YOU'LL NOTICE A FEW CHANGES IN THIS issue
of Books in Canada. Paul Stuewe, our editor for five years, has left to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo. Fortunately, he hasn't entirely escaped our clutches: he remains with the magazine as an advisory editor. After seven years as the back-up band, I'm stepping out front, and I welcome both the opportunity and the challenge.
We've also done some shuffling in our line-up of columns. Up Front and Coren at Large have retired from the fray; they have been replaced by Outlook, a column of cultural commentary featuring a roster of writers from across the country. In this way we hope to broaden our scope and become a truly national forum of opinion. We plan to have each writer contribute five consecutive columns, then it's on to a new Outlook. Brian Bartlett, a poet and teacher at St Marys University in Halifax, kicks off the column in this issue, with "Spin Control."
We have other plans in the works, thanks in part to your feedback. Many of you took the time and trouble to fill out the readers' survey included in our April issue. One purpose of the questionnaire was to generate a demographic profile of our readership for potential advertisers - which is why we asked those nosy personal questions about income and lifestyle that, as a number of irritated and/or bemused respondents pointed out, had nothing to do with your opinions of the magazine. We should have made this clear at the outset.
We haven't finished all the number-crunching involved in interpreting the survey, but you've certainly given us lots to think about In the issues to come, we hope to give you lots to think about, too.
