Shayna Stock

Four editors reflect on decades of editing Briarpatch: what they learned, the stories that challenged them, what’s changed, and what’s stayed the same.

City council voted to restrict body rub parlours to industrial areas, citing safety as a reason. But some workers say the decision will make their work more dangerous.

The following poem was pieced together from snippets of letters to the editor of Briarpatch’s 40-year history. Each line is a direct, unedited quote from a Briarpatch reader, with the voices of dozens of readers represented in the whole poem.

It was a brisk sunny day in November 2007 when I first bounded up the stairs at Huston House, the historic building in which Briarpatch makes its home, brimming with energy and ideas.

What You Really Really Want is a powerful tool for radically transforming how we understand and navigate the complexities of our own sexuality.

Our efforts to organize more co-operatively must go beyond inclusivity. For power to be truly re-distributed, we must pay particular attention to the voices that have been most silenced by global capitalism.

Necessary for survival and intricately intertwined with our emotions, spirituality and culture, food holds major power. As such, the systems that govern its cultivation, distribution and consumption are fertile battlefields for controversy, domination, generosity and resistance.

The first step toward emancipation must be recognition of the shared struggle between all those considered less valuable by our state and social structures. Liberation can only happen collectively and across all communities simultaneously. Freedom at the expense of others’ freedom is not freedom at all, but a different and twisted kind of enslavement.

Spirituality and activism are not strangers. The intimate relationship between the two is evident in the work of icons like Gandhi, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X and Desmond Tutu, for whom activism was part and parcel of their commitments to something or someone beyond the sensory world.

Health, and the way we manage our collective well-being, is inherently political. As perhaps the most universally relevant topic, health care cuts across lines of class, race, nationality, age, gender and political bent, and has the potential to either unite or polarize, to inspire or enrage. As well as being highly political, health care is also deeply personal, affecting each of us at the most fundamental level of our existence.

Remember Grade 3, when school was all about storybooks and gym class and crafts? We had to learn our multiplication tables and cursive writing, too, but these are not the memories we tend to hang on to.

The origins of Food Not Bombs are somewhat mysterious: some report that a bake sale to benefit the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament led activists to call for spending on food, rather than bombs; other stories mention a mock soup line being used as street theatre when demonstrators asked the First National Bank of Boston to stop investing in a nuclear power station.

Intended to be a model that other mid-sized cities can adopt and adapt, We Are Many was a free, three-day festival held in Saskatoon’s Diefenbaker Park in August. Its aim was to combine education and arts to inspire individuals to make changes in their daily lives that, collectively, could represent a substantial step towards a more environmentally sustainable city.

Could alternative systems of exchange like the Saugeen Trading Community become valuable tools in localizing our economies and strengthening our communities? Could they work to democratize our economic exchanges by keeping money in local hands and out of corporate coffers? With unprecedented global imbalances, rapidly rising oil prices, the decline of the U.S. dollar, and the word “recession” on the tongues of newscasters across North America, could these local systems of exchange offer a solution?

Shayna and Dominique have just set out on a cross-Canada trip to seek out intentional communities and learn from their experiences. They’ll be blogging about what they find right here on www.briarpatchmagazine.com.