Author: aja moore

The Thursday Writing Collective began in 2008. When asked about its philosophy in an interview, its founder, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, a local writer, replied, “We firmly believe that everybody has a right to be heard, and we work together to make sure that we do that in an equitable, safe and exciting manner.” (Bender, 2015) It is a weekly free writing class that anyone can attend consistently or drop into. It takes place at the Carnegie Centre, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which it defines on its website as “an area challenged by poverty-related issues.” (Bender, 2015)

Anyone who’s spent time there, or anywhere that could potentially be define that way, likely understands the variegated way that “poverty-related issues” present themselves, the multitude of other issues they connect to, exacerbate, or in some cases, stand in for. Which is to say, understands that one type of obstacle cannot be, and should not be separated from others. In the case of the Downtown Eastside, “poverty-related issues” can be understood complexly to mean, among other things: addiction, systemic racism, cissexism, misogyny, transphobia, queerphobia, gentrification—all of which contributes to what can be a very material lack of resources of all kinds: medicinal, rehabilitative, economic, housing, to name a few. This is meant to demonstrate that anyone who is facing challenges like the ones I’ve listed, and many I have not, is welcome at the Thursday Writing Collective. This means that the communities this program is intended for are not necessarily QTBIPOC, but given what we know about the struggles faced, especially by QTBIPOC youth, and how frequently they are denied resources, it is not hard to imagine this community being an integral part of this program.

What’s more is that the program is run by local artists and activists, meaning these are individuals who are, in many ways, intimately acquainted with the particular and diverse difficulties facing this community. It is not a program designed for a community from its outside.

While there is no statement on the Collective’s website about their stance towards QTBIPOC individuals there are multiple instances of its organizers emphasizing that the space is meant for everybody or anyone, much like the one cited above. That said, almost all of us have had the experience of entering a space we think will be safe for us only to promptly find out it is not. In the absence of an explicit policy we can look at the collective’s organizers, events and endorsements for clues as to their level of inclusivity. They are frequently publishing excerpt of, blog posts by, or simply praise for, queer writers. One such case is the writer Erold Almelek, who’s poem, “strange, queer, extraordinary, peculiar” appears both in English and in Turkish on the Collective’s website (and in one of their chapbooks.) (admin, 2014) In an interview titled Talking Queer Vancouver Writers, Bisexuality, and Community with Vancouver Author Leigh Matthews, Matthews is asked to name “some of the most amazing queer Vancouver writers,” she names one of the Thursday Writing Collective’s central teachers. (Stepaniuk, 2017) Of course, these observations don’t automatically mean that any queer person, especially an Indigenous or racialized one, would definitely feel comfortable here. However, given what we know about the excitement and consideration expressed towards queer folks and differently marginalized peoples as well, I think it would be safe to assume that this would be the kind of environment in which discomfort can be addressed, and hopefully, resolved.

 

In ‘Gays Who Cannot Properly be Gay’ Queer Muslims in the Neoliberal European City, Fatima El-Tayeb spends some time discussing the activist group Strange Fruit. They describe the group as having had an intersectional practice “in which identities and discourses were eclectically appropriated, rearranged and transformed without a single model of ethnic, gender, or sexual definitions becoming normative.” (El-Tayeb, 90) They go on to write of the groups successes and the strategies that they think brought them about, one of which being that they combined, “local, peer group focused activism […] with a global perspectives” which El-Tayeb posits resist “divide and conquer politics that […] pit ‘gay’ against ‘migrant.’” (El-Tayeb, 90)

In the case El-Tayeb explores it becomes clear that while it is always important to have spaces and initiatives that are explicitly meant for certain communities, some progress can be made, and can be made well, through collaborations between marginalized communities. I submit that this is what The Thursday Writing Collective provides an opportunity for. In that same interview with its founder, she describes the process of writing as “a type of freedom many of us don’t experience in our daily lives.” (Bender, 2015)

While writing about Ballroom culture in his article Engendering space: Ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in Detroit, Marlon M. Bailey suggests that Ballroom culture can do a lot, but it cannot erase all our differences and the difficulties that spring from them. He writes, “Instead, I argue that members ‘make do’ with what they have in an effort to forge lives that are more livable” (Bailey, 503)

This is what the act of writing together and learning from one another as the potential to do.
 

Bibliography:

• Bender, D. (2015, October 21^st) Finding Joy in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with Thursday’s Writing Collective. Retrieved from: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/thecollective/the-collective-thursdays-writing-collective-1.3106481
• El-Tayeb, F. (2012). ‘Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer muslims in the neoliberal european city. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 19(1), 79-95. doi:10.1177/1350506811426388
• Bailey, M. M. (2014). Engendering space: Ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in detroit. Gender, Place & Culture, 21(4), 489-507. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2013.786688
• Palaniuk, C. (2017, April 12^th) Talking Queer Vancouver Writers, Bisexuality, and Community with Vancouver Author Leigh Matthews. Retrieved from: http://www.insidevancouver.ca/2017/04/12/talking-queer-vancouver-writers-bisexuality-and-community-with-vancouver-author-leigh-matthews/

The Capilano Review is a literary magazine that’s been running since 1972. They print three issues a year, and more recently have made their issues available as PDFs online at a reduced price. They even publish online chapbooks and occasionally hosts artists-in-residence and organize generative, warm readings and seminars for the public. There is no shortage of praise for this publication. Local environmentalist and poet, Stephen Collis, is quoted on their website as having said, “Every issue provokes and in some small way moves Canadian culture forward.” (“The Capilano Review: About Us,” n.d.) The magazine’s reach, however, is not merely local. It is internationally recognized and publishes artists from various parts of the world. Though their Canadian focus is certainly worth recognizing, I think they are by no means a national project, but rather imbricated in a literary community that is mired in Canadian nationalism and willfully ignorant of the violence it inflicts. A closer examination of the issues themselves, especially the more contemporary ones, demonstrates a critical departure from the status quo.

They frequently have guest editors for specialized issues. The Winter 2017 issue was guest-edited by local poet and activist listen chen. In their Editor’s Note they write, “My approach to this issue was to seek out work that responds to various conflagrations, with attention to plurality, because the difference between reifying lines and interrupting them can be pretty subtle.” (chen, 2017)  Later in the note, they go on to discuss a particular contribution to the issue by Dion Kaszas and Afuwa, stitching back the land, writing that it: “reminds us that possibility is material and embodied.” (chen, 2017) Even from these small excerpts it is clear that this issue was approached and curated with nothing short of deep care and thought for systemically underrepresented communities. What follows is an issue teeming with insights—writing, drawings, photographs—all of it actively resisting the erasure of marginalized voices.

Anyone who follows more established literary magazines knows that this is already a much more varied selection than what you can usually expect. Moreover, the contributors to this issue were largely people who are situated at the nexus of multiple forms of oppression and prejudice—queer and trans people of color and Indigenous folks. People who’s, if we were to follow Guyartri Gopinath’s thinking in Impossible Desires, very existence undermines the dominant narrative by which they are rendered impossible subjects. If, as Gopinath suggests, “heterosexuality is a structuring mechanism of both state and diasporic nationalism,” (Gopinath, 25) we might also add cissexism and white supremacy to our (ever expanding) list of “structural mechanisms.” If the bodies that contradict these structural ways of seeing and knowing threaten their power, then their testimonies, perspectives, artwork, insights and care extend that rupture even further.

No small summary could adequately describe the breadth of the work contained in this issue. However, even a small analysis reveals its potential to disrupt. My favorite piece, by Ya-Wen Ho, occurs only partially in English. The rest is told in Mandarin. Intermittently, interpretations of those passages are offered. While bilingual work is not entirely uncommon, it is often dismissed by those people who can only understand one, or none, of its components. People still have trouble letting what they don’t know speak to them.

Later in the issue three poems appear by Gwen Benaway. In the first, entitled Chaser, which reads: “you like girls/like me, it’s ok/to want a body /unfinished, in (trans)it” (Benaway, 2017) This is a poem that manages to be very explicit about its intent and feeling without ever sounding familiar. This is a poem articulating an intimate experience—revealing the structural mechanisms at work that frequently infiltrate even our closest relationships.

In another section there is a striking monochromatic comic by Lee Lai entitled dreams about surgery. It contains no words—yet we are immersed in this dream, in which a figure is attacked by a dog who tears at their chest, and left to interpret its significance without the help of explicit language. It has been argued that art, and poetry in particular, is an inefficient way of addressing injustice because of its tendency towards ambiguity. In order to address a problem one must be able to conceive of said problem in the first place. While I do, ultimately, agree with that, I also believe there is a way in which poetry is able to address concerns we were not even fully cognizant of, and then some, exactly because of its unpredictable, underdetermined form. I have given only three examples out of the whole issue in order to show that, not only is each piece and artist saying something with their different approaches, but the pieces are all saying something together, about what kinds of people are existing and creating.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the issue was not received well by everyone. The launch of issue 3.31 was the most underattended event of theirs I have personally been to. It was also, in my opinion, a striking and intimate evening. There was a Facebook event for the reading on which a long time reader commented “Worst issue ever just saying.” Unfortunately, I can’t cite it because it has since been deleted, but I saw it, and so did many others. What becomes clear in light of exchanges like that one is that a trans, queer, two-spirit, POC, and/or Indigenous focus is viewed by certain people as a sign of a decline in the quality and relevance of this publication. Luckily, this could not be further from the truth. If anything, The Capilano Review’s engagement with and elevation of ideas and artists like these is a big reason to continue to support it.

If we believe Collis’ claim that I shared in the beginning of this entry, that TCR “provokes and moves Canadian culture forward,” (and I think there is good reason to believe that it does) then the turn it took in issue 3.31, and to a lesser degree in other issues, is a necessary one for the disruption of the various systems of oppression that are functioning with force and precision within Canada every day.
 

Bibliography:

– “The Capilano Review: About Us” (n.d.) Retrieved from: https://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/about/

– chen, (2017) Editor’s Note. (Issue 3.31, pg. 7) Vancouver, British Columbia. Print.

– Gopinath, G., & e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection Backlist. (2005). Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and south asian public cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.

– Benaway, G. (2017) Chaser. (Issue 3.31, pg. 44) Vancouver, British Columbia. Print.