To find contributors, he recalls, “I would mail authors out of the blue - ‘Could I impose on you to write a 2,000 to 3,000 word essay?’ I don’t remember being turned down.”ĭutil and his contributors volunteered their services until 1996, when the LRC secured a little funding from the federal government. I saw myself as a romantic 19th Century pamphleteer.”ĭutil started out doing layout work on an improvised light table made from an old window. “I had a strong conviction,” he now says, “that Canadians were smart, interested and caring enough about our own country to sustain a magazine taking on serious ideas. He left the civil service for a 9-to-5 job so that in his spare time, he could create a Canadian equivalent of the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books - bastions of long-form, unapologetically intellectual writing about books and ideas. The LRC began in 1991 as a glorified ’zine run out of the Toronto home of Montréal-born Patrice Dutil. And yet, today, he says, the publication is debt-free, gaining ads and subscribers and eagerly ambitious. Its in-betweenness has made it a hard sell: “We’re a 30-year-old magazine that no one’s ever heard of,” jokes Kyle Wyatt, its editor-in-chief. The magazine might seem too scholarly for journalists, or too populist for scholars, but it has attracted high-profile contributors wishing to delve at length into Canadian issues - among them, icons (Margaret Atwood, David Suzuki), public intellectuals (Margaret MacMillan, John Ralston Saul), and politicians of varying stripes (Preston Manning, Bob Rae). The LRC exists at the nexus of publishing, journalism and academia - three spheres that have themselves been struggling with seismic changes. In October, beloved American publication “The Believer” announced it will shutter next spring, after 19 years, citing the financial impact of COVID-19 and “increasing headwinds” for print publications in general. Reduced fanfare aside, surviving so long is an achievement, especially for a literary magazine.
The 30th anniversary, this October, was more subdued: those who had worked on the most recent issue met up at a Toronto pub. It boasted cocktails, a dinner billed as “decadent,” celebratory remarks from the lieutenant governor, and the unveiling of the “LRC 25” list - the most influential Canadian books published since the magazine’s inception. The Literary Review of Canada’s 25th anniversary gala, back in 2016, was a swanky affair.
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