A Letter for Anyone Who Has Ever Submitted/Will Ever Submit A Story to Living Hyphen
This post was originally published on our Medium blog.
Being the Editor-in-Chief of Living Hyphen is perhaps the most nourishing, meaningful, and rewarding position I will ever hold. But it’s also the most painful, agonizing, and difficult one too.
Nourishing, meaningful, and rewarding because I have had the opportunity to hold, carry, and widely share the incredible stories of artists and writers all across Canada who hail from diverse ethnicities, religions, Indigenous nations, and so many other intersections of identity. Stories that delve deep into some of the most timeless and universal questions around home, identity, belonging, and what it means to be human.
Painful, agonizing, and difficult because it means having to say no to many, many stories. It means not being able to share or amplify many voices that are important and deserving. It means having to reject artists and writers — human beings!––whose stories are significant, valid, and precious.
It is a position that I am humbled and honoured to hold, and one that I do not take lightly.
An Update on Issue 2: Across Generations
Living Hyphen received well over 600 submissions for its second issue exploring intergenerational stories, lessons, memories, and realizations. I’ve spent the last few months of this pandemic reading, re-reading, reviewing, and re-reviewing every single poem, essay, illustration, play excerpt, photo, and short story that was shared during our latest call for submissions. Each and every single story so deeply personal, wildly intimate, and beautifully vulnerable.
I am thrilled to share that the final selections for this issue have been made and we are ready to move forward with the curation portion of this journey. This week, I will let so many artists and writers across this country know that their stories will be featured in the much-anticipated Issue 2: Across Generations. That their stories––and those of their parents, grandparents, ancestors, and descendants––will be published in our pages.
But this week I am also faced with the daunting task of letting hundreds of people know that their story will not be published. The fact of the matter is that Living Hyphen simply cannot publish all of the stories that are submitted to us. We simply do not have the resources or capacity to do so.
And that is something that really pains me.
The Power of Gatekeepers, the Arbitrariness of “Expertise” and “Excellence”
Curating the stories for our inaugural issue was a revelation to me. I saw for the first time the very real and very serious power that editors and publishers have as gatekeepers of stories in our society. Being back in the editorial seat after a year(ish) hiatus was a powerful reminder of that, and this time on an even bigger scale as we received triple the submissions and grown our platform in the thousands since launching back in 2018.
As I go through the editorial process, I keep thinking to myself—who am I to say whose stories get published, printed, and ultimately, told? Who are any one of us to hold this position of gatekeeper?
What do formal education or credentials mean and what does it matter how many years of editorial experience you have? Who holds expertise in a matter and what is “expertise” anyway? How does that have any bearing on determining whose stories and life experiences get told? Who are any of us to say someone’s story is more valid, more powerful, more worthy than another?
I have grown acutely critical of all the media we consume in society, constantly asking myself: Whose stories get told? Who gets to tell those stories? And how are those stories told?
I pull those questions back further and deeper as I go through this process and ask, what is “excellence”, anyway? Who do we reward and who do we neglect? Whose voices are deemed “important” and when? What standards are we conforming to when we determine “excellence”? Who determined those standards to begin with and are they even right or good? Are there alternatives that I/we have failed to consider? Why? How do we do better?
A million and one questions pop into my head as I go through this editorial process and in the next coming months, I hope to share more of what’s been on my mind while in this role of editor. I hope it serves as a way to pull back the veil and provide transparency for our community. A way to open ourselves up to our imperfections, to demonstrate our attempts at doing better, and to show how messy and convoluted this work actually is. To (hopefully) show our integrity.
It is also a selfish endeavour on my part though. A way for me to reveal my process, to understand the world around me through the best way I know how (writing), and, hopefully, to archive the ways I have grown and will continue to grow.
I can’t promise to have all the answers or even a fragment of any of them. But who knows? Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s the answer in and of itself.
The Importance of Creating More BIPOC Spaces
When Living Hyphen was just a seed of an idea, I met with Léonicka Valcius, who was then the Chair of the Festival of Literary Diversity’s (the FOLD) Foundation Board of Directors to run my idea by her. I asked her if she knew of any other publications in Toronto or Canada that were already focusing on the voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour. If there was, I would step back, not wanting to add more noise and compete. I’d just be so happy to support those existing spaces. But if this didn’t exist yet, amazing! I could pursue my idea.
But Léonicka stopped me. “So what if it already exists? How many magazines already exist out there for women’s fashion and beauty? And yet no one stops them from producing more. Why can’t there be multiple spaces for our voices?”
It was a lightbulb moment for me. I realized then that I had been subscribing to the mentality of scarcity that so many of us in historically underrepresented and marginalized communities have been far too accustomed.
For far too long, we have been content to have just one space for us or our community. We have been content to see ourselves represented in movies and television even if in a minor role, even if as a caricature, even if played by a white actor. We have been content with the little we have been given, because, it felt like enough. It felt like progress.
At least, it did then. But not anymore.
Léonicka’s point has stayed with me all these years and its importance rings true to me even more now than it did back then.
As I go deeper into this work, I am seeing just how few spaces exist to cultivate and amplify the voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour. A few existed long before Living Hyphen entered the scene laying the foundations for much of our work, and more of these spaces have certainly popped up since. But even then, there still aren’t nearly enough.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen once wrote in the New York Times that the majority (a.k.a. white, cis, straight, able-bodied people) has what he calls “an economy of narrative plenitude” where all the stories are about them. Meanwhile, the minority (a.k.a. any and all historically marginalized communities) has “an economy of narrative scarcity.” where almost none of the stories are about them.
Nguyen writes, “We want narrative plenitude, but we can only achieve it when we have control or influence over the economy of narrative. Individual writers or artists can’t achieve narrative plenitude. It takes a movement to struggle at all levels of economic and narrative production…”
I think about this often. I think often about how necessary, imperative, and absolutely vital it is for there to be narrative plenitude for those of us in these underrepresented communities. I think often about how much more hopeful and empowering it would be for me to be able to send rejection letters along with a long, hefty, and beautiful list of other BIPOC spaces for these artists and writers to submit their work to. I think often about how much richer, more textured, more nuanced, and potentially more understanding our world could be if we simply had more of these spaces, if our communities had an economy of narrative plenitude.
My goal in creating Living Hyphen was never to be the sole and only space for underrepresented voices. I want our publication and community to be recognized as a premier space for this community, yes. But I do not want to hold a monopoly over this space or over these voices. We are not Amazon nor do we aspire to be. Convenient, cheap, and soulless? No, thank you.
What I want is for Living Hyphen to inspire other Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour to create their own spaces, to cultivate these diverse voices in the true sense of that word, to foster the growth of this movement.
“It takes a movement to struggle at all levels of economic and narrative production,” Nguyen wrote. And my goal is for Living Hyphen to be a part of leading that movement.
A Plea to Keep Writing
This is all to say that while Living Hyphen will likely reject more stories than we will ever have the capacity to publish, my sincerest hope is that this is just the beginning of your journey to tell your story and speak your voice.
I always say that Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour have been told from their earliest days by the institutions and influences around them that their stories don’t matter, that their stories are not worth listening to, are not valid, are not Canadian enough, are not X ethnicity enough, are not, are not, are not.
And so those stories are left not only unheard, they are left entirely untold.
Please do not let this continue to be the case. Please keep writing. Please keep telling your story. Please create more spaces like Living Hyphen so that more of our stories are told every single day.
Our stories are beautiful, heartbreaking, uplifting, contradictory, and constantly unfolding. They are ordinary and extraordinary, they are boring and they are unbelievable, they are everything it means to be human. And our world will be all the better for knowing all its gradients.
