This post was originally published in our Medium blog.
I recently got a new phone and as I was excitedly setting everything up, I came across a couple of gems that had gotten lost in my overflowing camera roll.
I found a video I’d taken of myself before and after picking up Entrances & Exits’ first printed prototype. It’s almost a year ago to the day, but watching it filled me up with so much of that same frenzy of excitement and joy I felt in that very moment. A kind gift from past Justine to future/present Justine.
Everyone who’s come across Living Hyphen has been so wonderfully supportive and has shown so much belief in me and this publication. But the one question that almost always inevitably comes up is this — why print?
“Print is expensive,” folks warn me. It absolutely is. I will tell you right now that the margins are terrible (another blog post for another day). And that’s been a hard pill to swallow.
“There are so many more possibilities online,” they urge. There absolutely are. “And you could reach so many more people.” I absolutely would.
Creative Director, Josh Layton, playing with different paper stocks and binding options.
“Digital is the future,” I am told. It definitely is and I love that. Because the online world is, for the most part, free and open, marginalized voices have flourished there. It’s so easy and accessible now to start a blog or start a social media account to express yourself. There aren’t the same barriers in the online space that you would find in the “real world” of institutional power. This has accelerated a lot of critical conversations around race, gender, and identity that would just take longer to disseminate in any other medium, especially print.
And then there’s the big one: “Print is dead.” Maybe it is. But dead for who? And has print ever really been alive — the fully, breathing, thriving, flourishing kind of alive — for the communities that Living Hyphen is trying to represent and serve? The answer is simply and sadly no.
This is at the core of why I started this publication in the first place (read our origin story) and why I’ve chosen print as our medium.
It is so difficult for hyphenated Canadians — specifically those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Colour — to publish their work. The institutional barriers are immense and the publishing industry still largely prioritizes stories by White authors and/or narrow stories by “ethnic minorities” that fit age-old and tired stereotypes. It’s only recently that we have begun to see more complex, nuanced, and varied representations of our lived experiences in print and other mainstream media.
We have historically been shut out of the ivory towers of the literary world, the pages of history. And that’s why Living Hyphen is in print.
I want to see myself and people like me represented on paper, in pages bound together. I
want our stories in physical and tangible form. Something you can touch, something you can feel. Something you can hold.
There is a power in seeing and feeling our stories in print, there is weight to our pages. And I don’t just mean the emotional weight of each of our stories, but the literal, physical weight too. 122 pages on premium paper.
Want to support our work in publishing our print magazine? Support Living Hyphen on Patreon.
Living Hyphen is heavy. Living Hyphen takes up space. Physical, tangible, “real” space.
Print is also something you pay for. And that piece is intentional too. Not because I want to make money (trust me, publishing is not the industry for that), but because I want people to recognize the value of publications like these and the diverse voices that lie within them. I want people to recognize the labour that artists and writers from typically marginalized communities have put into this publication and for that to be compensated accordingly.
That’s why our price point isn’t cheap and will likely never be.* At $30–$35 CAD per copy, Living Hyphen is absolutely on the high end of publication price points. And that’s intentional too. In this (flawed and exploitative) capitalist system we live in, our voices, our stories, our labour has all too often been undervalued and cheapened. Living Hyphen is worth every single penny and if I’m being completely honest, it should cost more.
I want people to see the gorgeous and poetic cover of our magazine (designed by the incredible Nicole Xu) on a coffee table and stop to flip through our pages. I want people to see you reading it in public and for it to spark a conversation, a connection. I want people to stumble upon it in bookstores, libraries, and other mainstream spaces and for them to get lost in our pages.
Print gives us the power of the physical. It gives us the power of taking back the space our communities have not traditionally had. Print is significant.
Maybe one day, our pockets will burn and my naïve little heart will learn its lesson and we’ll move to the more practical, more wide-reaching digital world with all its promising possibilities. But for now and until then, we’re a print publication and we’re here to take up space — figuratively and literally.
Want to support Living Hyphen’s work in publishing diverse voices through print? Support us on Patreon!
*Despite our high price point, we are striving to find ways to make our publication more financially accessible for those who might not be able to afford our price point (often folks from the very same communities our magazine tries to represent and serve). We’ve been doing this through grant funding and the public library system and are continuing to find alternative ways to make this happen.