Playing around the edges
Published in Toronto, Find magazine bills itself as, “A journal for the curious”, with a story list that coalesces loosely around creativity, art and the contemporary, but with lots of latitude for following flights of fancy. This first issue is themed ‘Edges’, and contributors are set free to play around with the beginning and end of things, out on the peripheries of everyday experience.
For example there’s a visual piece exploring the cutting edge of AI art, with the writer using fragments from one of their poems as inputs for the machine to create drawings. Is this art? And if so, is it any good? The writer is critical and sceptical, and I enjoyed seeing their unease at the process as it unfolded.
A very different sort of edge is explored in Kelley Toombs’s touching and personal recollection of her father’s slide into dementia and his subsequent death. Her strong and clear voice communicates the terrible sadness of that slow loss, comparing it to the gradual erosion of Prince Edward Island, where he lived. The artwork also relfects that erosion, the pages getting gradually thinner and revealing the text, “In the Deep, Dark Waters / When You’re Lost to the Sea / I Hope You Never Forget / What You Meant to Me”.
This feels like a magazine that’s being made by a group of people who are loving exploring the possibilities of the printed format, and who are following the stories that excite them the most. (Elsewhere in the issue there’s also a visual guide to parallel parking, a love letter to VHS tapes, and a recipe for mushroom ravioli with brown butter and sage. More is more!) I hope the video above helps to give a sense of what this energetic new magazine is all about.
