About Brick

Brick

Brick: A Literary Journal is a Toronto-based literary magazine publishing essays, interviews, memoirs, travelogues, and belles lettres. Established in 1977, it is published twice a year and is regarded as one of the most respected literary journals in the English-speaking world, featuring work by emerging and established writers from Canada and abroad. Its website is brickmag.com.

Overview

Brick is devoted to literary nonfiction in its many forms: personal essays, memoir, travel writing, interviews with writers, excerpts from works in progress, and what the magazine calls "unusual musings of all kinds." Published twice yearly, each issue runs to book length — recent issues have run to 136 pages — and the journal is distributed internationally. Its focus on the essay and on nonfiction distinguishes it from literary magazines centered on poetry and short fiction.

The journal has grown from grassroots beginnings into an internationally recognized institution. As one bookseller's description puts it, Brick is "an ongoing conversation between readers and writers," focused on the writing life, travel, film, memoir, and interviews.

History

The germ of Brick was the review section of a short-lived literary magazine from London, Ontario, called Applegarth's Folly. In 1977, Stan Dragland — the Alberta-born writer, critic, and professor of English at the University of Western Ontario — co-founded Brick, A Literary Journal with Jean McKay, two years after co-founding the poetry publisher Brick Books with Don McKay in 1975. Dragland served as the journal's founding editor.

Dragland, who taught at Western University and later lived in Newfoundland, was remembered after his death in August 2022 as a champion of independent publishing whose mentorship shaped generations of Canadian writers. His work with Brick and Brick Books put him in touch with writers across Canada, many of whom benefited from his counsel and editing.

The journal's institutional history includes steady editorial leadership. Publisher Nadia Szilvassy, who had been with Brick since 2007 as managing editor and became publisher in 2011, stepped down in June 2016; poet and editor Laurie D. Graham — previously circulation manager and assistant editor — took over as publisher. Editor Michael Helm has been a central editorial figure. The magazine marked its forty-year history in the mid-2010s, with Szilvassy noting that "changes at Brick over its forty-year history have always been expansive and energizing."

Content

Each issue of Brick features essays, interviews, memoirs, travelogues, and belles lettres by writers from Canada and around the world. The journal's pages have hosted major literary figures alongside emerging voices, and its interviews with writers are among its signature features. Recent issues have included contributors such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez alongside Canadian poets and essayists.

The journal's commitment to literary nonfiction — the essay in all its varieties — gives it a distinctive identity in the literary-magazine landscape. Its issues function as curated collections, closer to anthologies than to conventional magazines, and are collected by readers and libraries as lasting literary objects.

Coverage & Audience

Brick's readership is the international literary community: writers, readers of literary nonfiction, creative-writing students and teachers, and subscribers to literary journals. Published in Toronto and distributed internationally, it reaches readers across Canada, the United States, and beyond. Its audience is defined by literary seriousness rather than mass-market appeal, and its reputation rests on editorial quality rather than circulation scale.

Ownership

Brick is published in Toronto, Ontario, as an independent literary journal. Its publisher is Laurie D. Graham, a poet and editor who took on the role in 2016. Graham comes from Treaty 6 territory — Sherwood Park, Alberta — and lives in Nogojiwanong, on the treaty and traditional territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario). Her first poetry collection, Rove, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada; her second, Settler Education, was nominated for the Trillium Award for Poetry. A publisher who is herself an award-nominated poet continues the journal's founding pattern: Brick has always been run by writers, for writers. The journal operates within Canada's independent literary-magazine sector, supported by subscriptions, newsstand and bookstore sales, and public arts funding.

The 100-Issue Digital Archive

In January 2020 the journal completed its digital transformation: the full archive — 100 issues dating back to 1977 — was published online in partnership with the digital-publishing company Exact Editions, for individual and institutional subscribers across web, iOS and Android. Publisher Laurie D. Graham noted that the magazine's visual elements had transferred beautifully to the digital format; Exact Editions' managing director called the archive a coming asset for literature departments worldwide.

The archive's contributor roll reads like a syllabus of contemporary literature: Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, John Berger, Louise Erdrich, John Irving — alongside the emerging voices each issue introduces. With comprehensive search, citation and sharing tools, the archive turned four decades of Brick from a collector's shelf into a research database: every essay locatable, citable, and shareable, the journal's whole history available to institutions that could never assemble the print run.

Issue 113: The Journal in 2024

The June 2024 issue — number 113, 144 pages — shows the journal's current editorial shape. Edited by Dionne Brand, David Chariandy and Laurie D. Graham, its contents run the full Brick register: Robert Bringhurst on commerce, culture and the bookseller's crusade; Héctor Abad remembering the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina; Andrea Luka Zimmerman on Palestine; Eleanor Wachtel interviewing the artist William Kentridge; Iman Mersal on the archive; Jan Zwicky on the contemplative mind; poetry from Fady Joudah, Zoe Whittall, Suzanne Gardinier, Cassidy McFadzean and Cornel Bogle; fiction from Theresa Wong and Amelina herself; artwork by Kentridge and Lauren Tamaki.

The mix — the interview as signature form, the international literary conscience, the poetry folded into a nonfiction journal — is the house style that has held since Dragland's day, applied to the present moment's writers and crises.

Dragland's Formation

Stan Dragland's path to founding Brick ran through the academy he never quite fit. Born in a Calgary hospital on December 2, 1942, and raised in several Alberta communities, he completed a PhD at Queen's University and taught at schools and post-secondary institutions in Canada and the United Kingdom before settling as a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario in London. Manina Jones — now head of Western's Department of English and Writing Studies, and once Dragland's master's student in Canadian literature — remembered him as "a different kind of professor," one who spoke from inside a literary community and communicated the emotional and personal ways people encounter writing. She credited him with inspiring her own academic career: he showed, she said, that there was enough elasticity in the academic community to embrace ethical considerations and heartfelt engagement with literature — he was not a traditional academic, and he changed academe for the better.

That elasticity — the professor as publisher, editor, mentor and community-builder — is the institutional DNA of Brick: a journal founded by a man who treated literature as a lived community rather than a subject.

Digital Presence

The journal's website at brickmag.com publishes content from and about the magazine, including contributor pages, excerpts, and subscription information. The site extends the journal's reach to international readers and serves as the digital face of one of Canada's most durable literary institutions. Its history is documented in publishing-industry coverage such as Masthead Online and in the biographical record of its founder, Stan Dragland.