Interview by Cara Nelissen In connection with the annual Victoria Festival of Authors taking place September 28 to October 2, 2022, Plenitude book reviews editor Cara Nelissen interviews VFA author Justene Dion-Glowa on their debut collection of poetry, Trailer Park Shakes. Forest to Poet/Tree Walk...
Interview by Annick MacAskill Samantha Sternberg was born under a waxing gibbous moon. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Malahat Review, Room, Prairie Fire, The Mackinac, and Plenitude (“Labour,” from October 2020), as well as in the anthology The City Series #5 – Halifax (Frog...
Interview by L’Amour Lisik In connection with this year’s Victoria Festival of Authors taking place September 29 to October 3, Plenitude prose editor L’Amour Lisik interviews VFA panelist Hasan Namir on his latest collection of poetry, Umbilical Cord. Birth, Death, the Restlessness In Between takes...
Interview by Cara Nelissen In connection with this year’s Victoria Festival of Authors taking place September 29 to October 3, Plenitude reviews editor Cara Nelissen interviews VFA panelist Brandi Bird about their writing, the prairie landscape, and this year’s festival. maskotēw-askiy: a...
Interview by Rebecca Salazar In connection with this year’s free and virtual Victoria Festival of Authors taking place September 30 to October 4, Plenitude poetry editor Rebecca Salazar interviewed VFA panelist Danny Ramadan about his writing, fundraising work, and literary festivals. Queer...
Interview by L’Amour Lisik In connection with this year’s free and virtual Victoria Festival of Authors taking place September 30 to October 4, Plenitude prose editor L’Amour Lisik interviewed VFA panelist Catherine Hernandez about her second novel, Crosshairs. Hernandez is a proud queer brown...
Interview by L’Amour Lisik, associate prose editor In this interview with Plenitude prose editor L’Amour Lisik, Shani Mootoo talks about her participation in Room’s Growing Room Literary & Arts Festival (taking place March 11 to 15 in Vancouver) as well as her own writing and projects...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the final of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. “Sushi Tears” by Emma Bishop chronicles the process of coming out while also interrogating gender norms in the context of...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the third of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. Rhyan St. Louis’s “To Be the Moon” utilizes a somewhat claustrophobic timeline along with earnest dialogue to create a palpable...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the second of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. “How I Didn’t Go to Mexico” by James Cawkwell is a narrative about coming out as queer and trans, and the consequences that...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the first of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. “The Ostrich Wife” by Annie Bhuiyan is a semi-autobiographical examination of what it means to feel uncomfortable as a...
Interview by Emma Rhodes Hazel Jane Plante’s playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman’s unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with...
Interview by Nathaniel G. Moore In just a few short seasons, Metonymy Press has been getting the attention of readers, authors and the publishing world—and for good reason: the books are engaging, inclusive, thought-provoking, award-winning, and beautifully designed. Ashley Fortier and Oliver...
Interview filmed by Ulla Laidlaw, with videography by David Mesiha C. E. Gatchalian and Tanya Marquardt are two queer-as-fuck authors and theatre-makers. Settlers in Turtle Island, they were both raised on the traditional Indigenous territories of the West Coast (BC). Both were artistically reared...
Interview by Patrick Grace, managing editor John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer and visual artist who was raised on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. A selection of their work is featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Malahat Review, Ploughshares, and in their poetry...
Matthew Walsh’s debut collection of These are not the potatoes of my youth takes a long, hard look at what queer means to them and how the world has shaped them, set against the backdrop of their grandfather’s potato garden. Walsh’s poems talk one moment of coming out to their mother in a...
Interview by Brett Josef Grubisic Ahmad Danny Ramadan isn’t afraid to challenge readers with The Clothesline Swing, his debut novel. Weaving together fantastic and magical tales with those that are heartbreaking, sobering, drunken, and decadent, Ramadan’s storyteller, an old man residing in...
Interview by Rachna Contractor Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer femme sick and disabled Sri Lankan/Irish/Roma writer, performance artist, educator, and hellraiser. The Lambda and ALA Stonewall Award–winning author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap...
Interview by Rachna Contractor Nia King is a queer, mixed-race artist and activist from Canton, MA (Wampanoag land), living in Oakland, CA (Ohlone land). She is the author of Queer & Trans Artists of Color, volumes 1 and 2, and the host and producer of We Want the Airwaves podcast. Find more of...
Interview by Matthew Walsh Writer Jane Byers’s latest collection, Acquired Community, is coming out this fall with publisher Caitlin Press. Byers’s work can be seen all over the city, and this self-described writer and poet has no intention of slowing down any time soon. Byers’s new...
by Kathleen Fraser Jia Qing Wilson-Yang is an author and musician whose writing has appeared in Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet (ed. Simon Strikeback), Letters Lived: Radical Reflections, Revolutionary Paths (ed. Sheila Sampath), and Room magazine, and Metonymy Press...
by Matthew Walsh Arleen Paré, author of Paper Trail, Leaving Now and the Governor General’s Award-winning book Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books, 2014), has a new collection out this year, landing right on the heels of her last book. He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (Caitlin Press...
by Matthew Walsh Sarah Ellis is a YA and children’s literature writer whose work has garnered her some notable awards, including the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. She has also worked as...
Interview by Matthew Walsh Sassafras Lowrey’s most recent novel, Lost Boi, was released a few months ago with Arsenal Pulp Press, and it has already gone into a second printing. Lowrey has even been recognized on the streets of Brooklyn, where they live, by fans of the book, which takes the fairy...
Interview by Matthew Walsh Jillian Christmas is a powerful force in the spoken word and slam poetry scene. Many of our readers are already familiar with Christmas’s work both in Vancouver and nation-wide. I had the lovely surprise of attending the reading series Chicken Sessions, where...
The incredible thing about Local Heroes, the series of short films made by local artists at the Toronto Inside Out Film Festival, is when you start to see the influence artists, actors, and organizations have on each other’s work. New Zealand–born drag queen and certifiable local hero Judy Virago...
Of all the incredible films in Transplanetarium, the shorts series focusing on trans stories and creators, Iris Moore’s The Dancer and the Crow stands out because it’s the only animated film in the series, one of very few in the entire festival. Film review contributor Michael Lyons got in touch...
Interview by Rachna Contractor Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and educator who draws from his experience as a “disabled, pin@y-amerikan transgender queer in the US” to create art about community, culture, food, struggle, and resistance. He performs on campuses throughout the...
Interview by Matthew Walsh Writer, filmmaker, and performance artist Amber Dawn has released a new collection of poems this year, titled Where the Words End and My Body Begins. Her previous works, Sub Rosa and How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir, have garnered wide acclaim and...
Interview by Matthew Walsh Plenitude Magazine has established a writing award for up and coming queer voices called the Emerging Writer Mentorship Award. The award alternates each year between poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, and the recipient works with an established writer on a...
Interview by Nancy Jo Cullen Tamai Kobayashi is the 2014 winner of the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writer. She is the author of the novel Prairie Ostrich, published this spring by Goose Lane Press and two short story collections, Quixotic Erotic (Arsenal Pulp...
Interview by Leah Horlick A native of Los Angeles, SD Holman is a photo-based artist and Artistic Director of The Queer Arts Festival, an artist-run three-week, multidisciplinary arts festival in Vancouver, Canada. Recipient of the 2014 YWCA Women of Distinction Award in Arts and Culture, one of...
Interview by Rachna Contractor Vivek Shraya is a Toronto-based artist working in the media of music, performance, literature and film. His Lambda Literary Award-nominated collection of short stories, God Loves Hair, has recently been re-published. On May 5th he launches a new video project, Holy...
Interview by Shannon Webb-Campbell Jane Byers is a poet that conjures mind, heart, and embodiment. Her stunning debut collection of poetry, Steeling Effects (Caitlin Press, 2014), is deeply queer, beautiful and expansive. Byers lives with her wife and two children in Nelson, British Columbia, where...
By Dorothy June Fraser Bitter Lamentations from Adam Wojtowicz on Vimeo. Adam Wojtowicz is a Vancouver-based artist who works in a variety of media. Over the past decade, he has been involved in the Vancouver film scene, as well as the larger Canadian entertainment industry. In his creative...
By Dorothy June Fraser Maureen Bradley likes making narrative film, because it’s difficult. Her history in film and video began with herself; she speaks about overcoming the gender barriers present in media at the time through teaching herself. Like many of us who aspire to learn the...
Alan Woo was born in England, came to Canada when he was a young boy and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he still lives. He always wanted to be a writer, and gets his inspiration from his Chinese-Canadian heritage, friends and family, reading lots of books, going to live theatre...
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...
by Dorothy June Fraser Basin from davideo on Vimeo. David Geiss doffs his tweed cap as we exchange introductory hellos and sit down in a comfy corner of Swan’s Pub in downtown Victoria, BC, to discuss his latest works over a beer. Geiss, born in Saskatchewan and a relatively recent transplant to...
John Barton has published nine previous collections of award-winning poetry, six chapbooks, and two anthologies. He has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, a Patricia Hackett, an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award and a National Magazine Award. Born and raised in Alberta, he worked as a...
