Letter from the editor. WCLJ summer 2023

From the desk of WCLJ Managing Editor, Darcie Friesen Hossack

For this issue, we asked writers to delve into The Right to Read.

For writers, this right is also, inextricably, linked to the right to write. And this, with the right to safely, and with dignity, enter spaces that exist to promote our written words.

I know that am fortunate to live in Canada. To be able to write about difficult, even controversial subjects, without my government getting to have a say in whether my books are either published or burned. I am fortunate because most of my fellow citizens agree this should be so. And I am fortunate because, in too many other places in the world, just putting pen to paper can be a subversive, dangerous act. Danger, magnified exponentially by each and any number of layers of political and societal prejudice, by draconian policies and laws (see: Florida) and the associated threats of verbal and physical violence that may be meted out by governments intent on maintaining a status quo of inequalities.

But governments are not the only issue.

I cannot speak from any experience but my own. So in this space, I am going to speak from the experience of being a woman in what is still a jealously patriarchal world. I am white woman, to be sure, which comes with privileges of its own. But also with one glaring, persistent, often terrifying disadvantage in a world (both in Canada and abroad) where the gates are still being guarded by (*not all*) men.

Not All Men™

Not all. Just, for example, the TheoBros over at The New Evangelicals. A place that was the closest I’d come to attending church in more than a decade. The New Evangelicals, who in the last several days, made the decision to ban dozens of women from their Facebook platform for the sin of objecting to TNE’s presence at the soon-coming Theology Beer Camp (aka: “White Bro Summer”), after the camp decided to platform a known, narcissistic, domestic abuser and theologizer of “spiritual wives” as a workaround to marital infidelity.

Thanks to the work of many, many Jezebels, TNE’s presence there will not be a comfortable one. But TNE and other white men in power have made it clear that there are still no safe spaces for anyone but them.

And then, at the same time of my own banning from The New (Same Old) Evangelicals, came a certain TV interviewer. An interviewer who scheduled me to talk about my work, on air, before I had even agreed to appear.

In a pre-interview conversation, this educated, erudite man soon veered from the literary, into my reproductive choices (Had I definitively ruled out having children? How could I possibly say such a thing?), my appearance (“You look splendid, dear Darcie…dazzling”) and a request regarding my appearance on the day of our then-upcoming television appearance (“Could you not wear your glasses so you can look more dazzling and less like a nerd?”). And my favourite: “Your entire WordCity editorial board is made up of women? Is it a cult?”

This man, who held the gate to an international literary audience, then also asked why so many people in North America hate Donald Trump (on which point, I was glad to elaborate), and by the end, expressed a by-then predictable disdain and disappointment for the fact of my having included an LGBTQ+ character in my most recent novel, Stillwater.

I cancelled my appearance.

But? Why not stay and be part of the change and push back on air?

First, I would not be the one driving the course of the on-air conversation. And second, because the right to being taken seriously, as a full human being, in a space where others are respected both in front of and behind the camera, is not negotiable.

Which brings me back to the right to write including the right to safely exist in promotional spaces being as important as it is to being published at all. It is as essential as a writer’s right to not be banned by governments, schools. Or, as I once found myself, too, banned by a public library directed by a religiously conservative board.

It is this right to write, for storytellers and poets and truth-tellers to have their voices heard, that drives us to keep here working on WordCity Literary Journal. This mission won’t go on forever, but it will go on for now and for a time to come. Because, in this space, we aim to provide a platform for writers who are telling stories at the various margins of our societies. And that is something we all agree is worth our collective time and talent.

And on that note, we especially want to honour and give our gratitude to a particular group of poets who have joined us for this issue. A group whose courage we hope to continually work to deserve, for as long as we create this space. Our featured contributors: Trans Women Poets from the League of Canadian Poets, beginning with Rebecca Gawain.

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