Minal Hajratwala, Editor, Out! Stories from the New Queer India (Queer Ink, 2012). 447 pp. Reviewed by Rachna Contractor During my last visit to India in 2010 I noticed an overt shift: queer was everywhere–in mainstream news, family conversation, Bollywood nuance. It’s not that queer had been...
By Joy Fisher I never knew Candis Graham. She died in Victoria, BC, in 2005, two years before I moved there. In 1994, when she was still living in Ottawa, she told an interviewer, “I write for lesbians.” She wrote for me, but I didn’t know that, either—not until 2012 when I was chosen to receive...
Press Release from Leaf Press 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...
Press Release from Biblioasis 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...
By Dorothy June Fraser 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...
This review posted with permission from Coastal Spectator. 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...
By Theodosia Henney 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...
by Andrea Routley 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...
By Fazeela Jiwa | Guest Post from a Straight Ally 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...
A Letter from the Editor 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...
By Leah Horlick When I opened the email to learn that I had been selected to attend the 2012 Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT writers, I may have shrieked. I grew up in a small town in the northeastern part of Saskatchewan. I’m a young woman and came out as a femme lesbian when I was...
by Geer Austin When I agreed to lead a creative writing workshop for homeless LGBT youth, I had been leading workshops for about ten years. The earliest ones had taken place in the apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn where I lived with my domestic partner. Those groups consisted of...
I was recently following the cyber trail from UVic Pride’s website to various sites describing the rights and responsibilities for someone of a “majority” group entering a “minority space.” Some of the advice included a responsibility to listen to, not to argue...
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (The Penguin Press, 2012). Hardcover, 82 pp., $26.50 Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver’s latest book, A Thousand Mornings, is yet another collection of meditative poems in praise of nature’s beauty, spiritual generosity, and connectedness. This collection veers away...
Kamal Al-Solaylee, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (Harper Collins, 2012). 204 pp., $27.99 I really wanted to love this book. Intolerable chronicles the chaos experienced by author Kamal Al-Solaylee and his family in the modern Middle East. Al-Solaylee and his father, mother, and ten siblings...
Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). 297 pp., $29.95 Chris Fox reviews Alison Bechdel’s latest at The Coastal Spectator. If you’re wondering why Bechdel’s name sounds familiar, she’s the creator of Dykes to Watch Out For and...
In a writing workshop yesterday, my peers had a bad reaction to one writer’s use of the word “hooker.” This term is derogatory, they said. So it was jarring, hard to read. But sometimes a narrator or a character can say things that are derogatory, but in a way that is true to...
Rachel Rose, Song & Spectacle (Habour Publishing, 2012). Paperback, 112 pp., $18.95 In her third book of poetry, Rachel Rose delivers a collection soaked in maternal feeling and all things archetypically female — oceans, milky universes, blood, burial. The language is deceptively...
by Michael Walter Can the internet free us from Canada’s history of censorship? The Canadian government hasn’t always been the biggest protector of free speech. Sure, things have improved a lot in recent years; we’ve gradually seen the growth of an open public space where queer literature has made...
Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian writes a wonderful review of Plenitude Magazine Issue 1! As usual, Casey’s review is thorough and thoughtful, and I’m so happy she enjoyed the read! Read what all the fuss is about here: caseythecanadianlesbrarian
Plenitude is currently seeking a Marketer/Promoter (volunteer) and Fundraising Coordinator (by commission). For more information, please contact Andrea Routley at [email protected]. MARKETER PROMOTER FUNDRAISER
Subscribe to Plenitude, and receive the inaugural issue today, August 31st, 2012. Issue 1 features new writing from Betsy Warland, Peter Knegt, Kevin Shaw, Stacy Brewster, Lindsay Cahill, Nancy Jo Cullen, Geer Austin, Trevor Corkum, Emilia Nielsen, Theodosia Henney, Matthew R.Loney, Alex Leslie...
