Reviewed by Adam Holman In Andy Sinclair’s debut novel Breathing Lessons, he writes about how people “should do what they want,” whether in hookups or matters of the heart. We are forced to contemplate the repercussions, and Sinclair guides us with a precise assurance, taking us, along with its...
This article is part of the Queer Press Profiles series by DJ Fraser Even before its launch in the summer of 2015, Dagger Imprints was a community venture, responsive to the climate in the BC publishing industry, and run by a few extremely dedicated employees of Vici Johnstone, owner of Caitlin...
Reviewed by Vivek Shraya Beldan Sezen’s new graphic novel, Snapshots of a Girl, opens with this definition of coming out: “The decision to step out of the unseen, the unspoken, the unnamed. Telling others, loved ones, dear ones, about one’s so-called ‘sexual preferences’ … something you know...
by Kennedy Ryan The latest Apple software update included a patch that fixed what many users had long seen as a glaring oversight: the lack of same-sex couples with which users could express themselves. The previous “People” category on the emoji keyboard had only included straight couples...
For the third annual Emerging Writer Mentorship Award, we invited queer writers who have yet to publish a book to submit their creative non-fiction, as well as a short essay explaining what they hope to gain from a mentorship with Michael V. Smith. We received many compelling applications from...
I began working on Plenitude just over four years ago. The first issue came out in the fall of 2012, and included both emerging and established writers such as Betsy Warland and Nancy Jo Cullen. From reading and selecting material, to designing epubs, to marketing–I was a volunteer staff of...
We would like to thank everyone who applied for the position of social media and marketing coordinator, and to welcome our new coordinator, Malaika Aleba! Malaika is a writer, copy editor, spoken word performer, and fundraiser. She earned her BA in English Literature and Women’s Studies at the...
Plenitude magazine is currently seeking a social media and marketing coordinator. The coordinator will work with the managing editor to plan and implement all promotions. Duties include: Posting and sharing relevant content on our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and creating any additional social...
by Adèle Barclay In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson crafts a new kind of text, an exploratory vessel, out of philosophy, theory, art criticism, and memoir to house discussions of motherhood, transitioning, queer family, romance. An innovative work that is exacting and enthralling, The Argonauts...
Congratulations Ron Schafrick on being one of just twelve short story writers selected for the Journey Prize Stories (Penguin Random House, 2015). Schafrick’s tender and funny story, “Lovely Company,” appeared in Issue 5 of Plenitude magazine (Fall 2014), and we are thrilled that...
by Matt Loney Alternating between Ameera, a sexually adventurous resort worker in Huatulco, Mexico, and Azeez, her father’s wandering South Asian ghost who tries to connect with his daughter, Farzana Doctor’s third novel, All Inclusive, is a rare, somewhat whimsical but vibrantly coloured...
by DJ Fraser This is the second installment of a series on Canadian queer publishers by DJ Fraser. This series explores Canadian queer publishing across genres, houses, and provinces. For this children’s literature month, we are looking at Flamingo Rampant, the children’s publisher started...
by Jules Bentley R.W. Gray’s second book of short stories, Entropic, is the work of a writer exploring his gifts. Gray excels at articulating a state of pained, disempowered longing. It’s not lust, precisely, although it sometimes finds a subrogate in lust. It’s an...
DEADLINE EXTENDED TO DECEMBER 11, 2015 Plenitude Magazine invites emerging Canadian queer writers to enter the Emerging Writer Mentorship Award. In February, 2015, the award was for fiction and the winner was Sasha Boczkowksi. Eligible writers have yet to publish their work in book form...
by DJ Fraser Metonymy Press, the newly launched English-language press out of Montreal, is focused on unity and representation, filling a void in English-language publishing in Montreal’s hyperactive queer creative scene. Through experience in the Montreal arts and literature scene...
by Adèle Barclay Mette Bach’s young adult fiction debut, Femme, is a decidedly modern and timely coming-of-age narrative published as part of Lorimer’s SideStreet Series. The series boasts a mandate of publishing edgy and realistic novels for young adult readers. In this vein, Bach offers a...
by Mette Bach At the outset of this review, I must admit that I am biased. The truth is I owe a lot to Amber Dawn. She has encouraged and inspired me over the years in such ways that I’ve sometimes wondered what my creative career would be like without her. When I read her work, I inevitably find...
by Matt R. Loney Like a conscientious hiker, Deborah Ellis treads skilfully through the historical terrain of her thirtieth work, Moon at Nine. The revolutionary tumult of 1980s post-shah Iran might not seem like fertile territory for a YA novel with queer and feminist themes, yet Ellis’s superbly...
by Trevor Corkum There are books that come along once in a blue moon that split you open. Not simply because of the subject matter, although Michael V. Smith’s My Body Is Yours covers ground I am familiar with—struggles with masculinity; growing up queer in a small, secretive town; feeling...
Congratulations to the sole Canadian Lammy winner, Casey Plett! Her debut short fiction collection, A Safe Girl to Love, won in the category transgender fiction. She was in excellent company — other books shortlisted included For Today I Am a Boy, by Kim Fu, and Moving Forward Sideways Like a...
By Michael Lyons The Blue Hour is a hard film to sort into a genre. There’s a level of romance, but it’s certainly not a romantic movie. Maybe a very slow thriller, or a mostly pleasant horror? Actually, the closest thing to a genre that this feature from Thailand falls into is a Murakami...
BY MICHAEL LYONS Think about a movie that is non-stop action: explosions, guns blazing, with a trademark wisecracking, beefcake, invariably white hetero leading man—I guess what I’m saying is, think of Age of Ultron. Then think of a film that is the exact opposite of that, one that is so...
BY MICHAEL LYONS This documentary should be shown in every school as a prerequisite for becoming an adult. This statement may be showing my hand early in a review, but it’s not hyperbole. From the moment the film starts, depicting recent protests against regressive policies that limit women’s...
By Michael Lyons On their Kickstarter campaign page the producers of Naz & Maalik claim that the feature is not a political film, but it would be difficult for any piece addressing its subject matter to stay away from politics. Two gay Muslim teens, small-time, good-natured grifters, are...
by Michael Lyons Have you accepted roller derby into your life? The transformative powers of this sport are best known within queer circles, but if you want an excuse to love a tough woman with a heart of gold, on wheels, then In the Turn is the documentary for you. Unlike most documentaries that...
by Michael Lyons Two young guys hook up and decide to go on a road trip together, eventually bringing a third into their strange little relationship. In a film like this, you go in with the expectations that it’s either going to be really artistic and beautiful, with a lot of gorgeous, sweeping...
by Michael Lyons My father has a saying about our hometown: “It’s a nice place to be from.” In But I’m a Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Committee director Jamie Babbit’s latest, Fresno, sisters Shannon (Judy Greer) and Martha (Natasha Lyonne) want nothing more than to escape their hopeless, banal...
by Michael Lyons As the saying often goes in the queer and trans community, it’s a small world. If you don’t know someone personally, you know someone who does, or you’ve probably seen them at a local event. Martine Stonehouse, the central figure of the new documentary Transfixed, is one of those...
by Jules Bentley We live in a world where resources, including those intended for the queer community, are overwhelmingly in the hands of upper-class white men. Queer and trans people of colour are forced to contend not only with the regime of heteronormativity that all queerness exists in contrast...
Plenitude magazine, Canada’s queer literary magazine, is seeking a Film Review Intern to cover the Toronto Inside Out Film Festival, which runs from May 21 – May 31, 2015. The reviewer will write ten short reviews (400-500 words each), which will be posted during the festival (1-2 per...
By Sugar le Fae Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s new poetry collection, is a rich meditation on place, memory, nostalgia, and loss. Paré interweaves vignettes of family history with kaleidoscopic bursts of lake imagery, biographies of local monks, maps, plants and animals, place names, and...
BY METTE BACH When are we going to start believing women who are brave enough to come forward to share their stories? When are we going to trust that survivors know their own bodies and experiences? These questions haunted me while I read Leah Horlick’s latest collection of poems, For Your Own Good...
By Shannon Webb-Campbell Poetry is inherently queer. At the core of a poet’s craft is an ability to toy with language in a way a prose or fiction writer can’t. There are no rules in poetry, only desires. A poet can write three lines and call it a poem, whereas a novelist must adhere to an arc of a...
BY TREVOR CORKUM “We all had our own reasons for what we were about to do,” says the eleventh-grade narrator in Shawn Syms’s story “Get Brenda Foxworthy,” one of the standout stories in his stellar debut collection, Nothing Looks Familiar. In a collection that skillfully mines the inner lives of...
BY RACHNA CONTRACTOR Last year Arsenal Pulp Press published Vivek Shraya’s first novel, She of the Mountains, which elegantly juxtaposes two love stories, one based in Hindu mythology and one loosely based on Shraya’s life. With only two main characters and a handful of secondary...
BY LISA TIMPF Since I enjoyed many of Brown’s earlier works, including Sudden Death, I decided to check out one of her more recent offerings, a mystery entitled Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. Released in November 2014, this book is the ninth in a series that revolves around silver-haired...
Congratulations to the sixteen Canadian authors who are finalists for Lambda Literary Awards this year! Some Plenitude friends are on the list, too! This year’s Emerging Writer Mentorship Award mentor, Shani Mootoo, is a finalist in the transgender fiction category for Moving Forward Sideways...
by Derek Bedry In Cyrille Martinez’s “surreal parable” The Sleepworker, a strange fictionalized telling of Andy Warhol and John Giorgio’s creation of the film Sleep, the narrator seems to float detached above the action, an alien observer. This foreigner watches the neighbourhoods of “New York New...
Plenitude Magazine is now entirely online and accessible to everyone, but don’t miss out on the fantastic work that appeared in Issue 4 and Issue 5! New stories from Shawn Syms, Leah Horlick, Ashley Little, Mette Bach, Lukas Bhandar, Shannon Webb-Campbell and more! From medieval same-sex...
Congratulations to Sasha Boczkowski! Shani Mootoo read the stories from finalists Sasha Bczkowski, Lukas Bhandar and Llew Forestell. “This is one of those hard decisions,” she said. “Three very, very good works.” She finally selected “Birds,” by Sasha Boczkowski...
