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JUST THE FACTS FEATHERTALE: You gained notoriety as the first Canadian to be charged with five counts of obscenity in publishing before the age of 21. That’s quite a claim to fame. What happened? MARK LALIBERTE: That was a very odd scenario. It’s film worthy, almost. Here is what happened: in 1989, I had started up my own zine called Headtrip (for the Tainted Intellectual). It was a simple photocopy zine in which I explored intermixing layers of things I was interested in — music, comics, poetry. Very early on, I met up with an artist from Florida, Mike Diana, who was doing a zine called Boiled Angel and what was typical back then was that creators would contribute to each others zines — we would later both be challenged legally for the work we were doing in the zine world; I would come out victorious while Mike’s story would not end as happily. Google it. Anyway, I was making Headtrip and selling it in high school to students who were in turn selling it to other students. The drama begins when this guy and girl (who were like 16 at the time) ran away together to Chatham, Ont. from Windsor. One of their mothers somehow got it in her head to blame my magazinezine and got some people sniffing around. The Windsor police took the zine seriously, viewing it as very anti-establishment. The cops orchestrated a sting just after I turned 18: they wrote a fake letter, pretending to be this young kid who wanted copies of the zine. Of course, I sent Headtrip to him/them as requested. Suddenly, it was like a scene from a movie: the police converged on my parents’ house when I was at school, took nearly everything I owned. I had never been in trouble in my life. My last week in high school I was on the news, it was this big thing in the city. They positioned it like I was creating this total filth, and I was charged with creating obscenity, sending obscene materials through the mail, selling obscenity in stores, etc. A lot of it had to do with what I had published by Mike Diana, who had done this comic for Headtrip called “Blood and Salt”; I also did a Schulz/Peanuts parody in which Snoopy had sex with Sally and all kinds of dark things happened. It was a joke. But these comics became the subject of a number of serious adult debates over whether or not the project as a whole was obscene; we spent hours muddled in the absurdities of trying to answer questions like “was it bestiality for two interspecies comic characters to fornicate.” It was all this interesting stuff and it ended up being a two-year court battle. I won. FT: So looking back, you’re the guy with all the obscenity charges. Now you’re an editor with one of the most venerable literary journals in the country. What’s that like? ML: You know, I never thought of it in that way. Looking back on my life it makes sense that I’m in publishing. I’ve always had this sort of love of print stemming from childhood, and working with the page and print culture seems natural. It’s probably a bit ironic that I have landed at a magazine that is considered a leader in the high-brow lit market here in Canada. FT: What are your thoughts on the publishing industry in Canada? ML: Well, there’s a lot of talent and many good presses. We’ve got solid granting systems in place for established magazines. The distribution systems are not so bad. Through Magazines Canada and Disticor we’ve managed to keep ties with the independent stores and simultaneously get some copies in Chapters. All the journals here seem to get paid, at least something, even if the stores do destroy most of our unsold copies instead of shipping them back to us. It’s not ideal, but it’s something, right? In general I think we’re putting out a lot of great material. But just like anywhere, there’s a lot of slush that’s getting out there, mostly in terms of production. In my critique, it just seems like a lot of people are striving to put out the same product. It’s not a very attractive product, it’s not the most engaging and it’s not visually daring, I mean a poetry book is a poetry book is a poetry book and then every once in a while there’s something that’s actually visually interesting that comes out. FT: How much of what we see of Descant and Carousel are the visions of their editors? ML: With Descant we have a number of key players that help define the project. We take a bunch of individual writers work and just, you know, make it into something whole. We have a dedicated editorial team that puts all this stuff together applying our style and give it a flow. It works. I’ve been very cautious to try to respect the 40 year history of Descant. It’s a team effort to make the four issues each year. With Carousel I definitely have a lot of creative freedom to do what I want and apply my specific vision, it’s more hands-on for me. We have a small, caring team that is getting better every day; everyone needs a core. Carousel is an interesting case because the magazine had basically collapsed completely when I began working on it a few years back. You had something that wasn’t working at all; it didn’t have an audience, it wasn’t being published on a schedule, it didn’t have a specific look, it wasn’t connecting with an audience of writers and artists so the potential material they had to work with wasn’t very diverse. Everything you could possibly want in place was missing. But I saw it as an opportunity and said “hey let’s shape this thing. Let’s keep the name. Let’s get it out there, give it a look and let’s do it all with very little budget.” It’s a very free template and I’ve enjoyed really pushing it. FT: Do journals really have an impact on Canadian literary culture? ML: One of the amazing things about the literary scene as it pertains to the small journals is that we all at some point started doing complimentary exchanges with one another. I really like that about the Canadian scene because I always know what’s going on in the other journals since we’re so free about sharing with one another. In the office at Descant we all read lit journals pretty obsessively. I think we are our own audience first and foremost. If you read the journals regularly, you see some of the same names popping up across the map. We definitely service emerging writers in this way, allowing them to break ground, and this, I think, is our greatest contribution. Do young writers read the journals? Probably not as much as they should. I think there’s an unfortunate careerist drive to many new writers in that they just sort of look at all journals as a very similar set of places to publish. Some view us as a vehicle, a place that they buzz around and try to place their work into. We prefer to see ourselves as one layer in a diverse system, and try to provide opportunities to engage in community. We also realize that the book publishers/presses, who are looking for new writers to publish, they pay attention to who’s appearing on our pages. They look to us. They want to publish people who have a little bit of buzz around them. And the only real way to get that buzz about you is to get published in the journals and to do public readings. I think we’re a testing ground for some of these talents and then the lucky ones sort of jump up to the next level. But because of the loopiness of the culture now, they don’t just step up and never look back. 
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