Happy Lunar New Year!

Amazingly, it’s another new year for us at LooseLeaf and Project 40 and I’m excited to talk about one of our newest projects we’ve been working on. Yesterday, we put out the article “Taking Back Tết: My New Year is Not Chinese” written by Linh Nguyen as the inaugural launch of our LooseLeaf Blog Team. If you haven’t read it yet, please give it a read here. Linh’s article is a great example of what we’re aiming to do with this new initiative: broaden the field of conversation regarding what Asian-Canada can mean and bring that incisive commentary to the always already political and cultural world we reside in. We’re looking to tell different stories about Canada and the lives lived in the global flows of diaspora, displacement, and creative resistance that are still becoming.

The idea for this new project began in quite a few space-times: conversations with Jasmine across the length of our friendship about anything and everything in the small orbit of Canadian literature, community responses and student movements to the ever-present crises threatening our world, and long histories of colonialisms, settler/militarism, empire, race, capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, and environmental destruction that we are still responding to, and indeed, resisting. Project 40 and LooseLeaf Magazine have come a long way from classrooms and a kitchen table and it’s exciting to think that this Blog Team will mark another step in that journey. However, the acquittal of Gerald Stanley in Colten Boushie’s death, the continued fight for justice and an end to anti-black racism through police violence in the deaths of Andrew Loku, Jermaine Carby, and Alex Wettlaufer, the demand for justice and accountability in the Canadian government for murder of Indigenous women across Canada, the targeted murder to queer people of colour in Toronto’s Village, ruptures in CanLit’s open secret in perpetuating and enabling sexual violence, and the sustained failure of the government to adequately provide basic necessities of life for refugees fleeing global crises that Canada participates in are stark reminders of the work that still needs to be done.

This is work that no one has been alone in doing. I’m glad to say that I’ll be working as an editor and fellow writer with the talented Linh Nguyen, Natalie Wee, and Aliya Ghare for the LooseLeaf Blog Team who have generously given their time and effort to working with us. We’ll be aiming to release an article every two weeks on a variety of different subjects in/about/through Canada, so look forward to reading some interesting perspectives from us. If you’re interested in potentially joining the team or writing a one off guest article, feel free to send me a message at elliott@looseleafmagazine.ca. Our mandate has always come from the support of the community that is still growing and that we’ve had the unique pleasure of helping to build. Reading, sharing, and participating in our content and community has always been more than enough for us, but if you’d like to help us financially, we have a Patreon, magazines, and merch that you can purchase!

Enjoy celebrating the new year with your families and homes that you make in places you never imagined, and with the most surprising people.

 

In Solidarity,

Elliott