I’m Going to Start a Magazine
The Letter From The Editor as it appears in the September 2026 issue.
My sister has a memory of sitting across from me in a coffee shop in 2016, having a conversation in which I said, out of the blue, “I’m going to start a magazine.”
I like to tell people that Blank Spaces started on a whim, but that’s not really true. It was born out of my own creative grief when a novel I’d written, a novel I was immensely proud of, was rejected by countless agents and publishers because I “didn’t have a resume” and because “literary fiction doesn’t sell.”
This was a time in publishing when a list of credits mattered, when platform mattered, and when a nobody from small town Ontario would be turned away because she didn’t come with a guarantee.
I self-published my first novel as a middle finger to the industry and I haven’t looked back. Instead, I decided to reinvent the industry for myself and others like me who feel passed over because we don’t fit a certain mould. Blank Spaces was my answer to the big outfits who reject talent based on market value. I wanted to build a space that was dependent on community over profit; something that lifted up the writer or artist who felt invisible; something that didn’t require a platform or resume to be invited inside. I wanted to create something that would have said yes to me.
“I’m going to start a magazine.”
Blank Spaces began as a subdomain of my personal blog, a free website built on Google’s Blogger platform. The first call for submissions went out over Twitter (remember those golden years?) on June 1, 2016. The first submission came in on June 2 and they haven’t stopped since.
Something I’d noticed was the lack of anything in the lit-mag space that was just for Canadians. Even in the literary world, authors seemed to turn their focus from our landscape to recognizable places south of us: New York, Chicago, LA. I was guilty of it too. American locales sold, so I left my first novel’s location vague. I gave it a fake name. I didn’t tell anyone it was based on my hometown in Canada because I thought that admission would ultimately hurt my sales.
What Blank Spaces has taught me is that Canadians are hungry for stories of home. They want to recognize themselves on the pages. They want a place to capture the experience of being a Canadian, and at a time when that identity means more to us than ever, Blank Spaces is primed to be the archive of our collective voice.
Earlier this summer I visited the Library and Archives in Ottawa, a building that houses a history of our stories dating back to 1752, and I felt immensely proud that, within those walls, the entire collection of Blank Spaces was housed too: ten years and over 500 unique portraits of who we are as Canadians.
Ten years ago, my sister could have shrugged at me. She could have asked “Why bother?” But instead she just nodded and said, “Okay, what do you need from me?” And she became one of the first subscribers.
Dreams are planted within us because they fuel a need we may not even recognize. I didn’t know the impact that simple statement would have ten years on.
“I’m going to start a magazine.”
In the trenches of building each issue it’s easy to forget the reason I continue to fight. That’s why I reached out to past contributors to ask them to share what Blank Spaces has meant to them on their own creative journeys.
My vision was to offer a launch pad to authors, artists, poets, and photographers that might otherwise not be available to them. To read the impact statements was to deeply affirm what I already knew: in a world of hustle, noise, and capitalist nonsense, Blank Spaces is a gentle place to find your footing, hone your voice, and take flight. (Read those statements .)
The truth is, I didn’t just start a magazine—I started a family, and I am so proud of what we’ve built together despite an industry that tells us we don’t deserve to be here.
We do. I do. You do. With a decade under our belt, I can only imagine what’s next.
Alanna Rusnak, Blank Spaces Editor in Chief
