Featured in this folio:
- Ren Koppel Torres
- Noa Micaela Fields
- mónica teresa ortiz
- Karina & Seraphine
- Jody Chan & Zoë Fay-Stindt
- Jane Shi
- Erin Vachon
- Em Roth
- Curtis Emery & Laura Wetherington
- Chamomile Wheatley
- Allegra Wilson
- Adam Ahmed & Christine Huang
We—Jody and Zoë—have been sending each other love notes for six years and counting. We met via a virtual Winter Tangerine workshop in 2018; we have yet to meet in person. This bloom of a friendship—perennial yet distanced, intimate yet nebulous—is part of a long-standing and life-affirming tradition of queer epistolary.
To us, the queer epistolary is a reverent space: a gap in which to witness each other’s vivid, unruly particularities. A bridge between articulation and action. An encounter that can hold fear and anger and the exhaustion of trying, so that we may, in turn, meet each other outside of language, in struggle. Queer as in making room for reverence and revolutionary insistence, both.
The fourteen writers gathered here dwell in those spaces between grief and joy, critique and whimsy, rigour and gentleness. These pieces reach for the possibilities of entanglement across time and translation; grapple with the tendrils of Zionism and imperialism; forge an unsettled grammar of disability and transness; reach from O’Hara to Appalachia, Gothenburg to Tokyo, from corporate masking to queer bar euphoria; build altars for past and future ancestors. These writers flux and fight. They hold tight to each other.
Queer folks have been keeping each other company on the page for as long as we’ve existed—as a way to practice solidarity, to extend generosity, to resist, to wonder, to gossip, to flirt, to nurture kinship beyond borders and categories. But the queer epistolary, these writers have taught us, is more than a written form—it is a choreography enacted, a way to practice care alongside autonomy, through all our messy mundanity. We mirror, lineage, echo each other. We do not make ourselves on our own, but by holding space for our collective morphing.
We are deeply indebted to these brilliant writers, collaborators, comrades, and friends who continue to build, day by day, letter by letter, ode by ode, a just, queered togetherness.
In gratitude, in solidarity, and in co-creation,
Jody & Zoë
May 2025
Jody Chan (they/them) is a writer, grief and death worker, and community organizer based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of sick (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry, impact statement (Brick Books, 2024), and madness belongs to the people (Brick Books, forthcoming 2026). Jody is a member of the Daybreak Poets Collective, a co-host of the podcast Poet Talk, and the former 2023-2024 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Queer and Trans Research Lab.
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist with roots in both the French and American south, currently living on unceded Cherokee lands. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. They are a student of belonging and embodied relationship to land who believes in slowness, reciprocal relationship with place and people, and queer, kincentric futures.