Matrix: the early years
Matrix Magazine has a long and varied history as one of Quebec's more prominent English-language literary magazines. Philip Lanthier tells its origin story.
In a press interview earlier this month with journalist Joseph Elfassi on my publishing house and on Blue Metropolis, I referred to the festival as the Sugar Sammy of literature.
Sugar Sammy is a Montreal comedian who has been making a splash with his show You're gonna rire, in which he mixes French and English and a couple of other languages, as well, evidently to great effect.
Well, the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival and its writers have been doing something along those lines for 14 years now, and the comparison grabbed the editor's attention so that it appears in the headline as Blue Metropolis Literary Festival the Sugar Sammy of Literature -- and not only in English but also in the French.
The 14th Festival takes place this year at the Hôtel OPUS on Sherbrooke at St. Laurent, and that's where I'll be launching the first books published by LLP as well as this online magazine, Salon .ll., in English and in French. This is the first Blue Met I have had no part in organizing, and I'm just happy there is such a great context for me to stage a literary event in both languages.
You can find details of the festival programme on the Blue Metropolis website here.
© Linda Leith 2012
Matrix Magazine has a long and varied history as one of Quebec's more prominent English-language literary magazines. Philip Lanthier tells its origin story.
by Kenneth Radu
Wicked company, therefore, is to be understood as the hostile official attitude towards men (mostly men) of intellectual daring who challenged the assumptions of religion and society. Inconvenient thinkers could be imprisoned and atheists could still be executed at the time, a practice I believe some would wish to continue today. That was the purpose of the radical salon: room for a coterie of free thinkers to converse bravely on many subjects, including dangerous critiques of the ancien régime and the Church, without fear of reprisal, at least from their fair hostess.

It’s not as though we have such precise notions of the length of a novel, which has been described as a narrative fiction of “a certain length.”

Asked to comment on the audacity of launching a global English poetry prize in Montreal, Epp says, “It’s not necessarily audacious. It’s certainly interesting. We think it’s a great thing for Montreal, not just for the English-speaking community.
