This is an excerpt from a longer chapter titled “Notes on Rape Culture” and is posted with permission from the author. Every now and then in the writing of this,…
Category: Essays & Fragments
The Inaugural Mood Criticisms from the Field: The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference and the Futurity of Poetics The temporality of our forms of poetic engagement have a strange character. On…
I’m posting this classic Virginia Woolf essay as a reminder that the personal is always interesting if it is live and in context; if there is a pulse at the…
A Loss for Words from The Last Word (Coach House Books, 2017) by Julia Cooper Here we are in the pews of a bright, white-walled church in the opening minutes…
INTERVIEW WITH AN EMPIRE Q: Why does a Black woman like yourself write the kind of poetry you do? A: I’m not sure what you mean by “the kind of…
Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew-Bose, HarperCollins Canada (2017) “I have no pen…and not much to say, or rather too much and not the mood,” wrote Virginia Woolf…
Most people seem to be using appropriation when they include a Native character in their story. One of the people who was accused of appropriation in the 1980s was the…
The Haisla measure of intelligence is slightly different from that of mainstream culture. Three main indicators are an ability to trace your family roots back to mythic times, not having…
Sometimes what feels risky to me might seem quite guarded to readers. –Durga Chew-Bose Tess Liem: In your writing, especially in “Heart Museum,” you use repetition to create rhythm and…
RISK, ON AND SCREEN OFF At 15, when I first watched My Own Private Idaho, my sexuality was still a fetal idea. But even though there are few women in…
INSTANT CLASSIC, erica kaufman (Roof Books, 2013) “we can’t all be ballerinas, ducks, or robots / and we can’t all heed the ventriloquist and live / in the apothecary’s store…
Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence, Leanne Simpson (ARP Books, 2011) Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories and Songs, Leanne Simpson (ARP…