her own experiences as fodder for the novel’s fictional company.

Francis’s interview with Schultz revealed that the one tangible item she’d want to have in heaven would be cheese sandwiches. Just plain cheddar is fine, but no Kraft Singles.

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The bookstore of the future, and why POD machines are waiting for books in the present

Love wins out
While other major publishers are bleeding money, Harlequin Enterprises is raking it in. How the firm has managed to beat the odds

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AND MORE IN THE LIBRARY SPECIAL REPORT: Coping with rising patron demand, and learning to LOL at the reference desk

FRONTMATTER

• Ninety minutes with Stuart Ross
• Comedy is easy, kidlit is hard
• The adventures of Pierre Turgeon: a timeline
• Cover to Cover: Lauren Kirshner’s Where We Have to Go
• Snapshot: Alexandra Moore of Word on the Street
• Breakwater unbroken
• David Bezmozgis moves from control to collaboration

REVIEWS

• Heaven Is Small by Emily Schultz
• Though You Were Dead by Terry Griggs
• The English Stories by Cynthia Flood
• Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

• Dance Baby Dance by Andrea Spalding
• Dracula Madness by Mary Labatt and Jo Rioux
• Soccer Sabotage by Liam O’Donnell and Mike Deas
• Swim the Fly by Don Calame
• Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE Q&Q/BOOKNET CANADA BESTSELLERS

THE LAST WORD
Lesley Choyce does the math on three decades in writing

Current literary publishing wisdom has it that the short story is dead. We think otherwise. We think the form is at its stylistic peak. It’s just that the traditional venues for short stories – commercial print magazines – have changed dramatically and jettisoned the once prominent short story.

Joyland is dedicated to finding a new way to publish short fiction, and rather than just start a web magazine we’ve wedded a strict mandate (only short fiction) to some principles of social networking sites.

The message goes on to list the initial contributors, and it looks like a pretty respectable line-up: Canadian authors Lynn Coady and Nathan Sellyn, and U.S. authors Ed Park and Harold Abramowitz. (Another aim of the site, apparently, is to get readers from both sides of the border reading authors they may never have encountered before.) They’ve also got an international assortment of contributing editors, including Schultz herself, Vancouver author Kevin Chong, and U.S. authors Janine Armin (New York) and Matthew Timmons (Los Angeles).

You can check it out for yourself here.