Dear Jas, Arielle, Emily, Nickita, Brandi,
I can’t help but be embarrassingly earnest. Being a part of the GUTS editorial collective, working with you all, and seeing this stunning REVENGE issue come together has been really beautiful.
The theme, too, was particularly apt. Being a part of GUTS was, in many ways, an act of revenge for me. For more than five years I’ve worked in various capacities in literary magazines in so-called Canada, and the overall experience of that was Not Good. This is not to say that I didn’t like the magazines I worked for (I did), or the people I worked with (I mostly did), or that I didn’t learn a lot (I definitely did). But the scrutiny, criticism, and general expectation placed on me as an Indigenous editor by predominantly white people in the literary world made me want to leave the industry and never return (Jas, you might maybe kind of understand this feeling lmao).
Nôhkom Jo-Ann Saddleback taught me recently that justice for nehiyawak means healing. Coming back to a publication that centres anti-colonial thought AND practicing with a bunch of ndn baddies I only ever dreamed of working with has been exactly that. This has been healing, my perfect justice. So for that, I want to thank you all. You were all part of that revenge.
In this issue, I had the great honour of editing Oubah Osman’s fiction piece, “The Umbrella.” I love this piece for so many reasons: the way Oubah writes creeping tension and emotional intimacy, how viscerally the story still lives in my mind. But the thing I love most is her interpretation of revenge, the subtlety that revenge sometimes takes. She also explores questions I hadn’t myself considered when we were first discussing this theme, such as what does revenge in a relationship look like? What form might revenge take when you’re not consciously trying to enact it?
Did this happen to any of you? Did things come up in the issue you hadn’t initially anticipated?
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Ekosi,
JJ
☆♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆
Aaniin Jess, Jas, Emily, Arielle, and Brandi,
Scheming alongside all of you on this issue of REVENGE has been very therapeutic in many ways.
First, I want to acknowledge the gentleness we gave ourselves as full humans with full lives while running this project off the side of our overflowing desks. Approaching a theme such as REVENGE with such patience and care is an incredible lesson I hope to continue to apply in more aspects of my life. As editors who are Indigenous peoples navigating the publishing world that doesn’t hold space for us well, it can feel as though our work is never near finished at the end of the day, week, month. In a society that fetishes The Grind or The Hustle—which feels inherently colonial—I hope to reject a lifestyle that values hard deadlines and unsustainable paces over rest, relationship-building, and good process. I am reminded of a quote from Jayda Hope’s piece, “My Experience with Fatphobia Growing Up As a Caribbean Youth,” when she writes so beautifully: “If we love ourselves and the people around us, we must also be committed to destroying the world in which we are actively harmed.”
And second, I want to name all of the rage, grief, harm, and hurt that comes before the act of revenge. My hope is that all of us as editors, writers, and artists from varying intersections of life are able to greet these feelings as they come, sit with them for a while, and eventually turn them into something that contributes to a larger collective rooted in healing—just as this particular theme has asked us all to do. More importantly, I hope for the balance of joy, relief, or at least rest, in knowing that revenge can be a spark that ignites a different world for us. I want for us the kind of revenge Kate Sinclaire writes about in her piece, “You’re Not So Different: Laws Targeting Sex Workers Harm Us All”: “The revenge of a full life.”
In love, rage, and revenge,
Nickita
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
Dear Nickita, Jess, Jas, Emily, and Arielle,
Working on the GUTS Collective has been such a joy in a world (digital or otherwise) that tries to stifle any joy we feel.
The editorial process and our discussions about REVENGE made me realize that anger and resistance have to exist alongside with joy as well. Communing with you all even on Zoom brought me such happiness even when we talked about hard things. We took care of each other and that felt like revenge (against Canada, against publishing, against scarcity) itself.
I’ve always been afraid of my emotions because they have felt projected onto me as an Indigenous person by society. But emotions are just emotions. They aren’t good or bad but they are sometimes revelatory. And the pieces in this issue are revelatory. Rebecca Salazar’s poetry opens a hole in the sky and sings itself into the atmosphere. She builds a space for rage for all of us.
And in that rage, we see each other. I see myself. I have been afraid of feeling but that fear cut me off from everything. Having frank discussions about emotions deemed taboo, emotions like anger, rage, and despair, have made joy and hope more apparent in my life too. I’m grateful to my fellow editors for allowing this space among us and in the issue.
Chi Miigs,
Brandi
⸜( ˙ ˘ ˙)૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭
Dear Jas, Arielle, Jess, Nickita, and Brandi,
I love and admire this editorial board so much. They bring so much kindness and compassion and prairie energy to everything they do. Revenge is a dish best served cold, mirroring the care we took in preparing this issue through so many changes in our lives and the lives of the writers and artists we featured.
I appreciate this slowness in a world where publishing is often frantic and does not centre people. As a writer, I have worked with many different editors, mostly non-Indigenous ones, many of whom seemed to wilfully misunderstand what I was trying to say or seemed reluctant to provide me with edits for fear of being racist.
In this essay, I had the honour of editing Nisha Patel’s essay on disability, which we are so excited to share with the world. In this essay, she writes, “I can’t help but dream of that care web expanding being blown into the sky like a parachute in the school gymnasium. And we crawl under. There is room.”
Perhaps the biggest and best revenge is being with your kin and doing what they said you couldn’t, and not doing things you don’t want to do.
Ekosi maka,
Emily
☽ ☼☽ ☼☽ ☼☽ ☼☽
Dear Indigenous Creatures,
Revenge has never been so sweet. I’m grateful to have worked on an issue wherein the poetry was selected by myself, and Brandi, while I was high on mushrooms, after watching Everything Everywhere All at Once. Enjoy.
xo Arielle
.·:*¨¨* ≈☆≈ *¨¨*:·.
Dear Arielle, Brandi, Emily, Jess, and Nickita,
Fourteen-year-old me is so proud of us right now. I’ve always had a soft spot for independent publishing. What is a magazine in this era? Dangerously established audiences and their conservative viewpoints dominate journalistic media, and Gen Z questions if magazines “are even a thing anymore” (as Leighton remarked in season 2, episode 1 of The Sex Lives of College Girls). Putting aside questions about whether physical publishing is even fiscally sustainable anymore, are published, physical magazines still relevant in 2023? If magazine publishing cultures—which is to say a keen eye on editorial style, publishing, and critique, with a focus on accessibility and cultural trends—can change with the shifting values and technologies of North American society, then they will remain relevant.
Publishing industries must shift their expectations about prestige to focus on equitable labour and making time and space for the creative process again (in other words, make working at a magazine fun again). Publishing brands need to understand that, in an era of digital publishing, they are just that: brands. Social media is now as much a part of the publication process as picking out the weight of your paper and expensive and time-consuming layouts (and a curated aesthetic can exist outside of that top-down hierarchy of publishing past).
Whatever publishing is, and is becoming, fourteen-year-old me is proud to do this work alongside the other editors of REVENGE. The fourteen-year-old who had to special order Bitch magazine to Regina, and thirty-five-year old who watched the magazine crumble because it could not meet a digital figure, is proud we did it in a feminist way. I’m learning that the things that brought me to publishing are a little more complicated in the muddy waters of Canadian industry. But I hope I made you proud with this work, and all the Cree/Nish/Métis grrrl besties I had before you, too.
I started to write that this issue is my revenge on the Canadian publishing establishment: my ugly abusive ex-boyfriend. But, then again, with my ppl behind me, a quote from Beverly Hills Real Housewife Lisa Vanderpump comes to mind, about some things not being important enough to hate. To the future.
xx Jas
