By Jena Lynde-Smith
The 25th issue of The Feathertale Review, the award-winning comedic literary magazine founded by Carleton journalism professor Brett Popplewell, has just been published.
Popplewell joined the faculty at Carleton in 2017 but is also a 2006 graduate of the Bachelor of Journalism program.
He launched the publication while he was an undergraduate at Carleton, with his high school friend, Lee Wilson. Popplewell said they wanted it to curate content “for people who didn’t really understand the cartoons in The New Yorker.”
“The model was for it to become a high-end, low-brow, literary humour magazine,” he said.
“I didn’t see anything coming out of Canada that was trying to be what we were trying to be. We really wanted to produce something that would stand out as unique from other Canadian journals in bookstores.”
The first issue of Feathertale was launched on Aug. 31, 2006. Each issue has looked vastly different since then. It’s been formatted as a comic book, a vintage magazine, an LP and an anthology of women’s writing about sex and food. The schtick for the 25th issue is that it uses glow-in-the-dark ink.
Popplewell’s fourth-year courses, Longform journalism and Sports and Freelancing, are highly sought after by students. He is also the founding director of the Future of Journalism Initiative, executive director of the Gordon Sinclair Foundation, and part of the journalism program’s Permanent Working Group on Anti-Racism and Inclusion.
In addition to his work at Carleton, Popplewell continues to work in magazines and is also a book author. His longform articles have been recognized by the National Magazine Awards Foundation in best short feature, longform feature, profiles, investigative reporting, sports and travel.
When he’s not busy teaching journalism, doing journalism, serving on committees, or being a father, Popplewell devotes his time to what he calls “Canada’s most celebrated illustrated literary humour magazine” – The Feathertale Review.
The publication has won six National Magazine Awards and received 11 nominations, despite consistently being the smallest magazine represented at the awards.
Asked to pick his favourite issue from among the 25, Popplewell said his favourite was number nine, which was the first one to win the award for Best Single Issue.
“Picking a favourite issue feels a bit like picking a favourite child, but our ninth issue still feels really special to me,” he said. “The whole premise was to create a magazine that would look and feel like an issue of the very first magazine ever created in 1731. It took 38 contributors to bring it all together.”
The magazine has had submissions from some big names including doodles from Margaret Atwood and a poem from Robert Munsch. A number of Carleton journalism alumni have also contributed.
The magazine receives financial support from both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and is distributed by Magazines Canada to bookstores across the country (including the Chapters/Indigo chain).
Popplewell said he wouldn’t consider the publication a journalistic magazine, but it does include some journalistic aspects such as interviews and memoirs.
“Feathertale is centered around literary and genre fiction,” he said. “The journalism that we do publish would be more in line with creative non-fiction. It’s a different editorial mix from the work that I do with other magazines.”
Popplewell remains an active freelance magazine writer. He has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, Mother Jones, Reader’s Digest, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, The Walrus, Toronto Life and more.
“I’ve always appreciated magazines as a classic delivery mechanism for journalism, for fiction, for entertainment,” he said. “The magazine industry has changed a lot in the last 15 years, but it’s still a medium that excites me.”
Popplewell said his experience publishing Feathertale has informed his teaching, specifically in his freelancing course which has a heavy entrepreneurial component. Students are put into teams and they create a business pitch for a new media creation. Popplewell said this simulates the type of partnership required to launch an idea into a crowded mediascape.
“If I were doing this by myself, then Feathertale would have died in 2006,” he said. “The reason why it’s 15 years old and still going is because other people have guest-edited it and there have been issues that I’ve had nothing to do with.”
Popplewell said his advice to students with an interest in publishing would be to find partners with whom to collaborate.
“You need to find your audience, you need to know how long the money will last, you need to have a strategy to bring in new financing, you need to bring in partners… partners, partners, partners,” he said.
“And you also need to know when it is not worth your time anymore.”
Popplewell said that there have been occasions where he’s wondered if it was time to back away from the project, but he continues to be inspired by each issue. He said what fulfills him is seeing Feathertale contributors succeed.
“The fact that I was part of a team that created an outlet for 800 to 1,000 people to break out – to write fiction, to illustrate, to do comics – that is what excites me.”
Feathertale 25 is available for purchase here.
Thursday, December 17, 2020 in General, Journalism News
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