John Kinsella?s
Salt Magazine
has been relaunched as a free online journal.
Salt Magazine began as a print journal in Perth, Western Australia back in 1990 when the first issue appeared. Its history goes back to the early ?80s when Kinsella had a wanted to establish a new literary journal in Australia outside the usual educational venues and government funding sources. The magazine has published a wide range of international authors including: Fleur Adcock, John Ashbery, Harold Bloom, H?l?ne Cixous, Carolyn Kizer, Les Murray, Marjorie Perloff and John Tranter.
?Back then, it was called ?Canti?,? says Kinsella. ?I managed to collect some fabulous material for a first issue. ?Canti? never happened ? money and the vagaries of my life got the better of it.?
The name Salt comes out of the salt wastes of the Western Australian wheatbelt, and the intimate connection Kinsella had with them. Yet the magazine?s title is not simply a mnemonic for ecological devastation but also one of renewal. ?My cousins and uncle and I planted many thousands of trees in the wheatbelt in an effort to heal the damaged land. This is the salt that intrigued me. The grotesque and the beautiful, and the question of what ? if anything ? really separates them.?
From 1990 to 2004, Salt journal appeared with the support of Kinsella and his partner Tracy Ryan, published first in collaboration with Fremantle Arts Centre Press (now Fremantle Press), and then Salt Publishing.
Salt?s new online home has been made possible by a significant Arts Council of England grant and the magazine forms part of a flagship development of Web-based poetry- and short-story resources by Salt, the Cambridge-based independent publisher which Kinsella also helped found.
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