The Puritan Launches New Spring Supplement On Literary Suburbia

Dear Readers, We are pleased to announce that our first supplementary issue of 2018, on Literary Suburbia, has now launched! In her introduction, guest editor Kathryn Stagg notes that the stock images we have of the suburbs as a place where "melancholic teenage girls commit suicide, where marriages fall apart behind closed doors, and where secret love affairs take place on drab afternoons," may not capture the full range of experiences present in Canadian suburbia in 2018. This leads her to ask: "What does a literary representation of the suburbs look like in the Canadian context?" This supplement provides an answer. In Nicole Breit and Aaron Kreuter’s essays, and Carrianne Leung, Claire Kelly, Chris Benjamin, Erin Della Mattia and Sarah MacKenzie's stories, the suburbs are a complex place, not easily reduced to a single set of narrative conventions. And as Michael Prior, Ben Robinson, Daniela Elza, PW Jarungpiterah and Dani Couture show in their poetry, the suburban landscape is hardly an artistically sterile one. Finally, as David Chariandy in an interview with the supplement editor, whatever else the Canadian suburb might be, it is not homogenous: suburbs like Scarborough are places of arrival and departure, resilience and resistance, deep cultural memory and cross-fertilization. The suburbs have always been spaces freighted with symbolic resonance, and we hope this supplement provides a brief glimpse into how new generations of Canadian writers are investing suburban landscapes with new meaning. Kind regards, The Puritan Editors