Welcome to Horseshoe, a literary magazine devoted to publishing excellent poetry and prose from new, emerging, and established writers. Horseshoe publishes two online issues per year, and is edited in part by graduate students in the Master of Applied Literary Arts program at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Grenfell Campus.

History

The name Horseshoe is an homage to some of the writers who helped establish a literary scene in Western Newfoundland. More than forty years ago, some of those writers gathered at Al Pittman’s property on the bank of the Humber River for an afternoon of throwing horseshoes. That first gathering turned into an annual tradition, now more than forty years strong, that sees members of Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus English Program (where Pittman taught back when it was still known as Sir Wilfred Grenfell College) compete for a coveted (and hideous) homemade trophy. Many writers and professors of English have competed for the title of horseshoe champion over the years, including (along with Pittman), John Steffler, Randall Maggs, Adrian Fowler, Shoshannah Ganz, Stephanie McKenzie, Tony Fabijancic, Robin Durnford, Nathan Elliott, Tom Halford, and Aley Waterman. Many of those same individuals have also worked to nurture the local literary scene during their time spent teaching at Grenfell Campus. Grenfell’s English Program has for many years sought to enrich the arts community in Western Newfoundland by providing a platform for writers from farther afield to share their work, through festivals such as the now defunct March Hare, and through the many readings the Program hosts annually. Those events have included other writers featured in this inaugural issue, including Mary Dalton, Lindsay Bird, Dan Murphy, and Matthew Hollett (who has also spent time teaching in Grenfell’s Visual Arts Program). The symbol of the horseshoe, both with its connotations of local tradition and its magnet-like shape, evokes Grenfell’s English Program as a sort of epicentre for drawing together important writers from Canada (and beyond) and therefore seemed a fitting name for a new literary magazine that aims to build on the past by providing a venue for new, emergent, and established writers to contribute to an already rich literary culture. We are thrilled (and grateful) that our first issue includes voices from so many excellent and well-established Canadian writers. We are also thrilled that several of those voices are the same ones that helped establish the literary scene in Western Newfoundland. A few of them, as champions in the annual horseshoe match, have even had the honour of hoisting the venerable trophy above their heads (before storing it in a shed or basement until the following year). It is our privilege to bring these voices to you at the outset of what we hope will be a long run of issues that continue to build on a vibrant past.