Signalling networks of inspiration and influence, mentorship and friendship, coterie and community ties, this issue collects writing and art that explores the valences of the word dedication as it relates to both relations and creative practice. The constellation of materials that opens this volume coheres around the work of Japanese-Canadian poet, painter, and filmmaker Roy Kiyooka, beginning with two typewritten letters to former students Linda Ohama and Rhoda Rosenfeld – the latter whose poetry is also featured in this issue. Kiyooka’s tender encouragements pluck and resound the affective currents and interpersonal intimacies that surround the production of creative work.
Roy Kiyooka’s role in enabling the creative endeavours of his contemporaries is also visible in Gerry Shikatani’s feature interview and poem “Journal from Roy’s,” originally written in 1994 but left unpublished until now. Accompanied by newly commissioned visual work by artist Henry Tsang cascading stills from Jesse Nishihata’s unfinished film on Kiyooka entitled Skeena: Follow the River, this folio reflects upon everyday gestures and their accumulations – Kiyooka’s animated hand gestures in conversation, for one – as meaningful emblems of intimacy and address.
The theme of dedication also points to a durational quality inherent to the creative process: a continuous practice, a longstanding commitment, or a position of loyalty or fidelity to people, places, and ideas. Hannah Azar Strauss scripts things heard, documented, and unsaid – like “[A]t the core of every intimate bond there’s an ugly little bat called disdain, feasting on the kind of information only a lasting intimacy can provide” – and making visible the work of art and play in spheres quotidian, historical, and intermedial. Artist Vida Beyer moves through a series of hand-drawn dedications to “the thorny, the sticky, the surprising, the niche”; Shiv Kotecha considers the films of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler as they percolate through dreaming and waking worlds. For Francesca Bennett, affiliations sparkle: filial and fraternal, familial and familiar for readers of certain avant-garde traditions, here catalogued to promote the “possible/impossible.”
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines’s “I have on the horizon, indeterminate intimacy” meanwhile works through apostrophe to conceptualize the intertwining intimacies of performance and parenthood; Suvendrini Lena presents a moving portrait of her mother through hybrid fragments of image and text; and Douglas Kerr’s poems follow footsteps of a hero to many, Lyn Hejinian. A Jamali Rad’s handwritten reproductions of text from Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism posit dedication through practices of rewriting that are at once embodied, creative, and cognitive. Gail Scott’s interview, which orbits around her recent book Furniture Music, meditates on the intersections of community, writing practices, and place, from the very local (her neighbourhood of Mile End in Montréal) to her networks of readers and contemporaries in San Francisco and New York.
Closing out the issue, guest curator Nasrin Himada has assembled a powerful visual folio that returns the prompt of “dedications” always and again to the land, inviting new work by an array of artists typically found working in film and moving image – Rhayne Vermette, Malena Szlam, and collaborators Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme – to call up the still medium of the image and the page to invoke potent reflections on ancestral lineage, grounding, and repair. This folio emerges in the violent context of the ongoing genocide in Palestine and its resounding circles of grief and solidarity.
This, our 205th issue, is a token of our dedication to experimental cultural production and its enfolding communities. It invites us to reflect on who we write and create for, who inspires us and keeps us accountable, and who we consider to be our audience – in the present as well as in the future.
— Emily Fedoruk, Deanna Fong, and Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross
