A few years ago, in Geist 56, we published 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. Neither Barbara nor her mother had ever known the girl in the photograph, whose name, Barbara learned from the friend who gave her the photograph, was Ola, and it was Ola’s image that became a token of Barbara’s memory of her mother.
How memories are made and unmade, how memories are kept, how they are lost and found and reinvented: these are the subjects of the Memory Project, a series of major commissions that will appear in the pages of Geist over the next year and a half, and will include work with Lost Photo Albums, Lost and Found Villages, Childhood Memory in the New and the Old Worlds, Rooming House Memories, Haida Memory and Haida Manga, Memory along the St. Lawrence River and (as they say) much more, and even more than that.
Most of these projects have been in the works at Geist in one way or another for years; others have evolved over the last few months. All of them are part of the future that we share with our readers.
Why not share the Memory Project with your friends and relatives? Lend them your copies of Geist, or—even better—shower them with gift subscriptions.
A gift of Geist includes the gift of memory.
All the best to you in these interesting times,
Stephen Osborne, Editor-in-Chief
