Introduction

Appointed in 1999, I will have served as Editor of Mosaic for eighteen years when I step aside in July 2017, only months from now. As the end of my long term approaches, I am, in the first place, astonished at how swiftly such a major part of my professional life has flown by. It is astonishing! As I look back, it was not two years into my tenure when I conducted my first interview in what would become the Mosaic “Crossings” series: conversations with leading artists, architects, literary critics, philosophers, performers, and poets that exemplify the interdisciplinarity at the heart of the journal’s mandate. Each of the interviews recalls for me a special occasion, a time and a place, the experience of meeting and, usually over several hours, talking with a unique person, in every case a person I much learned from and admired. I fondly remember, for example, that wonderful afternoon with Álvaro Siza in Porto, Portugal, his office building as seamlessly, strikingly white and infused with light as are the Brazil Iberê Camargo Museum, the Santa Maria Church in Marco de Canaveses, Portugal, or, for that matter, his Quinta da Malagueira housing project that I visited in Évora, Portugal. I will never forget my enlivening roundtable discussion on interdisciplinarity in Brisbane, Australia with Sander Gilman, Linda Hutcheon, Michael Hutcheon, and Helen Tiffin; the quiet, warm, and lovely afternoon interview I shared with Aritha van Herk in the John Snow House in Calgary, Alberta; the interview with Kristen Linklater that evolved over three days at my lake cottage in northwestern Ontario; one of my favourite and probably most widely circulated conversations with David Farrell Krell in an urban “country” house in which I then lived; the high energy of that long morning conversation with Bill Spanos at his kitchen table in Binghamton, New York, Robert Kroetsch adding an occasional word.

Each of the “Crossings” interviews has been published in Mosaic, albeit over a span of years, making it difficult for readers to read and appreciate the series as a whole. It is my great good fortune to have my term as Editor come to an end during the journal’s 50^th-anniversary year, a very special occasion that we will celebrate in several ways, not the least by collecting and publishing the Mosaic interviews in a single special issue, scheduled to appear in March 2017. The issue will include an upcoming interview with the incomparable Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, Director of the Program in Literary Studies, and associate member of the Department of German and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto; also Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Dr. Comay’s publications cross a range of scholarly disciplines, including philosophy, architecture, and literary studies, as is evident in such books as her Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Lost in the Archives, a companion to the multi-faceted project “Next Memory City,” and such co-edited and co-authored volumes as the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, with Benjamin Buchloh, Brian Dillon, and Lynne Cooke, and Genii Loci: The Photographic Work of Karen Knorr, with David Campany and Antonio Guzman.

I welcome Mosaic readers to advance order the March 2017 special issue, The Mosaic Interviews. Better still, I invite you to join us, along with a host of distinguished guests, in celebrating the journal’s 50^th anniversary at our March 9–11, 2017 Symposium, additional details on which will follow in the next issue of the journal, and on the Mosaic website. Especially, to all former conference attendees and participants, please come again—with your colleagues and friends. We promise you a warm welcome, education, interdisciplinary stimulation, and a really good time.