The making of Sad Mag: the words

The edi­to­r­ial con­cept for Sad Mag can best be summed up as “be sur­pris­ing.” We wanted young writ­ers and visual artists to draw on their own per­sonal inter­ests and expe­ri­ences to pro­duce con­tent for the mag­a­zine, so the con­cept hasn’t been dif­fi­cult to achieve.

Want to know about a gypsy musi­cian / vin­tage store owner and her role in the devel­op­ment of Main Street in the last 15 years? We’ve got that. How about, what a Chi­nese immi­grant thinks about life and perserver­ence? Yup. Got that, too.

Nobody is ask­ing Chi­nese immi­grants what they think of life. The piece that opens the mag­a­zine, “A Good Life,” was writ­ten and pho­tographed by Justin Mah and Jimmy Hsu (respec­tively). The friends and room­mates fre­quent the laun­dro­mat of their inter­view sub­ject, Jessie Li, a few blocks from their base­ment apart­ment in Burnaby.

Jesse Li at work. Pho­tog­ra­phy by Jimmy Hsu.

It’s an exquis­ite piece. The first of the sub­mis­sions we received, “A Good Life” was the first affir­ma­tion that our vision of pub­lish­ing uncom­mon writ­ing could be achieved.

I’ve said it before, but the kinds of writ­ing young peo­ple are going to pro­duce is nec­es­sar­ily dif­fer­ent from that of more estab­lished folks. Young peo­ple eek it out at min­i­mum wage, share apart­ments with friends, and rent in the dodgy areas that allow for pay­ing rent and hav­ing enough left over for beer. We use laundromats.

Jessie Li shares that she’s seen some hard times.

“I was once at the peak of my life, then sud­denly lost every­thing one day. It’s deter­mi­na­tion, I think, deter­mi­na­tion that kept me going—just think­ing on the bright side. When prob­lems come up, just face it and don’t give up. One should be hard­work­ing, kind and hon­est; this is my per­sonal philosophy.”

Keep your head up. Work hard. Don’t give up.

The dif­fer­ence between this arti­cle and some­thing you might read on eco­nomic hard times else­where is sim­ple, and it’s this: estab­lished writ­ers, skilled and con­nected as they may be, don’t hang out in laun­dro­mats. And I think we’re miss­ing out on some­thing really impor­tant as a soci­ety by rely­ing exclu­sively on politi­cians and talk­ing heads to give us moral guid­ance in times like these.

I’d rather speak to Jessie Li.

So, that’s our deal. We want unex­pected, uncom­mon writ­ing from young people—experienced or not. If you’re think­ing of devel­op­ing a pitch for Sad Mag, fol­low these three sim­ple steps first:

1. Grab onto an issue or a topic that inter­ests, even obsesses you. I’m super inter­ested in the preva­lence of bur­lesque among hip­sters. What’s the deal with the sud­den pop­u­lar­ity of faux-suppressed sexuality?
2. Con­sider how this issue or topic affects you per­son­ally. What about your posi­tion in life makes your take on the issue par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing? My room­mate started tak­ing bur­lesque classes last month, and now it’s all nip­ple tas­sels and feather boas. She says she feels more con­fi­dent, but I’m not so sure. As a fem­i­nist, can I endorse boo­bie shak­ing as a confidence-booster?
3. Do some research. How can you feed your inter­est, teach­ing your­self and oth­ers through some qual­ity time in the library, and out on the streets talk­ing to peo­ple? I’m going to do some research on the his­tory of bur­lesque danc­ing, inter­view my room­mate and her danc­ing friends, and what the hell, take a class myself. It’ll give my writ­ing some spice, or good jokes, at least.

Then bombs away to info@sadmag.ca and we’ll chat about mak­ing it a fit for the magazine.

Keep writ­ing,
Deanne