Editor’s note: This is a new beginning of sorts, a relocation of The Mysterious East. What follows is the post that began our last online project. We’ll see where this one takes us. Here’s where we began:
In recent days here on the eastern front we have been thinking about Charlotte and Wilbur. In the final lines of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White makes the following observation: “Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
In this spirit of E.B. White, we make a beginning here at The Mysterious East, where we will celebrate friendship and writing, which White held in equal esteem. A good life, in his view, requires both.
First, let us explain this curious name Mysterious East. This is a distant reference to an ambitious but short lived New Brunswick magazine published in the late sixties and early seventies by the also curiously named Rubber Duck Press. According to dusty documents buried deep in the University of New Brunswick archives, on August 21, 1969, Donald Cameron, a professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, Thomas Peter Warney, a graduate teaching assistant, Robert Reid Campbell, a graduate student and Russell Arthur Hunt, an assistant professor of English at St. Thomas University, created the press. Their primary objective was to publish a magazine. Hunt came up with a name for their publication one day when he was reading The New Yorker’s comically scrambled English/Chinese or English/Japanese notices the editors sometimes used as filler at the bottoms of columns: “The Mysterious East.”
The editors published 21 issues: two in 1969, ten in 1970, seven in 1971 and two in 1972. Rubber Duck Press distributed 10,000 copies of each edition of the magazine throughout the Maritimes. The editors were crusaders. They believed their little magazine could change the course of history in the Maritimes. They wrote their stories and became community activists, presenting briefs to government on the mass media and poverty and organizing petitions that called for reform of New Brunswick’s judicial system.
The editors planned to create the Rubber Duck College of Journalism and Communications, but real life intervened and sadly the venture ran out of creative energy and money. In late 1972, The Mysterious East vanished.
This virtual space is not an attempt to recreate The Mysterious East. Rather, we have chosen this name as a tribute to the dreams of young writers.
Here, we have no grand aspirations, other than to create meeting place for good friends and good writing, and other creative offerings members will bring to this space. And so we begin again.
