two new reviews of my book

Two fabulous magazines have recently reviewed my book- how exciting!

The Cascadia Subduction Zone: http://www.thecsz.com/

and Stone Telling: http://stonetelling.com/issue9-feb2013/allen-review.html

the current issue of the Cascadia Subduction Zone also features a new poem of mine.

Peak Magazine seeking articles on Immigration, Migrant Labour and Indigenous Sovereignty

The Peak is stoked to announce our Summer Issue, “Borders.” We’re excited to produce a magazine to examines borders and their implications for several reasons. Summer in Southern Ontario sees an influx of migrating workers to our agricultural regions and in the organizing of those that support them. The concepts of citizenship, status, and nation-states are central to Western capitalism’s exploitation of global populations and land bases. The existence of “Canada” on occupied territories makes exploitation and the threat of deportation daily realities for an entire class of undocumented people.

The Peak’s goal is produce a magazine that both documents the struggles of migrating populations and their allies and serves an informative tool for people involved in community-based work and anti-authoritarian resistance. We are soliciting articles about topics including but not limited to:

Migrant Labour:

• First person accounts of working as a migrant worker in Ontario, or interviews
• What does migrant labour organizing look like in Southern Ontario?
• Analysis of Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ and the Temporary Forerign Workers Programs SAWP and TFWP and how our agricultural/food systems are dependent on the exploitation of migrant labour

Immigration:

• How western capitalism exploits and dominates the global south along race, class and gender lines and how this impacts migration
• The ”safe country” designation of countries like Mexico and the violence that drives people north
• How the changes made to immigration system under Harper government  advances a capitalist agenda: refugee claims, immigration process, processes of holding and deporting people have all changed drastically in the last several  years. What are these changes, why were they made, how are they enforced and what are their impacts?
• Toronto was made a “sanctuary city” in February. What does this look like in practice? What are the barriers for undocumented people accessing services in Southern Ontario? How do these impact women, queers, and families?
• Racism: what is white supremacy, what are its origins in Canada, and how is it functioning today?

Indigenous Sovereignty:

• Indigenous peoples resisting the borders that divide their traditional territories
• Indigenous analysis of why “canada” is an illegal state

borders:

• History and analysis of the boundaries of “canada.” who historically has defined these, and in what interests? how do these boundaries interact with indigenous sovereignty?
• How capitalism and government propagandize against immigrants and refugees (like the CBSA-endorsed reality show “Borders”)
• Repression: how does the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) operate? what kinds of operations do they conduct, and who is impacted and how? how does Canada use military and police against migrant populations?
• The Security and Prosperity Plan (SPP) and how information shared between the US and Canada affected how borders are policed

Submission Details

NEWS FROM THE FRONT LINES

We want your current event stories, from coverage of current grassroots resistance movements to report backs from demos and other events. Short news briefs are welcome.

THEORY AND ANALYSIS

Theory is a broad category that encompasses discourse, philosophy and rants. From ramblings of french anarchist theory to critiques of community accountability processes, to opinion pieces and analysis of current and past struggles. Send us your thoughts, ideas or just stuff you’ve been mulling over.

REVIEWS

Read a zine you absolutely hated or a book that blew your mind? Have a sex toy that you just cant put down? Write us a review! Reviews can be short and sweet or or in-depth. If you need ideas, we may be able to hook you up with free copies for reviews.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

The deadline for submissions for the summer issue is May 27, 2013.

Submissions should be sent to peakcontent@gmail.com in .odt or .rtf formats, please.

Do you have an idea for an article, but need help making it happen?

We’re happy to give you a hand. Give us a shout at peakcontent@gmail.com

VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES

There are many opportunities to participate in The Peak. We welcome original illustrations and photography, and we always need proofreaders and copy editors as well as help with event coordination and distribution of the magazine Email volunteer.peak@gmail.com

April 5th and 6th in Montreal!

Two Rhysling Nominations for 2013!

Super excited to announce that two of my poems published in 2012 have been nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Award! I can’t wait to see who the lucky winners are, not to mention reading the rest of the fabulous poems in this year’s SFPA anthology.

Disability Essay Re-Published online!

An essay which I wrote for the Summer 2012 issue of Fifth Estate has been re-published in an online library called ‘Against Civilization’. The piece is called Survival of the Fittest? Questioning Perceptions of Disability Before Industrial Medicine. Substantial fossil evidence suggests that many palaeolithic peoples did not simply leave their elderly and infirm to die, as many presume– on the contrary, the most elaborate burials sites dating from the Ice Age contain the remains of people with severe disabilities (like these two children found in what is now Sungir, Russia), suggesting that exceptional people may in fact have been highly valued in some ancient societies.

New Short Story Published in Strange Horizons

Hey look! My latest short story, The Clover Still Grows Wild in Wawanosh, is published in Strange Horizons Fiction. Check it out here!

In other news, I’m also no longer in jail, which I suppose is pretty awesome.

Life in the Body Dump

At 47 years of age, Edith Marie Price is a woman who shows more than a few signs of wear. While her mannerisms generally convey a buoyant and carefree geniality, her face’s gauntness betrays the ravages of decades of intravenous drug use, poverty, and the inevitable progression of HIV. Even when she laughs, her dark eyes seem to sparkle with the disarming intensity of all that they have seen.

For Edith—or Eedie, as she is known to most of the other residents of the maximum security cell block that she currently calls home—2012 is a very special year. It marks the 30th anniversary of her ride through the revolving doors of Canada’s prison system. Since her first conflict with the law at age 17, Eedie has been arrested over 100 times and convicted of 52 offences, all of them drug-related. A long-term opiate user, Eedie once worked in the sex trade to support her addiction. “I had to quit working the streets because I’m gay” she explains. “That, and I realized I could sell drugs instead.”

“It’s not like I’m out to hurt people,” she says of her line of work. “A lot of people come to me—if they’re hungry I feed them, if they’re sick I take care of them.” Much of the reason police target drug dealers, Eedie believes, is that they view those who sell drugs as being responsible not only for the unsightly presence of addiction on the streets, but also for the thefts, robberies and break-and-enters which people who lack other means may commit order to pay for drugs.

Drug dealers, however, are hardly the root cause of crime and addiction in poor communities. In fact, cracking down on trafficking generally escalates levels of street crime, as dealers become more aggressive and reckless in order to make the increased risks worth it for themselves financially—often engaging in violent turf wars and cutting their product with toxic substances to increase weight, resulting in epidemic deaths within the user population.

Drug abuse, Eedie believes, often stems from the emotional and psychological pain of trauma—one of the few commodities that the poor and disenfranchised are allowed to possess in sheer surplus. Like a grotesquely high proportion of women who end up on the streets and in conflict with the law, Eedie’s life has been shaped by abuse and neglect. From the age of six, Eedie was prayed upon sexually by her step-father. The abuse was an open secret in their home, known to all but never acknowledged until Eedie became pregnant at 16 and her mother demanded that she get an abortion.

While the high percentage of abuse survivors in the female prison population is clear (a 1999 study carried out at the New York Bedford Hills Correctional Facility put the figure at more than 90%) the institution that houses Eedie and a few hundred other women does nothing to address this in the allegedly rehabilitative structure of its policies and regimen. “The guards here” Eedie tells me, “have no training for dealing with mental health issues. And having been raped is a mental health issue. But how do you go up to a guard and say ‘Look, I was abused, I was raped’?”

It was abuse that pushed Eedie to drop out of school in grade eight, confused and alienated by the grim reality of her home life. Unable to bear her father’s violence and her mother’s denial any longer, she ran away at 17 to live on the streets of Toronto. Her older brother, already a heroin user, was the only person she knew to seek companionship from. “My brother was the first one to put a needle in my arm,” she tells me, her eyes welling with tears. “And every time I tell him that, he cries.”

While Eedie’s drug use itself has not significantly interfered with her ability to work and lead a relatively stable life, the criminalization of her addiction has. When she moved to Edmonton after earning a forklift operator’s license a few years ago, it was not long before local authorities learned of her extensive drug history and began routinely searching her whenever she was spotted downtown. These searches were often coupled with violence—as a deep scar running down her left shin attests—and it was not uncommon for male officers to illegally strip-search her. Now back in Ontario, the searches of Eedie’s home and person are no less routine and systematic. A raid of the St. Catherines house where she lives with her wife of 15 years, resulting in the discovery of two prescription opiate pills, is the reason for her current incarceration.

If drug use were not treated as a criminal offence, Eedie feels that she could have had a very different lot in life. With access to safe injection sites and a greater availability of harm reduction services in general, she would not have resorted to using the contaminated needle that infected her with HIV. Without the disruption of frequent periods of incarceration she could have pursued her career interests and become a factory foreman, rather than working in the sex trade against her wishes.

Like many people who grapple with addiction in a society that regards drug dependance as a crime and a moral defect rather than a complex and layered social issue, Eedie’s life has been characterized by bitter “if only’s”; if only she hadn’t developed an addiction, she would not have spent the last 30 years in and out of jail. And if only she’d had love and stability in her childhood instead of violence and isolation, she would not have spent her life carrying the pain that pushed her down the road of drug abuse to begin with.

“When you really get down to the bottom of it,” Eedie tells me, “it’s because I was raped that I am in this position today. It is because I was raped that the system fucks with me.”

It is here that the majority of public criticism relating to the carceral system shows it’s limitations as gender-biased analysis. Prisons in general may be a way of warehousing the surplus population whose presence on the streets challenges the fundamental myths of capitalism—but the institutions that imprison women in particular are in many ways a different entity. Within a patriarchal society, imprisoning impoverished and marginalized women functions as a sort of return policy, through which broken or defective objects may discretely be disposed of once they have been used to the point where they can no longer serve their allotted purpose. Sex trade workers who rob pimps or attack abusive clients, rape survivors who turn to drugs to escape the pain of post traumatic stress, and underpaid workers who skim off of lecherous bosses may easily be discarded—the inequalities inherent to patriarchal society will continue to produce a seemingly endless selection of newer, more vulnerable, more easily dominated models for the benefit of the consumer class. And when they too become drab, worn out, or scarred to the point of complete disfigurement from over-use, they can join their predecessors in one of the prison system’s numerous dumpsites for damaged and rejected goods.

While Eedie’s body remains physically confined, she has in many ways attained a level of freedom that many survivors, incarcerated or otherwise, go their entire lives without realizing.

“I didn’t go through this for nothing.” She tells me, her face hardening with a stony conviction. “Do you know how many people I advise in here? I know this system. I know it like the back of my hand.”

Eedie is a woman who has stared back into the faceless gaze of the overseer, studying the drives and motives of the state’s judicial apparatus in painstaking detail. She has come to understand and accept that her life’s circumstances are the product of complex systems of power and oppression, rather than the simple outcome of her actions as an individual. It is this understanding which has allowed her to free herself from the internalized shame and self-hate that torment so many survivors of abuse, both structural and direct—and that is a freedom no one can take away from her.

This article originally appeared in the Fifth Estate.

Writing Updates for November 2012

So, this November officially marks the half-way point of my sentence – which is pretty exciting. My infinite thanks go out to everyone who has shown their support, either directly or indirectly. While I do like getting letters from strangers, I am regrettably not always able to write back because a) envelopes cost money and b) I don’t always have the energy. Furthermore, I’m going to request that nobody send me any creepy/flirtatious mail. It’s fucking gross – if you send me anything containing comments about my appearance or other such lecherous “flattery”, not only will I not reply… I will also read your letter to the rest of the women on my cell block so we can assuage our boredom by laughing our asses off at you. Seriously, sending anything of that nature to a female prisoner just shows that you lack any notion of true political solidarity. It’s also condescending as hell.

In other news, a new poem of mine is published in the current issue of Goblin Fruit magazine and my two most recent articles are available in the current print editions of Iconoclast and OBSOLETE! Magazine. The former, which my partner and I co-wrote, is about why the rhetoric of “ethical consumerism” is not necessarily conducive to animal liberation or environmental sustainability, and the latter is an interview with Canadian painter Martha Eileen about her ongoing fight against the institutionalization of people with disabilities. To learn more about the present and historical abuse and neglect of people with disabilities in Canada’s health care and education systems, check out the group People First of Canada, or author and activist AJ Withers’ home page, Still My Revolution. While I will soon enough be free from incarceration, this is unfortunately not the case for countless people, both in Canada and worldwide, whose only crime is having been born different from what society deems “able bodied.”

If you’re curious about what day to day life in jail is like, check out Mandy Hiscocks’ blog, Bored But Not Broken. She’s also a G20 prisoner, and she posts regular updates on the riveting events here at the Vanier Centre For Women.

Dear Friends

Two years after the g20 summit in Toronto, my court proceedings have finally been resolved. I feel a huge amount of relief that i am no longer caught in legal limbo, and although i will possibly be in jail until February my heart is filled with joy and inspiration.

While i have no access to the Internet or a computer while I’m at Vanier, my wonderful friends and my partner Doug will be keeping this page updated with messages that I send through the mail.

Three of my new poems are now online at Counterpunch and an article I wrote has been published on Crimethinc. I also have a short story forthcoming from Strange Horizons and an article my partner and I co-wrote is coming up in the next issue of Iconoclast.

Although it is so laborious to write in long-hand with a dull golf-sized pencil (the full-sized ones are, presumably, too easily weaponized), I am determined to keep writing throughout these months.

While institutional environments tend to numb the senses & discourage creativity, the womyn with whom I am incarcerated are such constant sources of strength, light and inspiration.

I send my unending gratitude to my friends, my family, my colleagues and the faculty at my school who have supported me through this all.

I do not need much in terms of support and I ask that people do not donate any funds to me personally — anyone who wishes to send money should contact my support committee (we.love.our.leader@gmail.com) or my partner, who needs money for transportation and phone calls so that we can still talk and see each other (albeit through irksome Plexiglass.)

I’m fairly busy in here at the moment, so I can’t promise that I’ll be able to answer all my mail, but I promise to try my best!

Love & Solidarity

Kelly Pflug-Back
Vanier Centre for Women
P.O Box 1040
665 Martin St
Milton ON
L9T 5E6

 

Fifth Estate now accepting submissions for “Education” themed Issue

The deadline is August 1st. Send your best!

http://www.fifthestate.org/fepages/call.html