Change is Worth Celebrating: Interview with Claire Farley and Teresa Yang
Claire Farley
Teresa Yang
Canthius was co-founded by former Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) graduate students Puneet Dutt, Claire Farley, and Cira Nickel in 2015. Teresa Yang joined the team in 2016 and has been co-directing the organization with Claire since 2019.
In honour of the magazine’s upcoming tenth issue, Digital Content Editor Manahil Bandukwala and Communications Coordinator Rebecca Mangra chat with Claire and Teresa about the publication’s origins and how the project has evolved into something shared and special in the Canadian literary community and beyond.
Manahil: Hi Claire and Teresa! It’s so nice to chat with you today about the beginnings of Canthius and where we’re at. To start out with, we're coming up on the 10th issue of Canthius and I wanted to know how you feel about that. When you published the first issue, did you think the magazine would get here?
Claire: I don't think we would have expected to still be doing this. Ten issues doesn't seem like that many, but the amount of time we've spent, the amount of hours and years… no, I don't think we would have imagined we would still be publishing Canthius. We didn’t have a plan when we started. At the beginning, we had a pretty casual conversation about the possibility of starting a magazine. Puneet is the go-getter who just started a Twitter [account] and put out a call for submissions. And then we were getting submissions and so we went with it. And Canthius definitely wouldn’t still be going without new energy—Teresa has kept things running smoothly and you [Manahil and Rebecca] have brought so much to the project over the past few years.
Teresa: I also never expected it to evolve into the kind of organization it is now. Because when I first started, there was no corporate structure. We weren't registered as a not-for-profit organization. We weren’t as familiar with the business management side of hiring people, for instance, or paying contributors. And all the technical stuff that comes with doing a creative project.
In my head, when I think about the art or the literary community, I think of it more as an abstract and cerebral practice. It is a cerebral industry where you don't really have a lot of the formalities that you have when you're working in, say, a business environment. So, it was eye-opening to realize, like any other business, you still have to have those formal safeguards and mechanisms in place. If you decide to launch a board of directors, you have to have AGMs (annual general meetings). You have to do certain kinds of tax income statements. And you have to do the grant funding work that Claire does. I didn't realize that working in an artistic community, to get an operation running, it involved all this work. That was pretty illuminating for me. It was good to connect with people who could offer us the tools we needed to build our project (lawyers and accountants, for instance).
Claire: The first issue was us sitting around Puneet’s kitchen table reading submissions and that was so fun. Just doing creative work together. We spent some time writing our own work after we’d finished reading submissions that day, I think. Canthius is definitely still going, but my own involvement looks very different. For me now, Canthius is answering emails, writing grant applications, and making sure people can get paid for their work. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that this is important work, too.
Three members of the Canthius team (L to R): Leah Maclean-Evans, Teresa Yang, and Claire Farley.
Rebecca: I was reading other interviews with the founding and early members of Canthius. What really stood out to me in one of the interviews is something you [Claire] said, about how if we're going to put our time and money into a magazine, we want to create something that makes us feel good.
In today's era, that's rare to see. So many people, when they start any creative project that's public-facing, are concerned about getting a million hits and getting a ton of readers. In contrast, you said that Canthius is a very personal project for the team and that you want to make sure it has a positive impact.
So I'm wondering, for the both of you, ten issues in, how does Canthius make you feel today? If you had to explain to someone what the organization is and what we represent, what would you say? Do you think that's changed from when you first began this journey?
Claire: When we started, it was a way to keep in touch with each other and to do something together. I had just moved back to Ottawa and life was moving quickly, so Puneet suggested that we start something together as a way to maintain our friendship and meet other like-minded people in our literary communities. Since then, my literary community has been rooted in Canthius. Over the years, we’ve invited people whose work we admire to join us. It feels organic in that way. I guess I should have thought more about who was reading the magazine, and what it was like for the reader, from the beginning, but it really started as a way to gather people together and strengthen existing bonds.
In terms of how Canthius has changed: I think the impact of the magazine has changed. Part of that has been my growth as a person and learning from the many oversights we had when we started, like important changes to our understanding of what intersectional feminism means and should aspire to. I've grown so much through my participation in Canthius and I’m extremely grateful for the safe and caring community that allowed me to grow. It also doesn't feel like it’s “my” project (or any of the founders’, for that matter) anymore, which is what I like most about how it's changed. It’s so much bigger and fuller than we could have imagined back then.
Teresa: I was very flattered to take part in Canthius. The project had already been up and running for a bit and I even had a poem published in it. I knew Claire from Ottawa, who introduced me to Puneet and Cira. They were all so passionate about creating this space in the Canadian literary community for underrepresented writers.
From the very beginning, I personally felt like I wasn't necessarily the most equipped person to contribute to this organization. But the recognition, I think, amongst everybody was that we have a responsibility to continue learning and to continue creating the tools to make this platform safe and accessible. Internally, it's required a lot of learning on our end, as well as a lot of self-reflection. It's the first time that I've been involved in an organization where my professional life seeps into my personal life, and vice versa. The issues that we talk about within Canthius and the writing that we promote is reflective of what I have to engage with on a personal level.
I feel kind of old saying this, but there seems to be a new generation of Canadian writers who are motivated to promote and advocate for this ongoing inclusivity that I didn't have growing up. Seeing the kind of quality of work that comes into Canthius as an organization; reviewing submissions; seeing the kind of art we support; seeing how the members of our board of directors, as well as editorial board members and volunteers, are so motivated by this purpose we have—it's motivating and inspiring. We really didn't have this space, or at least I personally didn’t feel as accessible to it as I do now.
It's nice to see that Canthius has more of a national presence now. You can just find the magazine in bookstores, which is surreal to me. I still feel surprised when I hear that. The growth in the time that I've been involved has always impressed me. Canthius feels very much like it was a collective project that I was involved in when I was in my twenties. Now that I'm a little bit older, it's nice to see it take off in a direction where the individuals who are involved are as passionate about the project, like you Manahil, and you Rebecca.
Claire: The reason we decided to make a specifically feminist publication was because we wanted to create a space where we could engage with a literary community that felt safe to us. A space that felt good.
Over the years, the idea of what a safe space means has evolved. In the few years leading up to starting Canthius, I had personally had some really negative experiences with cis men in the literary community. There were instances where I felt physically unsafe and other cases where I felt uncomfortable sharing my work. I didn't want to read submissions from cis men that objectified women's bodies. If we were going to start a magazine, we as editors needed to feel safe.
As time has gone on and more people have joined the project, the idea of what makes someone feel safe or unsafe has evolved. As a straight, white cis woman in my body, what feels safe to me was only the starting point of those concerns. As more people joined, it was clear that what it meant to build that safe space needed to be a lot more expansive.
Manahil: I’m thinking back to four years ago, when you invited me to join the team. Suddenly, other members of the literary community were viewing me as representative of Canthius. At the time, I didn’t feel like I had “earned” the recognition. But now, I think about how my understanding of feminism has evolved alongside Canthius’s.
Claire: I think literary communities do this a lot… we put this ideal of community on a project that has internal dynamics and processes that are still and maybe always being negotiated. There is a danger, particularly in feminist spaces, of oversimplifying a community or maybe it’s the way we’re forced to market ourselves for funding, as a cohesive, unmessy unit. Something we’ve been discussing with the board of directors as Canthius professionalizes is how a feminist project can build the relationships and trust needed to navigate the internal dynamics inherent to feminist and intersectional spaces. How do we professionalize and still keep the kind of trust you build by getting to know one another, going to events together, spending time together, and generally seeing each other in the world? And with Canthius starting as a project focused on doing something good with your friends, where everybody already has that trust with each other—how do you pull that dynamic into the professionalization that scaling up requires? We've lost that a bit over the last couple of years with the pandemic. Rebecca—it's so good to hear you say that you don't feel like that community was totally lost. But I do think the pandemic changed the project in ways that we’re still working through.
Manahil: Professionalizing during a pandemic is especially hard. For Issue Ten, Sanna Wani is our guest editor. She and I are great friends. We’ve gone for walks along the Credit River in Mississauga and have talked about submissions and gotten excited about poetry.
Claire: That’s kind of like reading submissions around a kitchen table.
Manahil: There’s also something gained as Canthius spreads out of Ottawa and Toronto. But then, whenever “post-pandemic” allows for meeting up, a coast-to-coast spread makes that meeting impossible in other ways.
Claire: Those are big questions for feminist organizing, I think. But also, maybe that's putting way too much stock in a magazine and what it can achieve?
Canthius launch at Birling, Ottawa.
Rebecca: Pre-pandemic, Puneet would tweet about Canthius events that I wanted to attend, but most of the time they were in Ottawa and I was in Toronto. That distance has now mostly dissolved because of online readings, events, and workshops. The idea of community has moved beyond a physical location, which I think is important to embracing new ideas and actually making literary communities more open, which I don’t think they always are. But either way, it’s hard to bring that gooey feeling we get with our friends and bring it to a huge organization. I’m glad we’re at least trying.
Teresa: We have a pretty small editorial team. Because of that, the organization really gets to know each other—I think that is the benefit of having a small organization. We are expanding though, and I hope that the connections people have made to date build a strong foundation for what’s to come, especially since there will likely be growing pains.
Claire: I love the expansion too, but I’m a worrier and I can’t help but think about how expansion also impacts our ability to carry out a mandate of creating an equitable and safe space. When you’re working at that level, you do need the ability to have conversations with each other in a meaningful way and maybe I just don’t have that much faith in digital communication as a way to facilitate that kind of conversation. I think a lot about how to structure an organization that could facilitate that kind of relationship building that's necessary to actually affect the mandate we say we're doing.
But, really, these seem to be the complicated questions facing feminist organizations everywhere. I’m definitely not saying that Canthius is going to solve them. But the questions about what it means to professionalize an organization that has a mandate like ours are the main ones confronting us in the next decade, if we are so lucky to have one.
Teresa: It’s particularly strange working within the board and our volunteers and talking about these relationships, and how they fit into a code of conduct and other professional business documents.
Manahil: What are the benefits of running a small literary magazine? The submissions I’ve read for Canthius are definitely different in tone than those I’ve read for other publications. If you’re submitting to a feminist literary magazine, you’re probably thinking about what the editors want to read. Because the organization is smaller, submitters are more aware of the person on the other end.
Teresa: You have to be very specific with where you submit. We don’t have the same knownness. We’ve also had some well-known writers too.
Claire: That happened in the submissions call for the first issue without us soliciting work. Jen Currin submitted a short story to the first issue—I’ve always loved her writing and was so excited.
Manahil: People are excited about a feminist literary magazine. I’ve found, in my experience, there’s a way feminist magazines take a chance on your writing and have trust in you as a writer.
Claire: There isn’t any “filler” in Canthius. Not a lot of people are published in each issue. The editors have to choose pieces carefully because of the interaction between pieces. I’d love to see more long pieces in Canthius. I loved the play we published in Issue Nine. There’s a tendency to publish short lyric pieces in literary magazines, but we’ve been able to publish experimental and hybrid pieces that blur boundaries between genres.
Manahil: Claire, this question is for you, because you used to do the layout for Canthius. Graphic design is a huge part of creating a literary magazine. How does graphic design enable the ability to publish those more experimental pieces that some magazines can’t publish because of a lack of resources and design knowledge?
Claire: Haha, I would flip that—the design and layout are minimalist because I don’t know how to do design. The template is as simple as possible, so it requires very little fancy formatting. But minimalism actually facilitated taking work that required fussing with line breaks because I knew how to do that. I learned a lot about layout and proofs when I had a contract working with Dale Smith for the White Wall Review at TMU. But I’m very relieved that there is now a professional designer [Tree Abraham] responsible for layout!
Manahil: I think Canthius is one of the first places where I saw an attention to line spacing and breaks.
Claire: That’s also feminist. A mutual respect and trust with the people you publish. If the purpose was to get to know someone’s work, the proofs had to be thoughtfully packaged with kind and respectful emails. Publishing someone’s work is a relationship, not a means to an end.
Rebecca: If money wasn’t an issue, what would Canthius as an organization look like?
Teresa: I would want everybody to have health insurance. And retirement savings and coverage for indeterminate leaves. I want the perks of a lucrative magazine for everyone who works here! Maybe an RRSP, dental, the paid leave, and flexibility, meaning people can work within their own hours, continue pursuing their independent creative pursuits, and everyone trusts each other to get the work out there. I’d want a rotation of guest editors, writers, and speakers too, to come in and speak about writing, styles, themes—and pay them. We could have a mentorship program. We could buy Twitter. We could have an all-expenses paid getaway. We could donate to charities on behalf of Canthius too!
Claire: Yeah, our mandate always feels limited by our resources.
Rebecca: Hopefully, a millionaire will read this interview and decide Canthius is worth investing in!
I have a final question: what advice do you have for someone starting their own literary magazine?
Claire: Do it with other people. Also, little magazines start and stop all the time but that burst of energy, even if it’s short-lived, is incredibly important. I used to think that Canthius needed to last. I’m excited we’re reaching our tenth issue—it’s an incredible milestone—but even if we had only published five issues, it still would have been incredible.
Teresa: There’s a perception that magazines and presses need to grow and become bigger.
Claire: The benefit of longevity is the funding. Puneet, Cira, and I paid for the first issues, including contributor payments, with our own money. As the founders of Canthius move on, I hope that new people can use the institutional clout and funding base we’ve developed to do whatever excites them because it was hard to start from scratch. But, if we had just published those first three unfunded issues, I don’t think Canthius would have been any less important. Literary magazines are a way for people to come together and create community and communities shift with time. That’s normal. Change is worth celebrating too.
Claire Farley is co-founder of Canthius and the magazine’s former managing editor. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. Her first chapbook is Bait & Switch (Anstruther Press, 2020).
Chuqiao (Teresa) Yang was born in Beijing, China and grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her writing has appeared in several journals and broadcasts across Canada including CV2, Arc Poetry Magazine, PRISM and the CBC. In 2011, Chuqiao was the recipient of two Western Magazine Awards. She was a 2015 finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Chuqiao was also featured in 30 under 30: An Anthology of Canadian Millennial Poets and in the anthology The Unpublished City (Bookhug). Her first chapbook, Reunions in the Year of the Sheep was released with Baseline Press and won the 2018 bpNichol Chapbook Award.