Image: Talking Stick Festival Review by Sarah Higgins The Talking Stick Festival took place from February 19 to March 2nd. Below is a review of three performances at the 2019 festival. Stay posted on productions by Full Circle: First...
The following is an excerpt from What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation, which will be published by Nightwood Editions in late November 2018. The book will feature conversations between twenty-two of Canada’s top modern poets. Marilyn Dumont:...
Kamloopa is an Indigenous artistic ceremony that follows two urban Indigenous sisters, Kilawna and Mikaya, and their new friend, Edith, as they struggle in their own ways to understand themselves and their cultures. As they each come to terms with what it means to reconnect with their homelands, ancestors, and one another, it becomes clear that this story is not a hero’s journey; it doesn’t follow the “typical” three act play in structure or story arc. The artistic ceremony focusses on kinship relations, rather than a central conflict: this is a journey between women, a journey that happens within, between, and outside of themselves. It’s a journey that happens on Indian time: existing now, bringing the past, and holding the future. As the three women move through the world, they face issues of assimilation, disconnection, and loss, and the audience is witness to every ignorant, painful, funny, and awkward moment of what it means to find your way home again.
Continue reading Indigenizing Theatre: An interview with Kamloopa Fire Creator Kim Senklip Harvey
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation and is a PhD student in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His work has been widely published in magazines across Canada, and he has been named by Tracey Lindberg as one of six Indigenous writers to watch. In Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection with Frontenac House, This Wound is a World, love answers heartbreak, “history lays itself bare” (42) and a world glimmering with decolonial love and queer, Indigenous possibilities is split open. This is poetry at its brightest. It is electric, profound, necessary work. Belcourt bends genre, challenging the cage of colonialism through a poetics of intimacy. It is a collection unafraid to ask questions, exploring grief, desire, queer sexuality and Indigeneity with tender honesty. Belcourt asks us to consider the ways Indigenous bodies can be simultaneously unbound and “rendered again,” (40) how worlds can be made and unmade. These are poems to be returned to again and again with reverence. PRISM editors, Jessica Johns and Selina Boan were thrilled to be able to sit down with Billy-Ray during his Vancouver book launch and chat about Indian Time, queer Indigenous futures, and the armpit as heaven’s wormhole.
Continue reading Everything is Something Else: In Conversation with Billy-Ray Belcourt
Reminder! PRISM international is offering free entries for self-identifying Indigenous writers for our Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction contest! This contest is being judged by the amazing Thalia Field, and closes on January 15, 2018. Indigenous writers are invited to submit by emailing assistant@prismmagazine.ca by...
We are so exciting to announce that our fall issue 56.1 Liminal is due to arrive from the printers any day now, so will be sent out and in your hot hands within the next couple of weeks! If you don’t have a subscription or need to order an issue, the website will be updated as soon as the delivery arrives!
Reminder! PRISM international is offering free entries for self-identifying Indigenous writers for our poetry and fiction contests this year. The Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, judged by Aisha Sasha John, closes on October 31, 2017. The Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Thalia Field, closes on January 15, 2018.
Continue reading Free Contest Entries for Indigenous Writers
Interview by Michelle Cyca. Photo by Red Works: Nadya Kwandibens
Joi T Arcand is a multidisciplinary artist from Saskatchewan, currently living in Ottawa. A nehiyaw iskwew from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Joi’s body of work includes representations of the Cree language in photography and other mediums, and she has been exhibited across Canada, including at Vancouver’s grunt gallery. She co-created kimiwan, a quarterly publication for and by Indigenous visual artists and writers that published eight issues between 2012 and 2014. Her piece Northern Pawn, Southern Vietnam appeared on the Spring 2017 cover of PRISM international.
Continue reading I Have Been Learning Cree My Whole Life: An Interview with Artist Joi T. Arcand
Reviewing the submissions we received in response to our new editorial team’s first call, “The Liminal,” a call intended to take what is often thought of as “marginal” and place it at the centre of our issue and our...