Virtual Screening + Launch

While some arts organizations have responded to COVID-19 with Gone Fishing signs, others have found new and inventive ways to serve its audiences. Is there a correlation between Gone Fishing signs and organizations with over 75% public funding? Put another way, after Capilano University decided it no longer needed The Capilano Review as part of its English Department, the journal was forced to find new funding sources, which it did, in large part by encouraging new audiences.

Yesterday, the current TCR team launched its Virtual Screening + Launch of Issue 3.41 at Strathcona Community Gardens. Editors Emily Dundas Oke and Matea Kulić provided extensive introductions that included a range of land acknowledgements -- from ancestral and unceded lands (Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples) to more recent land displacements (the City of Vancouver's destruction of the largely Black neighbourhood of Hogan's Alley in the 1960s), as well as "the ongoing displacements occurring within Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, as witnessed by the tent camp just across the way."

Also introduced was cinematographer Israel Seoane, who was commissioned by TCR to make three short videos adapted from current issue content. Although I applaud the inclusion of Garden Don't Care in the current issue, its contribution (and representation) failed to resonate with this viewer. However, when seen in relation to Israel's video -- it came alive! This, I think, is an example of how literary magazines could themselves overcome years of (self-)isolation within respect to the larger cultural ecology, particularly in this era of social media, which, for better or for worse, drives everything.