A Calgary lit mag for the words that make you gasp
Exclamation Mark, founded by high school students this year, drew nearly 300 submissions a month and just went to print.
Most literary magazines promise to publish your best work. Exclamation Mark promises to publish the work that makes readers “stop, gasp, laugh, or” and then trails off, which tells you most of what you need to know about the tone.
The journal is a Calgary project started this February by a group of high school students. Darren Yang, a Grade 12 student at Western Canada High School, is its co-founder and editor-in-chief, according to the Penticton Herald. He is 16, and he runs the magazine under the pen name Robert Hills. “If people knew that I am, for example, a high schooler, they wouldn’t take it so seriously,” he told the paper.
That caution turns out to be unnecessary. The magazine’s niche is deliberately uncomfortable. “There isn’t too many magazines that publish the dark side of human emotion,” Yang said, which is the lane Exclamation Mark has taken. It also makes a point of publishing young and first-time writers.
The submission pile suggests the lane was empty. The journal receives nearly 300 submissions a month and averages about 1,500 readers monthly, per the Herald. It was one of six winners of a contest run by Chill Subs and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, which came with a $5,000 grant.
This month it released its first print product, a 76-page black-and-white pamphlet focused on chronically ill writers. More than 200 copies have sold, the Herald reports, through four bookstores and franchises in Alberta. The online edition keeps going alongside it, and an independent directory lists the journal as a Calgary outlet publishing prose and poetry meant to provoke a strong reaction.
Yang drew a bigger conclusion from the reception. “This really shows me that Calgary is a vibrant literary city,” he said.
A pen name, a grant and a print run, all in under a year and between homework. The exclamation point looks earned.
