TWENTY YEARS AGO AN elderly, out-of-place-looking man used to turn up whenever there was a party at Saturday Night magazine. In a number of ways he'd had a vastly more interesting life than his appearance suggested. In the 1920s, for example, he'd served on a British gunboat deep inside China. His connection to Saturday Night was that he was the person who wrote the monthly puzzle at the back of the magazine -- had done so for decades. He was, in fact, the last known link to the great days of B. K. Sandwell, Saturday Night's most famous editor, who ruled from 1932 to 195 1. The equivalent person at the Canadian Forum is Hilda Kirkwood.

Both the Forum and Kirkwood were founded in 1920 and thus are both celebrating 75th anniversaries this year. The relative health of the former is apparent on the newsstands every month. As part of its most recent resuscitation, the Forum broke its historic connection to Toronto (it's now based in Ottawa editorially and in Halifax managerially) and became a little slicker, more colourful, and more topical. For her part, Hilda Kirkwood is going great guns as well. In 1993, she published a poetry collection, her first, entitled Phoenix Time (Oberon). Now the same publisher has brought out Between the Lines, a collection of her interviews from (and sometimes about) the Forum.

Kirkwood's first contribution to the Forum was in about 1950 (a terrible time for socialist magazines, though not so bad as now). It was a biographical piece on Robertson Davies, then still the editor of the Peterborough Examiner, where she had been publishing book and concert reviews. "This was the first profile of him in the Toronto press," she remembers, and continues:

One of my friends in those days was a co-editor of the Forum who taught in the sociology department at the University of Toronto. He printed the piece and then asked if I wanted to do book reviews as well. I said yes and he almost immediately said I was to be the book review editor.

Touches of such charming anti-professionalism still remained when I did a stint on the magazine's board in the middle or late '70s (Kirkwood was a member, too, and would remain so for almost another 20 years). She writes:

Not that Canadian books were ignored. Kirkwood's own reviews, signed H.T.K., for Hilda Thompson Kirkwood, included close and serious notices of Margaret Laurence's early works and, much later, of Alice Munro's as well. "I dealt with fiction mostly, and gave special attention to women writers, who weren't at the centre of things in those days as they are today." But she herself wrote poetry, not fiction. "When Milton Wilson was the editor [in the 1960s] the magazine started using some of my poetry when I sent it in from time to time." Everything was still very casual. Many of us will always think first of Wilson's Forum when the magazine's name is mentioned: a letterpress affair, designed by Frank Newfeld, printed on buff paper and with the stories starting in normal body type fight on the cover page, as in some l8th-century publication.

As an interviewer, Kirkwood has a wonderfully quirky style, and Between the Lines is generally a delight to read, despite some editing errors (surely Joan Murray compiled the catalogue raisonne of Tom Thomson, not the catalogue resume). No one who knows anything of Kirkwood and the Forum could read it without wishing them both many happy returns.

Douglas Fetherling's latest book is his Selected Poems (Arsenal Pulp).