Some Small Changes

With this volume, we bring Year 1 of Augur Magazine to a close.

Augur Magazine was hatched out of the desire to publish work that bridges the gap between speculative and realist literature, and a mission to create space where an intersection of Canadian and Indigenous writers could share their work.

After months of meeting up in coffeeshops and living rooms, we launched our Kickstarter in September 2017—just fourteen months ago. Our crowdfunding campaign was a wild learning process that we felt that we were totally unprepared for, but—surprise, surprise!—we successfully funded, and even raised an additional 10% over our goal. Very few Canadian magazines have run kickstarters, and we’re humbled by the support that we received.

Since our Kickstarter, we’ve published 43 writers across fiction, poetry, and comics. We’ve received nearly 3000 submissions from writers around the world. We’ve gained more than 2500 followers on Twitter. We’ve grown from a team of three co-founders to a group of more than twenty volunteers. Members of our staff have spoken on panels about speculative literature and publishing at major literary festivals and conferences. We also incorporated as a not-for-profit under the name Augur Magazine Literary Society, and received Ontario Arts Council funding to partially finance Years 2 and 3. And, earlier this month, we launched our blog, where we will highlight more amazing speculative works and creators in the months and years to come.

In one year, Augur has grown and changed in so many ways. So, it’s only fitting that many of the pieces in this volume explore transformation; how we evolve in unexpected ways when faced with challenges and how the world around us can seem as though it’s in constant flux.

But what excites us the most about these pieces is that they also explore the consequences of those transformations—what it means to live in a position of newness and transformation. Regardless of how we may change, we must always find a way to live with others in the world and to be accountable for our actions. The stories, poems, and comics in this volume recognize that change is not always painless, but it is almost always an opportunity for learning and reformation.

At Augur, we’ve always believed that we can change the future—and the present—by telling the stories that aren’t often told and amplifying the voices that aren’t always heard. We hope that you will sit with the works contained in this volume, and that they will change you in some small way, as they did us.

As we say goodbye to Year 1, we’ve overcome with gratitude to everyone who has made Augur possible and who has helped us to try to build a kinder, more inclusive speculative literature community.

We’re grateful to everyone who has submitted to us and trusted us with their work. We’re grateful to the authors we’ve published, who are fiercely brilliant and imaginative. We’re grateful to our volunteer staff, who go above and beyond every day to make Augur real. And we’re grateful to you, reader—Augur is only possible thanks to your support.

For those of you who have been with us since our Kickstarter, thank you for being in our corner from the beginning. And for those of you joining us with this volume, we hope you’ll settle down and stay with us for a while.

To many years to come.