Goodbye Merge and Notebook, you were both young but your pyres will burn bright.
In all honesty, it’s tough to see these two go. Merge, being the younger of the two, offered a lot of freedom to me as a writer. I learned a bit about cancer, a bit about ice road trucking (scroll down) and a bit about where babies come from. It was a novel idea, an Edmonton based rag with the advertising already paid for. It could have been a crappy sell out styled magazine, but it offered a different angle from a woman’s perspective. It was nice, fun and fluffy; like riding an exploding unicorn in to a heaven of rainbows.
Notebook I am surprised by. This was an art magazine for artists by artists. It had legs. The coverage was broad and insightful while the layout was one of the nicer around. Chapters picked them up as did a few other heavyweights. Although it lives on in electronic form (the new print zombie), the tactile wonderment that is and was Notebook’s lovely pages are now a memory. Unless you buy some back issues. Or you travel back in time. Or you keep them all in laminated form. Or…I think that’s it.
The Trent Wilkie 
