Alan Woo 

Plenitude editor Andrea Routley interviewed Alan about the process.

Why a children’s book?

I never intended to write a children’s book, actually. I have always wanted to write fiction for adults. I had been writing for a magazine for awhile, and they held a Bedtime Stories contest. I didn’t plan to enter it, but the editor called me up one day and told me he wasn’t getting that many entries and asked if I would submit something. So I ended up taking this poem I had written years ago and changed it into a children’s story and called it Maggie’s Chopsticks and submitted it, but the contest eventually led nowhere and kind of got forgotten. So here I was with this children’s story I had written and nowhere to go, so why not send it out to publishers to see if anyone would want it. I did that, and Kids Can Press ended up accepting it and wanted to publish it!

How is writing poetry different from writing a children’s book? 

This is a hard question! I don’t know if I can answer it. For me, I wanted to write a children’s book that had a message that would reach kids and help them to grow and to love themselves. When I write poetry, it’s more about me expressing myself and my own feelings. So I guess for a children’s book, I write more for the readers and the audience, whereas for poetry, it’s more self-indulgent and for myself. Both genres are challenging and difficult because you have to consider things like word choice, structure, sound, rhythm, and be able to convey a message or a feeling sometimes in a small amount of room.

My favourite line in this book describes the mother as she eats shrimp: “She snatches up shrimp,/ Making them flip / flop back and forth, / And pops them into her mouth / Like candy.” This quickly captures a real enjoyment of food and eating. Over the course of this dinner, Maggie learns how to use chopsticks, but more than that, she learns that “Everyone is different. / Everyone is unique.” What led you to this story?

Alan Woo

I think growing up gay, I always felt like an outsider. I was picked on in school and bullied and tried to fit into norms that were put upon me, but I just didn’t. I wish I had someone tell me when I was younger that it was okay to be different and to embrace being unique and be an individual instead of trying to be like everyone else in order to fit in.

The illustrations in the book are also beautiful. There’s incense smoke or steam on almost every page which gives it a really whimsical quality. What is the collaborative process for author and illustrator?

There was very little collaboration between myself and the illustrator. I had almost zero say in the illustrations. My publisher found the illustrator for me, and I was very pleased with the results. I admit I was worried it might not turn out that well, but I was more than thrilled with Isabelle Malenfant and the beautiful artwork she brought to the story. I did send some suggestions to my editor, such as the incense flowing over onto the other pages, but I don’t know if that came about because of me or if the illustrator already had that in mind! She did a wonderful job and the book would not be the same without her. The only thing I really was consulted on was the cultural aspects. I was asked about how a Chinese altar might look like and if the red envelopes on the table were correct, etc. So I did make a few adjustments because of cultural aspects but otherwise, it was quite a separate process.

Maggie’s Chopsticks won the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize at the BC Book Prizes this year. Can you tell us about that?

So when I heard that Maggie’s Chopsticks got nominated for a BC Book Prize, I was beyond thrilled. Then they invited me to be part of the BC Book Prizes tour, with myself and author Anne Fleming doing the Vancouver Island leg. That was a wonderful experience because I met the most amazing kids in these communities I had never been to before, like Port Alberni, Campbell River, Courtenay, Nanaimo, Qualicum Beach, and Parkesville. That was a fantastic experience all on its own. Afterwards, we made our way down to Victoria to the big gala event where they were announcing the winners. I honestly did not expect to win, so when they called my name, it was all pretty surreal. I had an unforgettable time on the tour, and then meeting all these other writers and book people at the gala was so inspiring, but then to have the honour of winning the award was the cherry on top.

What’s next for you? 

Next I would love to write a collection of short stories, which I have been working on for some time. There may possibly be another children’s book, but we’ll see!

Surge Narrows
By Emilia Nielsen

“Surge Narrows is gorgeously sensual and sharply precise—if we could taste it, this  book would be salmonberry. It would be salt. To read these poems is to stand under a waterfall, letting the words rush like cold, clean water over the skin. A powerful debut.” –Anne Simpson 

Surge Narrows opens with “Surge,” a fragmented narrative of coming of age in the remote coastal community of Surge Narrows, and closes with the series “Vernacular Hearts,” which explores a queer cityscape. Between these frames, Surge Narrows engages various emotional and physical terrains, and this disjuncture is perhaps best exemplified by the anti-lyrics of “Disquiet” and “Sensorial.” “Pass Creek” explores wilderness solitude and the geography of place at a northern Alberta fire tower site. In “Indifferent Season” the lyric poem aspires to not just distillation of language, but close observation and pitch perfect diction.

Emilia Nielsen holds a BFA in Writing from the University of Victoria, and a MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate at the University of BC. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals including The Antigonish Review, Contemporary Verse 2, English Studies in Canada, Event, Descant, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire, Plenitude, Room Magazine, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry by Prism international. Surge Narrows is her first book.

Canary
by Nancy Jo Cullen

What has to die before you force yourself to change?

That’s the question facing the always quirky and often-queer characters of Canary. From the communal showers of a hot yoga studio to seedy pubs on Vancouver’s East Side, from Catholic merchandise salesmen to hitchhiking teenage lesbians, the people and places of Nancy Jo Cullen’s debut are asphyxiating slowly on ordinary life. Things aren’t all darkness, however: in this joint-smoking urban underground, where families and relationships threaten to collapse almost daily, the stories of Canary also flash across the families, communities, friends and strangers, from whom unexpected kindness comes as a breath of fresh air. Trashy but poignant, comic and profound, Canary hangs luminous above the coal-heap of fiction debuts—and proves Nancy Jo Cullen a writer of astonishing depths.

About the Author*
Nancy Jo Cullen is the author of three collections of poetry. She has won the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Grant for Emerging Gay Writer and has been short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award, and the W.O. Mitchell Calgary Book Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing.

To find out where Cullen is reading next, click here.

*Also a contributor to Plenitude Magazine, Issue 1!

Elisha Lim’s work makes me think in whispers. Their voice, narrating videos or voicing claymation figures, is coy and intriguing. Their most recent work, however, focuses on different voices: those of Queers Who Pray. Lim “loves to praise God,” even though that devotion is intimidating, perhaps even daunting at times, considering the treatment of those who are openly queer in religious sects that condemn non-normative sexualities and gender presentations.

Lim has recently launched an indiegogo campaign to fund the completion of Queers Who Pray. The campaign has a goal of $2000 to meet in order to produce the next segment of the film. You can donate and watch the trailer here.

In the trailer for QWP, Lim animates a portrait of Vivek. I watched their pencils move up and sideways, animated on the page. Vivek’s face emerged from details, starting with his eyes. Lim’s smooth, confident lines portray a queer whose relationship with god was once his safe place, a space of love. This series will focus on queer people who practice four sects of religion that de-legitimize queer practitioners of prayer as much as dogmatize queer living: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. By giving space to queers who practice to narrate their relationship to prayer and drawing them, Lim’s rendering is a short devotional to those who pray, even when it’s stigmatized to do so.

This work builds on the wealth of material we can see on Lim’s YouTube channel, where they question the roles of gender binaries, love, big city alienation and affirms the value of queer family history. They also have an Etsy store, where they sell graphic work, calendars and more. Upcoming projects include a graphic novel set for next spring and the goal of creating new art, everyday. You can follow Lim through their website.

Their work has been shown at film festivals such as the Melbourne Queer Film & Video Festival 2013, TranScreen: Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival 2013, Long Beach Pride 2013 Tel Aviv International LGBT Film Festival 2013, Seoul Mixed Media Film Festival 2012, Reel Love LGBT Film Festival Madison. They as well will be featured as part of London’s British Film Institute Lesbian and Gay Film Festival 2013. So let’s make sure Lim gets their goal met! Go to indiegogo, right now, and make a donation! Right now!

Elisha Lim is a talent that can’t be denied (even by the art schools that are kicking themselves now for not admitting them years ago). Their work exalts non-white, non-straight and non-cisgendered experiences that often go unrepresented, working with such queer and radical institutions as the Feminist Art Gallery and A Space, both in Toronto. I’ll be watching for more, waiting, anticipatory whispers filling my head.

I really hope the crush is mutual . . . because I’m crushing HARD.

Litany Reading Series
Gallery Gachet,  Vancouver
Sunday, April 7

Reviewed by Dorothy June Fraser

The first Litany Reading of the year (back in January) was so well-attended it almost burst the small comfy surroundings of the Rhizome Cafe on E. Broadway in Vancouver. So well-attended that I couldn’t get in.  On April 7, Gallery Gachet on Cordova offered a larger space to house the queer reading series. This larger-but-still-packed event was certainly a success for co-hosts Leah Horlick and Esther McPhee, both graduate students with the University of British Columbia’s creative writing department.

Horlick and I chatted briefly after the evening had wound down about the influences on the creators and the origin of the event. The series itself takes its name from Audre Lorde’s poem, “A Litany for Survival.” When co-creators McPhee and Horlick noticed a dearth of queer, anti-oppressive spaces and readings in Vancouver (with few exceptions, notably the thrilLITERATE series which was organized by Vancouver-based queer author Amber Dawn from 2007 to 2012), the two engineered the Litany reading series .

The evening introductions started with pronoun usage, identity and biography. Readers laid bare their histories in this safe space and were appreciated for exactly the person they identify as, whether the pronoun be she, he, or they. The showcase of five readers, with Adam Douba unfortunately out sick, contributed life experiences that most of the audience could relate to. First reader, Fayza Bundalli, explored rites of passage through coming out. Her frank, embodied performance of queer creative non-fiction was an excellent introduction to the Litany atmosphere. Kiran Sunar’s unfinished manuscript work about brown family queerness and diasporic existence in the Fraser Valley was impassioned poetry trapped in prose sentences. Nat Marshik’s short poems were sweet honey in my ears, a quick whisper of love affairs. Christina Cooke’s evocative short fiction brought sense memories of “home” into the gallery. The featured reader, Jacks McNamara, a Bay Area genderqueer artist, brought the house down with sexy queerotica. Jacks cooed short, punctuated bursts of radiant orgasm. I adored the high these writers gave me, and I floated out of the Gachet.

The next Vancouver reading will occur some time this summer. Check Facebook or Tumblr for updates.

Dorothy June Fraser is an MA History in Art student at UVic and the online gallery curator for Plenitude Magazine.

It was the final semester of college. I was sitting with one of my advisors in her office, and we were reviewing my most recent batch of poems and flash-prose; two of them were about having sex with a woman. Yes, they were big, queer, gay-ass poems imbued with desire and feelings (So. Many. Feelings). My advisor, while endlessly kind and approachable, was also (as far as I know) straight, intimidatingly beautiful, and making a big splash in US poetry, so I was nervous. When we got to the poems in question, I laughed awkwardly, rolled my eyes, and said, “I mean, is it really that important to write about queer sex?”

She blinked at me for a moment as though I had said something very silly indeed, then told me seriously, “Thea, of course it is important to write about queer sex.”

It was one of those rare, magical moments where I heard what I needed to hear, and never looked back. I can honestly say I have never again questioned whether there is value in writing about queer sex. After all, if more straight writers questioned whether or not it was valuable to write about straight sex, I’d have read a lot fewer accounts of backseat trysts that are peppered with words like “quivering,” “salaciously,” “spurted,” and “thrust.”

Great, good for me. But maybe you need a little more convincing, so if you find yourself doubting the worth of your sexy queer words, here are just a few reasons to reconsider:

Education and Community

If no one told their queer sex stories, how the hell would anyone know about queer sex? Judging from mainstream porn we certainly cannot trust non-queer-identified people to give us an accurate representation, so it is up to genuine bonafide queers to combat the stereotyped bullshit with actual lived experiences. Representing a range of sexuality not only helps us build community with other queer folk by recognizing common experiences, struggles, and desires, but also reminds the world that each human is different, and hey, LGBTQ folks have their own individual practices and preferences, just like any other homo sapien. And bonobo chimpanzees.

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?

Young people often navigate coming into their sexuality by the landmarks society gives them. So, while some people find queer sex writing pointless or frilly, it just might open the door for some young queer-to-be. The greater the diversity of content we make available, the greater the chance a young person has of finding experiences that speak to them and confirm that the feelings they have are not wrong or unnatural. How cool is that?

Too Much Bad Sex

There is a lot of bad sex writing out there: uninformed, offensive, or just poorly written. You should write some good poems or stories about sex, so the chances of coming across good sex writing are higher. Please, do it. Seriously.

Do it for Science

When our society collapses and the archeologists of the future/Alpha Centauri find documentation of our world, it would be tragic and remiss if they never found out about queer sex and how very very awesome it is. It would be like not discovering Machu Picchu, or the Acropolis, or Abba.

Like I said, there are lots of reasons writing about queer sex of every variety is not only important, but necessary. Also, who told you you need a reason? You don’t! If you want to write about your fabulous sex life, then do it. If you want to submit or post it in an appropriate forum in print or on the web, by all means, do so. There are people out there who want and need your words.

*Please note that, while I mostly use the term ‘queer’, I mean this to be an umbrella term for all of those lovely letters (LGBTQI, etc.) and do not intend to exclude anyone of any identification or orientation.

THEODOSIA HENNEY is a Pushcart Prize nominated queer whose poems and flash prose have appeared or are forthcoming in over a dozen publications, including RHINO, Grey Sparrow, Fifth Wednesday, Vestal Review, Ozone Park, Dirtcakes, and Plenitude Magazine, Issue 1.

The histories of any marginalised group are a difficult thing to uncover. We can reinterpret literature, search through diaries donated to archives, find some legal records of those convicted of “lewd behaviour” or “perversions” . . . For this reason, many historians rely on oral history to uncover the queer past.

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (Penguin, 1993) is an ethnography of the Buffalo lesbian community/-ies, by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis. If you haven’t heard of this book and are interested in understanding more of lesbian bar culture in the 1930s-1960s North America, definitely see if you can find a copy at some second hand bookstore somewhere in the world, and buy it. Full of oral history, and supplemented and corroborated by historical documents and other research, this book provides lively first-hand accounts of lesbian life during these decades, which is also thoughtfully contextualised by the authors.

It was a good year for books in 1993, because Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg was published by Firebrand Books (published again in 2003 by Alyson Publications). This book is often haled as a masterpiece, one which Jewelle Gomez says “opened our eyes to a transgendered hue now recognized among our many colors.” Stone Butch Blues is a first person narrative of the story of Jess Goldberg. Born in 1949, we follow the character from childhood, as a member of a working class Jewish family, through rape, forced institutionalization, into the pre-Stonewall dyke bars, police brutality, union strikes, love through adulthood. I was warned before reading this, “Get ready to cry.” The violence and fear endured by the characters is heartbreaking, but equally moving is the passion, tenderness, and bravery that persists in spite of it. When I read this, I feel gratitude–not only for the many ways my life is easier now, but for those people that fought so hard to make it so, even when such change seemed impossible.

These stories are, of course, specific to Buffalo, so for those interested in learning about lesbian culture of Toronto, say, you would have to look elsewhere. One “elsewhere” would be Simon Fraser University history professor Elise Chenier‘s study, “Rethinking Class in Lesbian Bar Culture,” which provides an oral history of Toronto lesbian bar life from 1955-1965, and is generously made available online.

The history of lesbian bar culture is closely tied with that of liquor laws, so a search into the laws specific to your province will offer further insights.

These are just a few suggestions, and we always welcome more! If you know of a book that needs more attention on Plenitude, please email the editor: editor@plenitudemagazine.ca.

My Indo-African Muslim childhood in Canada was one of dissonance. It meant being invited to share samosas with my class on “multicultural days,” but feeling embarrassed of my non-sandwich curry lunches on every other day. The teacher’s enthusiasm for my pretty songs and clothes, but her outraged demand that I wash the henna off of my dyed hands before returning to class. Or later, my friends defending me from violence by insisting that I was “Indian, not Muslim,” and anyway I was a grungy skater, so no worries, we’re all the same. I was not the bad kind.

Canada’s Trudeau-era multicultural policies have garnered the country some international admiration. The country’s state-sponsored promotion of ethnic diversity might be deemed progressive when compared to the strategies of other countries, like the USA, which seek to assimilate the distinct cultures of immigrants into a homogenous national identity. Instead, since 1988 Canada’s official Multiculturalism Act seeks to make room for a myriad of minority ethnic groups within the nation’s dominant cultures–those of white, Christian settlers. This policy has been famously toted as “a mosaic, not a melting pot.”

The mosaic sounds beautiful and harmonious: a plethora of different shapes, sizes, and colours fitting together just right. It’s easy to forget that all of these pieces must fit into a frame.

Many critics and writers have problematized the Canadian brand of multiculturalism for underscoring racial and cultural difference at the expense of other aspects of identity (see, for example, Scandalous Bodies by Smaro Kamboureli). Instead of understanding ethnic identities as fluid and multifaceted, institutionalized multiculturalism either over-emphasizes ethnicity into static stereotypes, or attempts to erase difference altogether. In other words, samosas and songs are okay but barbarous tattooing rituals are not, and you can be designated a “good” brown person if you fit into the white milieu.

Either way, multiculturalism’s emphasis on ethnicity ignores other aspects of racialized peoples’ identities–the abilities, sexualities, political leanings, gender identifications, and everything else-s that form our dynamic, evolving subjectivities.

This is the frame that holds the pieces of the mosaic in place. It is also the context in which mainstream Canadian readers consume Canadian literature written by people of immigrant/refugee backgrounds. Recently, I’ve read some criticism suggesting that regardless of whether they intended their work to be representative of their cultural group, writers who are members of diasporas in Canada have been read by some as providing “authentic” insights into the experience of cultural difference. Aside from maintaining dominant white cultures as the norm, reading literature written by racialized peoples simply as “ethnic writing” assumes the author has an affinity with their community, and can represent the complex experiences and identities of an entire cultural group.

Readers bring their expectations to a text. In this context, they can burden authors that are members of cultural groups with representation, and favour texts that conform to the kinds of experiences that our multicultural society likes to promote. The consequences? Heterogeneous, dynamic groups are reduced to fixed stereotypes, while essentialist constructions of what it means to be “ethnic” (read: exotic Other) are reinforced. And those who are marginalized within the marginal group based on gender, sexuality, and/or various other social divisions become even more marginalized.

If you are one of these insider-outsiders, then the ethnic identities that mainstream Canadian lit claims to represent fall short. We don’t find ourselves in books; we are invisible even in literature that renders parts of us visible. It’s depressing to think that when people of colour attempt to speak about their experiences within the dominant society, their words can be co-opted to perpetuate essentialism.

But inspiring, innovative writers of colour have expected the expectations of their readers, and strategically resisted them. Increasingly, writers unsettle reductive notions of ethnic identities by presenting experiences other than, or in addition to, cultural difference. They disturb the constructed notions of “traditional” or “authentic” by unmaking and retelling those expected stories. They acknowledge the fragmented, multiple histories of Canada’s diasporas, and portray this discontinuity in their characters and their (inter-)genres. They use aesthetic or formal qualities that complicate any reading that would consider their writing representative of a minority group (for more on these characteristics, see the anthology Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography edited by Eleanor Ty and Christyl Verduyn).

You can find this resistance in the queer protagonists and feminist themes of Shani Mootoo’s work; Cereus Blooms at Night, for example, features violence against women and non-conforming genders and sexualities while the race-based experiences of colonization form the backdrop. You can find it in the magical speculative fiction of Larrisa Lai, whose work often explores themes of race, gender, and sexuality without providing easy conclusions for her readers. In the afterword to When Fox Is a Thousand, Lai says the book “was [her] attempt to find another way of writing, one that was consciously fictional, that used multiple voices, that refused to nail certainties to the wall . . . to talk about history but break away from the production of fixed identities” (255). You can find it in the experimental, genre-bending fictocriticism of Yasmin Ladha, whose considerations of immigration and racism are always inflected with female experiences. In Lion’s Granddaughter and Other Stories, she forgoes conventions to literally create a relationship with her reader, transforming us into a character called Readerji. She explicitly states that she does not “want to be the sturdy alphabet to set a novice at ease in Other literature–a vaccination prior to his/her flight into the Third World” (97).

There are many other authors who interrogate and intervene in their readers’ race-based expectations to emphasize the dynamic multiplicity of ethnic identities. If multiculturalism has gotten one thing right, it’s the concept of “multi-.” Let’s now redefine the second part; let’s expand “culture” from referring strictly to ethnicity, to include many communities, subcultures, and cultures of resistance.

FAZEELA JIWA is an educator, writer, and researcher living in Canada. Her thoughts usually spin around racism’s intersections with gendered experiences, especially in the context of official and alternative art, politics, activism, and histories. Her writing can be found in independent and mainstream media, academic journals, creative anthologies, websites, spoken performances, zines, pamphlets, walls, and various other venues.

Bo Luengsuraswat
© 2006

 Interview by Dorothy June Fraser

Occidental Paradise is an experimental film that questions constructions of racialized and gendered lived experience. An early work of interdisciplinary artist Bo Luengsuraswat, this film pulls pop cultural references into the entanglement of images and media representations that govern constructed identity, misrecognition and continuing Orientalism in Euro-American society.

The presentation of the fetishized, Thai female body for Euro-American consumption also brings the rapid expansion of globalized sex trafficking economies to the surface of perception in this short video. There is a highly individual specialization of moments in this work–almost as if Luengsuraswat is weighing each episode of characterization that results in the misrecognition of his identity.

I caught up with the artist via email and we corresponded about this early video work, current interests and the artistic pursuit of progressive expressions, community building and evolving identity.

What brought you to film as a medium?

I had always wanted to explore time-based mediums and experiment with the limits of representation. I was drawn to film because it offered a powerful space to re-narrate experiences, to challenge the way we understand things, to create alternative possibilities of being and belonging. Given the popularity and influence of film and moving images, I was hoping to produce counternarratives to what is immediately available in our culture for consumption. As in other artistic mediums like visual art, written word, and performance, I wanted to intervene in our practices of recognition and build community through film.

Does this work provide any insight into your lived experience at the time? Is this work part of a process of self-transformation?

Growing up in Bangkok in the 1990s, I was always fascinated by the effects of globalization on local residents and how the Thai cultural identity was constantly shaped through outside forces. I relocated to North America in the early 2000s, and since then I’d been observing my interactions with people—how they read me, how they reacted upon the disclosure of my cultural identity, and how racialization and gendering worked. At the time, only a decade ago, a small handful of people I encountered could distinguish between Thailand and Taiwan, and those who had heard of Thailand knew nothing beyond the red-light districts. Strikingly, a few years later, everybody became obsessed with Thai food and all they talked to me about was how good Thai food was. Thailand all of a sudden suspiciously appeared as a paradise on the global tourist map. Having witnessed this transformation in the image of Thailand over the past decade, I was intent on exploring the discrepancies between popular representations of Thailand and my actual lived experience across various creative and theoretical platforms (i.e., my creative nonfiction work, “Proximity and the Shifting Contours of Belonging,” is forthcoming in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics).

Most importantly, Occidental Paradise delves into the experiences of misrecognition. Using my body as a medium, I performed the discrepancies between lived reality and representation—how the popular images/stereotypes of Thailand shaped the way I was recognized and treated. Being identified as a “Thai woman” had caused me to feel alienated from my body on many levels. As a person of Chinese descent, I had already been an outsider to Thai culture to a certain degree, and it was quite painful to be repeatedly asked to speak on behalf of, or represent, a nation/culture I did not feel I belonged. Moreover, being socialized as female and labeled as “woman” had been a source of my discomfort, and to be objectified by Orientalist desire because of that misrecognition was an added insult to the injury.

This film was one of my very first works exploring the intersection of race and gender, but more importantly it was part of the process of developing my own voice.

What concepts were you working with at the time in your visual arts work? How did this work help your artistic process?

At the time I was primarily doing abstract work—drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Even in the more conceptual pieces, there was a certain degree of abstraction involved (this film for example). I guess I was experimenting with how to package concepts and interventions in unconventional formats. I was certainly into queering the usage of space, time, and narrative in artistic forms. (Examples of my visual arts work can be found here)

In Occidental Paradise I had a chance to explore different modes of visual storytelling and the possibilities of cultural resistance. Working with multimedia found materials was like creating a temporal collage—in a way the process of producing this work was comparable to collecting and sorting junk. Though disturbing and triggering most of the time, handling these toxic materials and rearranging them on my own terms was quite empowering. It was the emotional strength I gained through this process that I found to be invaluable and helpful for my future creative and activist endeavors.

Which formats are you currently working in?

I have been doing a lot of creative writing lately—poetry, short essays, memoir, and nonfiction genres—alongside some theoretical work on Asian American trans artistic production and immigration activism.

BO LUENGSURASWAT is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and activist. He holds a BA in Visual Studies from the California College of the Arts and an MA in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. His written and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Critical Ethnic Studies Anthology; nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal; Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader (Second Edition); Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics; Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation; and Dreamers Adrift (http://dreamersadrift.com).  Bo’s visual arts, performance, and multimedia work has been exhibited in various venues across the US including Fresh Meat in the Gallery, the National Queer Arts Festival, the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, and Gender Reel.

The best part about editing Plenitude is, of course, reading the submissions. And it feels sometimes like I’m taking the pulse of our collective unconscious—discovering what is on those solitary writing minds as we sit at our computers or notebooks uncovering our perspectives. Last spring, many of these submissions focused on families: estranged fathers or father figures, children, mothers. This winter we were thinking about love.

When I contacted Elisha Lim about illustrating the cover for this issue, this is what I wrote them: “I’ve been getting lots of submissions on the subject of love this time around—awkward attempts to find it, experiences being grossed out by it, more sentimental stories, finding someone online, stories of first boyfriends etcetera. Some really diverse stuff, yet linked along those lines.”
Then they came up with those four words, laid out perfectly:

the crush
is mutual.

How fortunate. How foreboding.

Here are a few morsels of what’s inside Issue 2: Sierra Skye Gemma’s story of lust in the 90s Portland punk scene may make you squirm. You may cry as Jim Brega remembers his great love at the dawn of AIDS. George K. Ilsley will make you put down your device and reminisce about your first love, and Alex Leslie will have you sifting through your box (or acccordion file or inbox) of old love letters—what would you redact?

Thank you to all the contributors, readers, and to everyone who submitted to this issue. It is a privilege to read your work.

Enjoy!

To receive Issue 2, click “Subscribe.”