For more than 40 years, Descant has been giving writers and artists a platform to showcase their work, placing new talent alongside established names. Next week, the quarterly journal will launches its 165th issue with a party at the Pauper’s Pub in Toronto. Q&Q chatted with editor-in-chief Karen Mulhallen, a poet in her own right, about the latest issue.

What are some of the highlights of this issue? It’s what we call in-house a “miscellany issue.” It’s a selection from the submissions that have come in over the last couple of years. Additionally we have the Winston Collins/Descant Best Canadian Poem Prize winner, Andy Verboom’s “Rite,” in this issue.

We have a visual portfolio from Scott McKowen who is a book designer and illustrator primarily. We have 18 scratchboard illustrations from posters he has done for Shakespeare plays for theatre companies all across North America, and it’s an amazing thing. You probably did this as a kid – you put all these coloured crayons down on a piece of paper and then you cover it with black and scratch through.

What can people expect at the party? We do four parties per year, one for each issue. They’re usually pretty packed. We do food and readings. At this party, there will be readings by poets Mary Corkery, Stevie Howell, and Assia Messaoudi, fiction writer Heather Babcock, and Mark Kingwell, who is a contributing editor of Descant.

Assia Messaoudi is a student at University of Toronto Scarborough. She sent me some pages and they were terrific. She had never been published before. I said to the other editors here’s this young poet who has never been published, and part of our job is to support new writers. This is what we do at Descant. It’s not just an old shop that has been around for decades.

Descant has been around for five decades. How does it distinguish itself from other literary publications? We support emerging writers of any age. I think this is one of the things that sets Descant apart – it does constantly publish writers that are unknown.

What’s on the horizon for Descant? We’re focusing now on our next issue, which is on Berlin. It will coincide with the 25^th anniversary of the reunification of Berlin, the fall of the Wall. We will have writers and artists from Berlin, and Canadians in Berlin. The Canada Council for the Arts runs an art studio so that Canadian artists can work there. There has always been a big connection between Canadian artists and Berlin. We’re also talking to the German Consulate about possibly doing a joint launch in both Toronto and Berlin.

This interview has been edited and condensed.