fiona mulro

I’m on this Quilt magazine and wanted to write a “Statement of Purpose” to post on our website, (something nobody has asked me to do, or necessarily wants me to do or will care about, yet I do it anyway. And for what? For whom? Do I really believe in the publication’s legacy as something important? Am I attempting to transform what should be a fun, if at times thought-provoking, team-effort lit mag, into a politicized passion project? Can I write anything anyone will be moved by, let alone read?) so I just typed the sentence

“Creative exertion is the most potent way to exhume the too-often buried agency within each sovereign individual.”

An over-laboured metaphor, a flawed one too (“potent” to describe excavation? what am I on?) but keep in mind I’d be writing this as an Editor-in-Chief; I’m expected to communicate with a certain degree of waxing poetics. A more concise phrasing:

Creating revives a power in us that consuming cannot.

It is well known that every person is subject to a matrix of interlocking systems—capitalism, language, your social network, academics, sexual and gendered ideals, limited natural resources, etc etc. There are many philosophies one can adopt to contend with these. I’ve been in circles where everyone is hyperaware of how it influences them, and the conversation always shifts toward attacking the minute manifestation of these systems and elaborating on their harmful impacts. I’ve been in circles where people focus on the impacts of one system, even tunnel themselves into it. They join isolated zero-waste communes, they present anomalously and are unable to be identified outside of their own declared positionality. I’ve known miserable nihilists, and I’ve known joyful nihilists, at turns crushed and liberated by the paradox of infinite culpability and victimhood. I’ve talked to those who uphold and justify capitalism either because they believe it is the best option or because they simply cannot imagine an alternate existence. (I once off-handedly insulted billionaires and capitalism at my family dinner table, and shortly after in the conversation said I would like to have a car someday. I got some jabs for that).

In my own brand of nihilism, I’m pretty woefully underinformed, partly because I can’t find news sources that don’t suck* and partly because, well, what am I supposed to do? “Iran no, stop making strike drones for Putin 🙁.” Doing better lately anyway. Shit sucks though.

If you didn’t know: I’m an English major. I’d love to hack the U.S. no-fly list but it’s going to take a few years of prep to pull off that kind of democratizing data heist. I cry at every movie and every book. I have a sincere, sentimentalist belief in the power of art and stories to shake things loose inside people who then can’t help but do the same to the world around them. I have bet five years of higher education, hours of work on Quilt, and my own independent writing and reading on this belief. It’s not entirely unfounded from a historic perspective, thinking of Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn, Sinclair; the 1960s anti-war hippies, the British punk movement of the 1970s, Helter Skelter (didn’t exactly change things for the better but there was a real material impact).

I am in a class this semester that plans and executes the Scotiabank-Giller Prize event. For those who don’t know, the Scotiabank-Giller gifts $100,000 to the author of the winning work. It is likely the most prestigious (and well-funded) literary award in the country.

I attended the event last year. While I have some personal fondness attached to it, there was no way to not feel morally compromised. What Strange Paradise is a novel about a boy washed ashore on an island run by soldiers. It follows Amir in Peter Pan-esque escapades, all relating to the Palestinian refugee crisis, the inhuman acts people perform on others in the wake of such crises, and a reflection on childhood at large.

And there we were, congratulating ourselves for caring about it at an event paid for by a banking institution that is predatory by nature. I am reminded of a passage in Tsering Yangzom Lama’s shortlisted Giller prize novel, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies. A Tibetan immigrant in 2012 is confronted with a sacred statue once revered by her refugee camp in Nepal, but was since stolen. She is granted this sacrosanct experience by Elise, the curator of the wealthy Martha’s personal art collection.

Elise looks up and holds my gaze. “I thought you’d like to see the statue.” she sighs… She wanted me to thank her, I realize. “Thank you for showing this to me.” “I can share one special detail, a folktale of sorts. Apparently, some people believe this statue comes and goes on its own. As if by magic. Isn’t that fascinating? Martha loves that.”

Martha loves that. Yes, that’s what reading these books and attending these events feels like. I loved that—patting my belly, sated.

But you can’t remove the goodwill of the jury, the panelists, or Omar El Akkad. They are in many ways like myself, believing in fiction, art, and storytelling, using what’s available to them to publicize those stories they believe will shake loose something in their readers. What other venues are there for this promotion? What makes people come to events if not free food and wine?

So here’s Quilt, a literary magazine, and something I am ostensibly, partially, in charge of. I even seem to have grifted a modicum of respect from some members. I am frightened of it containing only poetry about university students missing their mothers, feeling lonely, feeling their first heartbreak (what writer, though, starts out not scribbling about these things?) I am frightened of it becoming a clique, of enforcing conformity of opinion among its own members, and then in its published content.

Here’s the Scotiabank-Giller Prize event, something I am ostensibly, partially, in charge of. How do I make this event not for Marthas and Elises? For myself? For all of us who can’t help but love books, and in this love attend a well-funded, prestigious, ego-masturbation circle?

I think redemption comes with ending cycles of consumption with creation. Especially with quickly developing AI, we’ll have endless content available absent of any human production labour reminding us of our own impulse to create. I write, but there’s also music, painting, filmmaking. I would count event planning: dinner parties, club meetings, D&D campaigns. There’s building spaces, online and physical, like Print House, gardens, and community centres. Hell, stack rocks at the beach. Anything to flex your personal agency muscles.

Mostly, my fears listed above revolve around people forgetting their capacity for violence and action. This is what I want for those at Quilt and our contributors, and I’ll tell them so in this stupid statement of purpose. It’s what I hope grows out of the Giller Prize event I’m supposed to partake in. (Technically I’m assigned as an onstage presence, but I’ll inevitably involve myself in the planning).**

Yes, everything is baptized into discourse, and then into the space of frenzied interference between you and the person you’re talking to. Everything is subject to commercialization, appropriation, and abusive misrepresentation. It’s as inevitable as your current existence.

*Recs welcome

**If anybody knows what kind of charities/projects I should guilt rich literary people into funding, let me know. Additionally, if anyone knows who I could invite to be on a panel that would make rich literary people uncomfortable, let me know.