Daydreaming at Brick

On the day's agenda was Tara Quinn and Brick. A tall, lithe knockout and a literary journal.  With the temperature hovering around 28 degrees and an unlimited ceiling this Friday afternoon was looking good.

Brick is run out of the top floor of the George Brown house on Beverly Street in Toronto.  I only mention this because I am completely jealous that Tara and her fellow Brickers get to call this place 'the office'.  By showing it to you, you will undoubtedly join me in my envy and perhaps together the intangibility of this mutual desire will one day manifest into something of actual use. Hmmm.  Failing that I say we stage a coup and takeover the entire 'house' and by house I mean small country.

Between Jen, a recently retired lawyer, Tara, a student of Internatioal Relations, and myself, a student of political and social theory, we were a motley crew to be talking about the literary world.  In the end we spent much of our time talking about how to (or in Tara's case how she did) move from the places we were coming from to the places we wanted to be.  It was a fight to the death; my ideal world vs. the real world. And so, in my ideal world...

I would live in the George Brown house or something like it, an old house with ornate, dark-stained doorframes and banisters, twenty-foot ceilings, thirteen-inch baseboards, secret passages and a back staircase.  A house that when you closed your eyes and breathed in you were simultaneously invigorated and at ease with all of the life that lived there before you.  I think you should pause now and imagine this, or at least pause and take a deep breath with your eyes closed.  It's good for you.

Well that's it for me. My real world imagination couldn't get past the house.  Although I imagine that my ideal imagination would have had no problem.

Real world = 1/ Kasey's ideal world = 0

But so long as we're in reality, here are two take home truths from Tara:

Literary magazines are a labour of love.

Survival in the arts is all about maneuvering money.