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✱ TGS Issue 7.1 Launch Party! ✱
We’re back!!!! The English Students’ Association and The Garden Statuary, UBC’s undergraduate literary journal, are excited to welcome all of you to the launch of Issue 7.1! Please join us on Thursday, November 30 from 5-7 pm for: 🍂 Free food!! 🍂 Readings from published undergraduates!! 🍂 Mingling with editors, authors, and artists! 🍂 A chance to purchase or win past print editions! This event is open to everyone from the UBC community and beyond. Please feel free to invite your friends, family, or even complete strangers! 🍂 TERRITORIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 🍂 The Garden Statuary recognizes that this event is taking place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the…
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Separating Art from Artist
Some of the most renowned authors have been horribly problematic people. Salinger was an adulterer and has been accused of pedophilia. Anne Perry murdered her mother. T.S. Eliot was a raging anti-Semite – as were Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway. So why is it that we study these author’s texts with such fervent admiration in our English classes, fawn over their prose in our book clubs, and read their works on our own time? The simple answer is that bad people sometimes create great art. Yet the problem with putting so much importance on works by problematic people is that the things they’ve done and said become forgotten…
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How I Chose My Pen Name: On Racialized Names and the English Literary Canon
Hello, my name is Charmaine Anne Li. That is my full legal name on all my documents, and everyone calls me “Charmaine.” However, I sign off on all my literary pieces as “Li Charmaine Anne.” Truth is, I’ve always been a little sensitive as to how “Asian-sounding” my name is. “Li,” after all, is the most common surname in the world, and is almost iconically Chinese. Growing up, the books I read and the movies I saw with Asian names attached to them were almost always exclusively about “Asian issues.” This gave me the impression that Asian writers can only ever write about Asian Issues and nothing else: no medieval adventure…
