For more than 10 years now, the husband-and-wife team of Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje have been churning out three editions per annum of the literary journal Brick. It's a labour of love, for these two literary stars have busy careers.

In that time, Ondaatje's won a Booker Prize for The English Patient, gotten caught up in Oscar-hype when the movie came out, and then published Anil's Ghost last year. Spalding's quieter career is no less busy, and she received rave reviews for her memoir of a trip to Borneo, The Follow. She's edited the books of others, helped launch her daughter Esta Spalding's poetry career, and accompanied her husband to countless awards galas and benefits. But still, they soldier on with Brick.

Spalding, especially, credits her work on Brick with helping her become more involved in Canadian literature. The transplanted American (she came here when she married Ondaatje) says this mag helped make her not just a Canadian writer, but a writer period. "The other thing that I hadn't really connected myself to before was a kind of grassroots feeling of writing, a sort of populist sensibility, and I think part of that came from working with Brick," she told an interviewer last year. "I really felt grounded, I felt like I had a community and I was speaking out of something instead of being just a world floater which is how I lived before, where I didn't really feel I belonged anyplace."

Brick's actually been around for 25 years, but the star editing duo has transformed it in the past decade from a grassroots, rural-oriented magazine to one of the most respected literary journals in the world. They publish works by Canlit stars, but don't let borders stop them from publishing the likes of Edmund White, Alice Walker, Anita Desai, Pico Iyer and others.

A few years ago an interviewer asked Ondaatje if he ever considered giving up the labour-intensive chores on Brick. He muttered: "Three times a year."

Well, now the prize-winning author will reduce his worries by one...

Beginning with the most recent issue, Brick is down to twice a year publication. But they've upped the page count to 160 and made it a "perfect-bound magazine." In this latest issue, Brick magazine asked some of the world's best writers for essays about their favourite, under-estimated or under-praised writers. They go looking for the lost treasures in literature. Highlights (some excerpts on the website) include:

• Alice Munro on William Maxwell
• Jeffrey Eugenides remembers John Hawkes
• Mary Morris searches for Kafka
• Cartoons by Margaret Atwood
• a new story by Barry Lopez
• Michael Ondaatje's Lost Classic
• Sergei Eisenstein's Mexican misadventure
• Walter Murch on editing sound for film
• Anne Carson on Simonides

You can check out the website for subscription information, or look for a copy at the better bookstores.

Meanwhile, the award-winning Eve Ensler play that started this whole flap has been running since December in Toronto, and they keep extending the run. Sheila McCarthy just did a guest stint last week. This week it's comedian Elvira Kurt's turn, then watch for Erin Brockovich, Jann Arden, Carole Pope and Jeanne Beker.

Fine Tuning: "Move Closer: An Intimate Philosophy of Art," is the title of a new book that explains, it doesn't matter what you THINK about great art; it's what you FEEL that matters. That's The Arts Today, right after the 10 p.m. news (10:30 NT) on CBC Radio One.