For most of its long pre-life and perhaps the reason that its pre-life was so long, the working title of Geist magazine was the Flush Times, a name that amused friends and colleagues, but failed to excite their passion, and as the years went by it seemed more and more to be merely a relic of the seventies, an era that had been bygone for some time already, as our senior editor and co-founder was heard to remark more than once during the long pre-life mentioned at the beginning of this sentence.
A few years ago, in Geist 56, wepublished a photograph of a nine-year-old girl holding up a freshly caught trout. The photograph had been taken somewhere near Barrington, Nova Scotia, in the late 1950s, and it belonged to Barbara Zatyko, our managing editor at that time, who treasured it because it reminded her of her own mother, who had grown up in Nova Scotia and who used to tell stories of catching fish on the way home from school when she was a child.
When the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker hit the newsstand a few days ago, did you feel a familiar twinge when again you did not buy a copy, precisely because it is the summer fiction issue, and then did you fail to suppress the querulous flood, the peevish trickle of nagging familiar questions that one never speaks aloud in bookstores or libraries, or in the halls of the CBC?
