Emma-Jamie interview part 2

It means that we have access to faculty advisors who have been part of the CanLit game, and especially the lit mag game for a long time. Our current faculty advisor is Sue Sinclair, who is a very well-respected poet. She is also the head of creative writing at UNB, and she is also a high-ranking staff member of Fiddlehead. And that's just one person. That is only one of the people that I and any of my other editors can go to for professional advice. A lot of the professors in creative writing at UNB have also formerly had experience working with Qwerty. Triny Finlay, for example, was a former managing editor and former contributor. Before Sue Sinclair was in charge of creative writing, Ross Leckie was, and he's still involved in and around UNB creative writing things. So it's very easy to reach out to Ross for advice. Ian LeTourneau, another former Qwerty managing editor, now of course with the Fiddlehead. That's someone that I can reach out to at any point and ask for help on something with. Having access to these people for professional networking purposes is invaluable. There are challenges with being involved in the university system, but the benefit is not having to worry about where we're going to house all of our issues because we have a dedicated office on the UNB campus. Or if we somehow run out of funding, there are avenues to do something about that. It's not a guarantee that we have access to internal funding from the English Department, but we have help available to us if we suddenly need to access that funding. It is Sue, actually, who writes grant applications for Qwerty so that we can keep working. We survive entirely on the graces of something called the Shaw Fund, which she applies to for money for us every year. It's really helpful to not have to sweat the bigger managerial... Oh, sorry. I think we're back now, right? Okay, well, I also still have my recording going on, too. No, we're good. But yeah, that's why I have Audacity running. In summary, I don't have to worry about what happens if we run out of money and can't afford to rent a space because the space is already provided to us by the university to hold all of our issues. The university is also our middleman for getting these things printed. We have an account number, we give it to them, and they match us with someone who takes the bidding for printing our issues of Qwerty. We've been with a printer called Rocket for a little while. Previously, we were with Advocate. And that's just for our perfect bound issues of the magazine. For the staple bound chapbooks we do, we can do that entirely through UNB Print Services, where they only charge us the fees at cost. So a chapbook printed through Rocket would cost $700 for a run of 50, but through UNB Print Services, it's only $300. So because it's so cheap and we have access to that resource, that's really how the Homework chapbooks can be self-sustaining. So those are the benefits, but the negatives mean that we have to be associated with a large corporate entity, basically. So, for example, if the president of the university says something that you personally don't agree with, or if your values for the periodical that you're working on don't align fully with the goals and stated interests of the institution that you're tied to, that makes it a little bit awkward for you, and you have to figure out how you're going to respond. If at all. I will say that is the thing I worry about the most, is whether or not something that we say will result in us losing access to the autonomy that we have. I think it's a very helpful bridge, because we don't have the same status as the Fiddlehead, that makes us more open and available to writers from all walks of life, who are at different stages of their career, and at different skill levels as well. So, we have a mix of writers who we are more easily able to curate, because they are our colleagues, or our peers, but we also have writers coming in from places who just happen to hear about Qwerty from one source or another. So, we have this very wide net of people that we will publish at different skill levels of their writing, as long as it is good and we have a space for it. As far as how that looks in our local community, Qwerty in the past has done a lot of public readings. Especially around 2017 and 2018, there was a consistent Qwerty Reads series that was put on by the former managing editors, Annabelle Babineau, who was also the drag queen Barb Wire, and Perry Reimer, who was also the managing editor at the time. And so, they really invested in public readings hosted by Qwerty, and a lot of these were held at a bar in downtown Fredericton called Wilser's Room. This was all before the pandemic, of course. Recently, I have started pushing Qwerty back into doing more public events. We just had a queer poetry event called Richard's Room, named for the late New Brunswick writer, R.M. Vaughan, Richard Vaughan. And I'm looking to turn it into a monthly series. Fawn Parker, the new Poet Laureate, also has her own monthly reading series called The Catch-Up, and I would like to try to use Richard's Room as something we can do in the off weeks. The Catch-Up is usually the last weekend of a month. I would like to have Richard's Room two weeks removed from that, so that we can kind of get back to the schedule that Odd Sundays used to have. Odd Sundays was this reading series that was put on by the established, I'd say, creative writing generation at the time. Our former supervisor, Kathy Mac, was very involved with Odd Sundays, and so were colleagues of her generation of writers. But it skewed quite a bit older. So it was kind of past time for folks to move on from that. And really, the pandemic is what killed it. But now that we're starting to have more public events, I don't really have any intention of reviving Odd Sundays, and neither does Fawn Parker, even though several people, including myself, have apparently come up and told her, hey, has anyone told you about Odd Sundays yet? Because of how established it was. But I think that the schedule, at the very least, would be helpful to have, especially to have a consistent platform for queer writers to flex their craft in some capacity or another. I'm looking into diversifying Richard's Room so that it's not just a poetry reading series. Our next guest is going to be Uzuki Cheverie, who's a queer webcomic artist. And then after that, I would like to speak with folks like thom vernon, and Jenna Lyn Albert, and other queer writers from around Fredericton, or to involve my youngest brother, who is an expert on diverse children's books, and to perhaps do something with Imprint Youth, which is a queer youth advocacy and community group here in Fredericton. So, to get back to the question that you did ask me, I think the value that Qwerty has in a community sense is really whatever the editors in charge want to make of it. Sometimes we've only just put the issue out, and so the good of a magazine and a chapbook like this is just, hey, it's mere existence. The people who want to submit to it are going to read the issue and see, hey, my name's in a book, this is cool. The people who we publish as Homerow chapbook authors get to have their first big moment, and so all their friends and family buy the copies of the book, and once they've run out of their contributor issues, they end up buying through the rest of the stock that we have. So, my thought of what is the good of Qwerty magazine, I think of it entirely as a community good. It feels nice to be able to say, yeah, I'm a writer, or I'm an author, here's this book I'm in/here's this book I made. It doesn't necessarily need to be some grand contribution to some massive entity like CanLit and its inferno. Sometimes it's just nice to the person writing it. We've had one Richard's Room event. I am currently scheduling the next one. It is going to be sometime this month. I'm just waiting to hear back from the venue that we have on tap. Westminster Bookmark is a local bookstore here in Fredericton that's been around for a very long time, and they've been long-time distribution partners for Qwerty, and occasionally also partners for doing public readings, so it wasn't hard to get them on short notice for the first Richard's Room. Richard's Room didn't really have any long-term planning. It was made out of a sense of necessity. We were supposed to have our Fredericton Pride Festival here a couple weeks ago, and I won't bog you down with all of the details, but the festival was going to be cancelled, and the community really rallied to try to salvage the dying festival to still have something, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that until I was seeing that certain friends of mine were involved in trying to rebuild and restart the festival. So I thought, okay, well, if you're working on this, maybe I can try to use Qwerty to throw the queer poetry event that we were going to have. So the original event was called Verse, and I thought I would like to make sure Fredericton Pride can keep that name if they want to do another queer poetry event in the future, and I'll create my own thing so that if we want to do readings in the future, we can have our own branding. And so it just kind of came out of nowhere, really, it was a total fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants situation where I didn't fully know what I was doing, but I very quickly found the people I needed to talk to in order to make it happen. So, like I said, the inspiration for the name was Richard Vaughan, the late queer New Brunswick writer, but the other part of that, the Room part, I had thought about the CBC radio show Marvin's Room, which is named after the late R&B artist Marvin Gaye, and it's, I think, an hour-long block of R&B music, and it's a show I like very much. So I had the thought, oh, well, Richard's Room, the alliteration works really well. I think it's a nice name. I don't think that there's anything wrong with me borrowing the name part of this program. So that's really the birthplace of the name, and as far as trying to make this happen on a regular basis goes, that was also just kind of a last-minute decision. I wanted to see how well the first event did. I wasn't sure what we could expect as far as, like, seating and interest. I thought maybe three or four people would show up, but we filled every available seat in Westminster. This is not a good thing, but we had people standing because they ran out of seats, so clearly Westminster needs to buy more seats. But we had, like, a lot of interest in this event, which was incredible. So people wanted to come out and see it, so I thought, yeah, let's keep doing it.