From Denver Quarterly
We are delighted to present these collaboratively assembled portfolios from Westerly Magazine (University of Western Australia) and Denver Quarterly (University of Denver). We are deeply grateful to these invited artists and writers for trusting us with their work, and to our guest editors (SJ Burton and Billy J. Stratton) for building with us these online special issues via FIVES: a companion to Denver Quarterly and Westerly online. We are also grateful to our editorial and production teams at each journal for their perseverance with this project.
The foundation for this project began before the COVID-19 Pandemic, when our respective department directors established a faculty exchange program that was poised to launch just as, unfortunately, the global emergency took hold. In the spirit of that international partnership, W. Scott Howard invited Catherine Noske to visit (via Zoom) his ‘Introduction to Publishing’ undergraduate course (Winter 2021). During that visit, we began to imagine possibilities for Westerly and Denver Quarterly to build a collaborative project. And so, here we are! …Two years and hundreds of emails later, after a sequence of virtual editorial meetings nurturing our developing plans, we’re finally ready to share these collections with you.
In Summer 2022, Denver Quarterly (56.4) published an ‘Indigenous Voices’ portfolio to feature Indigenous writers from the lands sometimes known as the United States and Canada. Our editorial team aligned with the practices recommended by Greg Younging in Elements of Indigenous Style, including approaching publication as respectful relationship, honoring writers’ and artists’ wishes in style and formatting, and, by doing so, destabilizing whenever possible the colonialism embedded in Eurowestern writing, editing, and publishing traditions. We carry this commitment forward into this DQ Online Folio. We respect and present these contributors’ work as they wish it to appear. Thank you, artists and writers, for the gifts of your time, guidance, and voices.
For our community at Denver Quarterly, this project represents the first of our DQ Online Folios that will appear in FIVES. Denver Quarterly is a nonprofit organization, and we are grateful for our annual funding from the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Denver as well as for a grant from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses / Amazon Literary Partnership that made this project possible.
W. Scott Howard, Editor, Denver Quarterly and FIVES
Lucien Darjeun Meadows, Managing Editor, Denver Quarterly and FIVES
From Westerly Magazine
Our team at Westerly has been thrilled to work with the team at Denver Quarterly in this online special issue. The relationship between our magazines has been developed over the past two years, based on the connection of our university faculties from 2020. While the pandemic interrupted early plans for a faculty exchange, the issue that is published here offers a scene of connection which honours and extends that original intent to engage across the space of continents. Both our publications hold deep the desire to understand what it means to live and work on stolen Country, and to pay respect to the continued sovereignty and custodianship of First Nations peoples. While the national contexts in which we work hold their own specific histories of dispossession, they are also based on the same imperialist violence of settler colonisation. In engaging with these specificities and these commonalities alike, we learn about ourselves and about the broader world in which we live.
This issue differs from other Westerly online special issues in offering untouched the voices and style of contributors coming from Denver Quarterly. In that sense, readers might note what appears as inconsistency: shifts in style and formatting from piece to piece. This is offered primarily in recognition of, and as a mark of respect for, the unique voices of the authors. In building this issue, as mentioned above, our combined editorial practices have adopted approaches detailed in Greg Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style. These have included avoiding alteration to Indigenous voice, recognising the sovereignty of speech, and seeking to mitigate the colonial imperatives carried inherently within the English language—as well as within publishing as an activity in this context. These shifts in style also mark the connections built in our collaboration; they nod to the differing house styles of the two magazines and this wonderful experience of working together.
We are enormously grateful to the authors who have offered their voices and entrusted us with the work collected here. We’re likewise grateful to the two phenomenal guest editors who have guided the project: SJ Burton and Billy J. Stratton. This work is rich and exciting, and generous in its offering to the reader.
We need to acknowledge likewise that Westerly is supported by funding from multiple bodies, including the School of Humanities (University of Western Australia); the Australia Council for the Arts; Culture and the Arts WA (Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries); the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency; and the Finn Bequest. We thank them all for their support.
Catherine Noske, Editor, Westerly
Daniel Juckes, Associate Editor, Westerly