Article Category Archives: Editorial

A Message from DBDLI (June 2020)

This entry was posted on by Susan Brigham.

On May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, USA, George Floyd was videoed being brutality asphyxiated by a police officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes while no one stopped the horror. Two days later in Toronto, Ontario, Regis Korchinski-Paquet was killed falling from a balcony; she had been with police in her apartment after her mother called 911 out of concern for her daughter’s health. These are only two of far too many incidences of anti-Black racism that have led many of us to feel overwhelmed with disgust, frustration, despair, trauma, pain, fear, and anger.

Persistent state violence against Black people and systemic anti-Black racism in our workplaces, communities, and institutions here in Canada and around the world underscore the urgent need for change. It also highlights the need for an amplification of Black voices, perspectives, and stories.

In the time of a global pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, people of all backgrounds are seeking and listening more carefully for Black counter-stories. We are craving the rhythm of poetry, looking for the respite that visual art can offer, and yearning for the familiar sounds of African Nova Scotian voices of every timbre to help us feel we are not alone. In these pages, you will find breathing spaces and resonance. You will be reminded that we are “bound together with threads of compassion” (Wanda Robson), that we can critically hope to “build more capacity to find the courage to give back, despite the adversities we face” (Wanda Thomas Bernard), and that we do indeed “belong to a crowd that would not negate your very existence” (Késa Munroe Anderson).

As a board member of the Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute (DBDLI) and Chair of the Alexa McDonough Institute for Women, Gender and Social Justice, which partners with Understorey Magazine, I thank the talented women featured in this edition. The contributors—young and old, aspiring and seasoned—express their stories through art, poetry, and essays, covering such topics as critical hope, healing, home, racism, exclusion, body-image, family, loss, and beauty.

I also want to express my appreciation for all those who enabled the contributors to share their creativity in a beautiful and accessible way. Thanks to Katherine Barrett, Editor-in-Chief of Understorey Magazine, for her unwavering commitment to providing a platform for women and girls to express their stories and for her foresight for this special edition. Thank you Lindsay Ruck for guest-editing this outstanding edition. The DBDLI, which is committed to advancing Africentric education, is proud to have collaborated with Understorey Magazine and fund the print edition and the re-issuing of this edition at this critical time.

Remember: “Your truth is powerful” (Guyleigh Johnson).

Please enjoy and share this brilliant “African Nova Scotian Women” publication.

From the Editor (2nd edition, June 2020)

This entry was posted on by Lindsay Ruck.

I wear it joyfully. I wear it big. I wear it womanly. And I wear it Black. Black. Black. As night, deep and soft and endless with no moon. Just black and perfect splendour in life and in being a woman in this world.
—from “Mirrors” by Maxine Tynes

I was in Grade 3 when I first realized I didn’t look like the other kids in my class. A young boy used a word to describe my skin colour and in that moment I felt so small. I felt ugly. I felt different. All I wanted to do was run home, stay in my room, and never go back to school again. Up until that point I knew I didn’t necessarily look like my friends. Sure, my hair had far more volume than most, and I had hit a serious growth spurt that made me taller than most of the other kids at school. But for me, the differences stopped there. I hadn’t realized that other children might view my skin colour as a negative. It never occurred to me that my complexion would be something they could mock and point out as a fault. To my recollection, that was my first experience with racism, but it certainly wasn’t my last. When something happens over and over again, one can become numb to the action. It’s so common that it no longer has the same effect as it once did. But no matter how many times I was called a name or made to feel less than, it never hurt any less. If anything, it hurt more.

What we are seeing right now around the world are people who are saying in one voice that they will no longer let this be the norm. They will no longer accept the title of second-class citizen and, this time, they will ensure their voices are heard. People are starting to make a concerted effort to listen, to learn, and to try to grasp just how deep systemic racism has been rooted into every facet of life.

We’ve also seen a great many people looking to celebrate the beauty of being Black. And that is exactly what this issue of Understorey Magazine has set out to do. When the issue was first released in 2017, I was honoured to act as its guest editor. And once the call went out, I was blown away by the number of submissions we received from the African Nova Scotian community. This province is bursting with incredibly talented and proud Black women who are using their craft to celebrate the beauty of their race, their culture, and their ancestral roots.

Within these pages you will find works of poetry, essay, painting, sculpture, and beautiful quilts. I am grateful to Editor-in-Chief Katherine Barrett for giving these women the space and the platform to highlight their work. I’m also thankful to the Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute who funded this issue in 2017 and is now providing the re-print to mark the extraordinary changes happening in our world in 2020.

I wish I had such a publication to show that Grade 3 little girl who was made to feel ashamed of who she was and what she looked like. I wish I could tell her that Black is beautiful and that, one day, in the midst of a civil rights movement, she’ll be telling her own daughter to be proud of who she is, to love herself fully, and to not be colour blind, but to be colour conscious.

Let’s celebrate our differences. Let’s lift each other up. Let’s make sure this is a movement, and not just a moment. Black women matter. Black artists matter. Black futures matter. Black dreams matter. Black lives matter.

Print Edition, 2020

The Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute has generously funded a second printing of Understorey Magazine Issue 12 with our new editorial. If you are interested in receiving a copy, please contact us at editor@understoreymagazine.ca.

About Our Cover

Our cover for Issue 12 features work by Nova Scotia artist Shreba Quach.

Shreba says, “I have been an artist all my life but only in the last five years have I called myself one. Creativity has been a tool for healing and recovery from a traumatic past.”

The full painting from which our cover was created is shown here.

Words > Stories > Action

This entry was posted on by Katherine Barrett.

RE Nature: Concerning nature.
Renature: To restore to original condition.

We began plans for this issue of Understorey Magazine over a year ago, in August and September of 2018. It seems like a long time has passed.

At that time, few people knew of Greta Thunberg, fewer had attended a Climate Strike. Extinction Rebellion did not exist. The IPCC had yet to release their game-changing report, the one that warned we had only twelve years to take serious action against climate change.

In the past year, it seems, our awareness has transformed. Even our language has changed. It is now commonplace to talk of the “climate crisis” or the “climate emergency.”

But while global awareness has recently surged, the situation itself—warming, melting, acidification—is not new at all. Half a century ago, back in the 1970s, Exxon (and probably others) accurately predicted and then actively buried the fact that burning fossil fuels would rapidly warm the planet. A quarter of a century ago, in 1992, nations met in Rio to sign the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The goal was to limit “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate. And decades ago, Indigenous people, especially those in the Arctic, sounded the alarm, told us we are not doing enough. They have been living in a changed climate ever since.

The climate crisis has been called a “long emergency.” But things are speeding up—and it’s not just the climate we have to worry about. The UN has also issued dire, unprecedented warnings about species extinction. Some researchers say there are in fact nine planetary limits or boundaries; global temperature and species extinction only two of them. They say we have already transgressed four of those boundaries. Without a radical change of direction, and soon, we will not survive as a species.

So….

Why write poetry? Why write fiction or memoir? Why take time to paint or weave or sketch? Even for one morning, why ponder stories when so much is at stake?

A guiding principle of Understorey Magazine is that stories inspire change. Unearthing stories that are not often or not widely shared can build bonds, strengthen community, fuel action. This is why, for 17 issues now, we have chosen themes that are vital to our everyday lives but tend to stay hidden under the surface of everyday conversation: age, blood, service, motherhood, and more. In telling these stories, we announce: This has happened. This is happening—to me, to us. Stories help move us forward, they urge the question: Now what?

But as author and environmental journalist Linda Pannozzo recently reminded me, both through her writing and in person, stories can also blind us. Told over and over, stories can mire us in “truths” that were never truths, ideas that never made any sense at all. Patriarchy, for instance. Or more generally, dominion. Terra nullius. Nature’s bounty. Limitless economic growth. Whose stories are these? How are they sustained? What happens if we erase them and tell something new?

In his essential book, The Truth about Stories, Thomas King says: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” Think about this for a moment. We are the stories we tell. We become the stories we tell.

In this issue of Understorey Magazine, our contributors do not lord over nature’s bounty. Nor do they stand aside in reverence or awe. They do not separate themselves at all—from nature, or from a nature in crisis. “We are accomplices,” writes Anna Quon, capturing in three words an alternate and necessary story.

Mi’kmaw author Tiffany Morris asks about specific words and definitions: “there is not a word in every language for / extinction event,” she writes. What does it mean that the English-speaking colonial world now requires this term?

Many of our contributors look at the storytellers themselves. “Auteur theory is for the birds,” writes Tanis MacDonald, forcing us to question who is penning the stories we tell of nature. Who believes they are directing the plot? And what about those relegated to the wings? Those who are homeless, endangered, living precariously, already suffering, or already lost? How will their stories shape who we are as a society and a species?

Of course, we have to do more than sit and write. We also have to rally crowds, get our hands dirty, listen to the too-busy and the still-doubtful. And, yes, we must pause to acknowledge the absolute wonder and our place in it. But creating a new narrative requires brave new storytellers, as well as a place to tell their stories.

So we invite you to read, think, comment, share, and act—RE Nature.

Thank you to all of our writers and visual artists, and to all who submitted work. We could not publish everything but we appreciated and learned from everything we read. Special thanks to our poetry editor, Rachel Edmonds, who vetted submissions and provided editorial comments, all while undergoing chemotherapy and planning a wedding. And a big thank you to our cover artist, Jane Whitten. Jane creates woven art with non-traditional but sadly abundant materials such as discarded plastic bags, telephone wire, and fishing line. The resulting portrayal of natural beauty and nature in crisis suggests not only where we now stand in the world, but several possible future stories.

Editor’s Note

This entry was posted on by Natalie Meisner.

To look up from my own work as a playwright and professor and edit this issue of Understory Magazine, with its focus on diverse stories of womxn on stage, was in some ways the pause that refreshes. It is inspiring to have this opportunity to engage with the unique and rich work being done by artists across the country. How invigorating to edit this issue at a time when equity, diversity, and inclusion are finally coming to the forefront of theatre and the performing arts! Pow.

Many thanks to Katherine Barrett for helping to shape and refine the idea for this issue. There were many ideas in the air when she asked me to edit an issue. Some might have easier but this, we felt, was the most needful and challenging. To have a glimpses into the lives, work, and artistic practices of the writers you see featured here, and to deliver their work to you, is a distinct honour. You will find excerpts from plays or performance texts, creative nonfiction about the inner lives of performers, and poems that capture the particular frisson of “liveness” and what it means to be on stage.

At the same time, editing this issue was also heartbreaking in some ways. As The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre, Equity in Theatre, and other similar initiatives reveal, there is a still a huge disparity between the challenging and rich work being done by womxn and what actually makes it onto Canadian stages. There are so many calls for “opportunities” for playwrights … that don’t offer much opportunity at all. There are so few opportunities for real play development and production. So much more work to be done.

It was a key and joyful part of this process to co-edit with writer and Mount Royal University student Audrey Jamieson. A colleague and I were recently discussing the fact that if you don’t have a mentee under thirty years old, you’re kinda doing it wrong. This is as true of editing a magazine as it is in the classroom or in the rehearsal hall. As I enter the middle (ahem, prime) of life as an artist, it is just as important to be a mentee as it is to be mentor. We must all strive to attune our ears to fellow artists in all stages of their lives.

We are really proud to offer you this issue, Diverse Stories of Women on Stage. It is in no way exhaustive, but it is certainly rich and diverse.

Assistant Editor’s Note

This entry was posted on by Audrey Jamieson.

It was such an honour to work on this issue of Understorey Magazine with Natalie Meisner and Katherine Barrett. The amount of wisdom and experience—of both the stage and the life surrounding it—from the womyn who shared their stories was astounding. Natalie has been an amazing mentor through this process, but so have the amazing voices that I had the honour of reading.

This issue of Understorey is a platform for womyn across the country to share in our common struggles around equity, diversity, and inclusion, but also rise to the challenge of creating a world where we don’t need to struggle any longer. I wholeheartedly believe that art and literature are the keys to crafting this new world.