[Upon Ken Alexander's resignation as Walrus editor, comments have landed in media outlets across Canada. Below is Walrus contributing editor's Don Gillmor's view. ~The Walrus Online]
Magazines are driven by their editors and occasionally personified by them (William Shawn’s New Yorker, for example). The Walrus is Ken Alexander, both in conception and attitude (democratic, wide-ranging, messy). Under his tutelage, the magazine is alive—a forum for both ideas and (more selfishly) writers. Where else could you write a 9,000-word political piece? The long form was nurtured by him. In the ever-diminishing world of letters the response to this is: Who gives a shit? But long form magazine journalism maintains a critical place in the literary ecosystem. It is the logical stepping stone to a book. It gives the writer a chance to explore an idea in a way that isn’t possible at 3,000 words and gives the reader an experience he won’t find elsewhere.
The magazine cultivates the readership that Saturday Night left in the wake of its slow death. It is an enviable readership: national, sophisticated, and astute. As the death of SN demonstrated, to found a literary magazine and keep it going takes heroic energy, dedication, and money. Ken had all three, a rare happenstance. Whoever succeeds him will need those qualities as well.
Apparently, there was turmoil. It was always thus. McClelland & Stewart experienced turmoil under Jack McClelland (descriptions of Jack were eerily similar to those of Ken) as well as one of its most productive (and seminal) eras. From a writer’s perspective, the critical measure of a magazine is the experience with the editor, and in my case it was a wonderfully happy and fertile one. There is also the experience of the magazine itself. Do I want to read it?
It is uneven, as some critics have noted. But everything is uneven. Every New Yorker issue, every issue of the Atlantic and the New York Review of Books. Anything that is even is even because it is standardized into mush. Esquire is enjoying a prolonged period of evenness along with hundreds of other titles on the rack, some of them quite successful as measured by sales. New magazines are launched weekly it seems, all chasing the lifestyle market, hoping to cash in. A book editor once told me that the critical test for any book was: Is it alive? Under Ken, The Walrus is alive—as a voice in public affairs, as a nurturing ground for dozens of interns, as a standard for editorial excellence, as a haven for writers. Finding someone else who’ll donate $3 million and eighty hours a week to those causes will take a house to house search.
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