Dear GUTS readers,
If you haven’t heard the news, we’re saying goodbye with one last issue in the new year. Our primary source of funding has come to an end, and we’ll be signing off with a final issue on the very fitting topic of Movement in 2020.
Over the past six years, we’ve launched ten issues, thrown seven bumping parties across the country, and worked with hundreds of artists and writers to bring a new age of discourse to the young Canadian feminist movement. We’re proud to have created an outlet for talented women, non-binary, and trans writers and artists to bring their work, and are deeply grateful for the smart, witty, and vital perspectives they’ve brought to the oft-homogenous world of CanLit over the years.
As we look back with nostalgia, pride, and a hint of sadness, we want to turn the mic over to you. What have been some of your favourite GUTS reads from over the years? Is there a particular piece that’s stuck with you? Share your feedback with us here, or shoot us an email at editors@gutsmagazine.ca and tell us your thoughts. We want to give some love to our archive, and will be putting the spotlight on some of our older content before launching into the new year.
To start us off, Founding Editor Cynthia Spring shares with us one of her favourite pieces:
Katie Lew’s 2014 essay “Body of Work” is a piece I still return to regularly. We published it in our second issue, on the topic of work. I remember at the time, I was thinking and writing about how about what types of labour are considered productive, and on what grounds distinctions between unproductive and productive work are made. Katie’s piece makes an important intervention, revealing how chronic illness contradicts the “market imperative to Be Well,” and reflecting on the transformative effects of being sick. “Body of Work” was the first of a number of GUTS essays that changed my thinking. I still feel incredibly proud to have published this one.
– Cynthia Spring, Founding Editor of GUTS Magazine
from “Body of Work”
“Driving back to Edmonton in January from a doctor’s appointment in Toronto, I watched a moose run in a deep prairie snow. Her dark hulking shape shocked through the white landscape beside the Saskatchewan highway. Her gait was violent, thrashing, erratic, dangerous. It was a movement I had never seen, an unexpected shape I couldn’t have invented. It was the first time since getting sick that I thought, “Yes, it is maybe almost like that.” I welcome this new state of not quite self-recognition. It leaves me open for fresh solidarities, for unpredictable interactions. I don’t need to identify my self at all to recognize the value of a new shape.”
If GUTS has made an impact on you over the years, please consider making a donation to help us make our final issue the best one yet. All donations will go towards paying our contributing writers and artists.
