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From 2009-2010, I edited three issues of Dandelion Magazine, a Canadian literary journal whose mandate is to publish “literature & art on the edge.”

Hope On The Edge | Issue 35.1

FROM MY EDITOR’S NOTE
“Hope on the edge” stages an intervention, proposing that living discourse can act as a mode of resistance to the canned speech and tepid sentiments that dominate Culture-At-Large. The contributors in this issue show that it is indeed possible, in the age of Hollywood blockbusters and Twitter-mania, to imagine hope richly and three-dimensionally. Their texts don’t offer quick answers; indeed, they rarely answer at all. Rather, they raise the necessary questions, the questions we must ask if we are going to understand, for example, the difference between hoping and, simply, wanting, if we are going to be able to hope in the long-term. Some of the challenges the contributors raise demand that we, as readers, as cultural critics, as participants in the world, actively engage in the messy process of self-reflection. Where are we going? these pieces ask. And just who are “we”? Who gets the social sanction to determine who has hope and, indeed, what it is we are hoping for?

The Sexual Politics of Meat | Issue 35.2

FROM MY EDITOR’S NOTE
Inspired by the life & work of vegetarian feminist theologian & animal rights activist Carol J. Adams, this issue of dandelion hopes to be an antidote to the self deception that is regularly practiced when ordinary, moral, conscientious people participate in the wide-spread Western tradition of the consumption of mass-produced & factory-farmed meat.

Beacons | Issue 36 1/2

FROM MY EDITOR’S NOTE
In collaboration with Erin Moure, we are inaugurating an ongoing Beacons Feature with this issue of dandelion magazine. By soliciting pairs of Canadian writers, artists, & thinkers to participate in our beacons experiment, we hope to intervene in the making of “we” & to foreground the unstable & temporary nature of the formation of collective subjectivities. The question driving this experiment is whether, by thinking together, contemporary artists might interrupt standard reading practices & encourage readers to grapple with our obsession with notions of originality & authorship. This interruption opens a space for thinking through the social production of ideas into texts & models an ethical attentiveness to the political dimensions of the writer-text, text-reader, & reader-writer relationships. Our intent is to present the texts that comprise the Beacons Feature as a conversation & a community of collaboration. Our texts are never “our own” but always socially mediated, stolen, borrowed, cited, reworked, inspired… always already in dialogue. Which raises the following questions: who listens? What for? Why do we listen? &, most importantly, how do we listen? &, finally, how do we ensure we’re not simply talking to ourselves?