Articles & Essays
Black Carnation: Male Homosexuality in Interwar Latvia
In Latvia, the black carnation is much more than a flower. Kārlis Vērdiņš traces the symbol from private gay gatherings to tabloid scandals to contemporary pride.
Breathing 2021: Field Notes Week 2
Conceptual artist Zhao Rongjie chronicles daily life on Jizu Mountain, as she helps her local hosts Da Ge and Da Sao harvest walnuts and mushrooms to sell at the weekly market.
What if this is literature?
Having survived Moria refugee camp, Arash Hampay went to Athens to make soup for homeless people. Then he went to Hamburg and made more soup and an art exhibition. What if this is literature? We sent Chloe Ruthven to Germany to find out.
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Multimedia & Performance
What if this is literature?
As an introduction to the work of Parwana Amiri, we’re republishing her story, “The Olive Tree and the Old Woman,” and making it available for sale from Publication Studio Guelph.
Dissolve Disappearance
A figure—a slippery sight like an anaconda—asks permission to enter your pores and touch your marrow, enter the life of your blood that is also the sap of the world. It is a disappearance to be in the veins of the world.
Rise Up & Talk: Refugee Radio, Ep. II
Testimonies from South Sudanese women rebuilding their lives in Zone 2 of Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement, and an ex-rebel soldier who fled from his past to seek peace in Uganda.
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Editorials
Squatch: A Big, Hairy, American Metaphor
In the redwood forests outside Santa Cruz, author Sidd Joag’s childhood curiosities are awakened when he meets cryptozoological archivist and founder of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, Michael Rugg, who life’s work leaves him questioning the relevance of Bigfoot’s existence versus the value of celebrating intellectual curiosity.
Blind Spots
While the pandemic’s impact on social, political, and economic structures has been unprecedented, the uncertainty, tension, and collapse that people face on a daily basis is not.
Brazil set to take away Indigenous lands & rights
Sign the petition: “Protect the Amazon and Indigenous rights or face international boycott.”
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Photo & Video
The Video Kids
When a resourceful teacher gave a video camera to “the problem kids” they filmed what they knew to be true, and showed it. Now no one can make them stop.
The Prakash Churaman Story
Speaking from jail, Prakash Churaman tells his story of incarceration since his arrest at the age of 15 for a crime he didn’t commit.
And Here Is War, Yet Again
In early 2020, graphic journalist German Andino and filmmaker Ray Styles were preparing to launch the Bidi Bidi Media Lab in Uganda when Covid-related travel restrictions forced them to improvise and collaborate across thousands of miles to co-produce their first animated film together.
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Poetry & Prose
The Painting
Thirty-two years after Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre was stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art, it was discovered in the bedroom of a deceased woman in rural New Mexico. Only the painting knows how it got there.
What Breaks
A Palestinian girl growing up in suburban Ohio is proud to receive an A- on her 9th grade genocide report. Later, grown up, she asks Can a fact be sad? I wish to know.
Distance of Space
Six encounters at six social distances, told incrementally through prose and needle painting.
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Various
Curse of Geography: Qinghai-Tibet Plateau
In the wake of the 2010 Yushu earthquake, celebrated Indonesian artist, Arahmaiani, spent ten years working with Buddhist monks on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau to cultivate sustainable rebuilding projects and amplify the voices of women in Tibetan civil discourse.
Curse of Geography: Badakhshan
In the inaccessible borderlands of Badakhshan, Tajikistan, the M41 or “Heroin Highway” serves as the primary trafficking route for opium and heroin smuggled out of Afghanistan on its way to Russia and Europe, leaving a trail of uneven development and outward migration.
Curse of Geography: Western Newfoundland
During the early 1990s, when cod stocks in Western Newfoundland were on the brink of extinction, a moratorium on fishing caused the “largest mass layoff in Canadian history” and threatened the cultural fabric of coastal communities reliant on the ocean for their livelihoods.