Kay: In Residence

Day 3: FLEET, 2025

15 minute read. Content warnings: Discussion of privilege, and systemic oppression, mentions of ableism and historical erasure of marginalized communities, references to LGBTQ+ identity, coming out, and societal rejection, discussions of debt, and exclusionary practices in art spaces

chatGPT Summary: Kay reflects on their evolving relationship with reading, exploring the books that have profoundly influenced their artistic and access-focused practice, while considering which title to contribute to the FLEET resource library.

I am at the halfway point of the beefy novel I am reading. For now, know that I am reading for pleasure, and it is good. Join me, if you needed the invitation. The internet can wait (even this blog)!

The FLEET team told me they are building a resource library, and so far, each visiting artist has recommended their own book. I am struggling to pick one. My practice is multidisciplinary, so it won’t come as a surprise that I jump across genres. I am many things, and so too have been my influences. While I will likely have to pick one to add to the library, I enjoyed considering the books that have been so important to me and my art practice in particular. In the past, when I have been tasked to add something to a library, I generally focus on the audience it will serve and what is missing. In this exercise, I explored books that have been meaningful to me – books that I would love to have beside me or for my own audience as I shared my work.

Influencial references:

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

Link: Iron Dog Books, Paperback // New edition coming July 2025

I think if I must choose, this will be the book. Toni Cade Bambara said (often quoted), that as a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, “my job is to make revolution irresistible.” For decades, I didn’t realize how white my feminism was, and I was extremely ignorant of my privilege. I am still ignorant of the many ways in which I experience passive privilege as a white, ambulatory adult. But I was made slightly less ignorant when I met my friend Keimi, who told me how essential it was to read about the Combahee River Collective. Before, I thought the revolution was about LGBT and women’s equality. I didn’t know how much of my knowledge was stolen, coopted, and twisted to fit a narrative that benefited (white) power.

Without the liberation, recognition, reparation to, and uplifting of Black and Indigenous, Trans, Disabled and Chronically Ill Queer Women, there is no freedom. This is the way forward.

Follow up reading: Until we are free, Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada

How to Use Fool’s Gold, Sarah Browne

Link: Brown & Dickson Bookstore (Paperback)

There are a lot of great essays I have read and will read, working in exhibitions and contemporary art. An excellent curatorial review, framing, or response piece can take an exhibition or artist’s presentation to another level. But I love it when a show or an artist has a publication that expands on what you see, feel or experience in the gallery. I am invited into their thinking and process, transforming the exhibition experience into an immersive discussion. It answers questions while forming new ones and gives me something to solve (like a hint book for the art game).

Since my first artist statement, I have included the word “value. Early on, it was strongly tied to money and profit. I had recently left a career in marketing and advertising to go to art school and was living with mental illness and burnout. Everything about art making was constantly checked against a need to pay rent. I was barely making ends meet and was still clinging to Western, media-driven, and frankly, juvenile ideals that my commercial projects were hindering my ability to become an authentic artist. I was a mess – as many baby artists, young adults, and …humans… are.

This text came at the right time. The text reflects on forms of exchange and gifting and some of the economic structures I thought of as a necessary evil. It’s also ironic that it took a white woman (and these curated essays) to lead me down a path that ultimately led me to learn about Potlatch cultures and the historical and ongoing atrocities of the Canadian government. I was only starting to see the edges of how lacking/edited my education had been.

The texts are easy to read – which is also a bonus. I don’t tend to recommend art essays to other people, but this selection of essays reinforced the idea that you don’t have to talk down to an audience to validate your contemporary practice. It was a valuable read.

Payback, Margaret Atwood

Link: House (Paperback)

Continuing on the theme of value, this essay, also called “Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth,” was another work that helped me form my practice. Quoting from the dust jacket, “Atwood proposes that debt is like air – something we take for granted until things go wrong. By investigating how debt has formed our thinking from pre-literate times to the present day, Atwood shows that [debt] is built into the human imagination and is one of its most dynamic metaphors.”

After reading this essay, I started questioning copyright, considering knowledge as wealth, and exploring open source and Creative Commons licensing. Atwood doesn’t discuss this directly, and as a writer, I suspect she wouldn’t have encouraged that road. But reading this made me think about how we use knowledge—sometimes as a weapon against those without access to it, sometimes as a form of wealth that reinforces hierarchy and history. This, in turn, led me to consider what a freely available repository of knowledge could mean for humankind. Why could we not invest in each other? What would happen if we honestly rejected personal or intergenerational wealth and power, gave away not only excess but the meat itself, and strove for a non-hierarchical and exchange-based “economy”?

The answer, of course, is that government and enterprise create laws to shut you down. Capitalism depends on our collective participation; we all must choose to feed (each other to) the machine. Fear and greed make it easy to convince people that there is no other choice. No wonder that the alternative is so met with fear and hate – we all need to buy into it so that it can exist. I know it’s fatalistic and more than a little fantastical, but it also drives me to think about how all it would take is for us to share with each other for the entire system to come crashing down.

I struggle with numbers—percentages and dollars lose me in economic discussions – but debt and guilt? Those, I understand. This essay talks about depth in terms of what we owe to each other as humans, the debt we accrue by living in community, and cultural beliefs that inform and influence our value systems. After reading this, I picked up and ultimately put down a copy of “What We Owe to Each Other” by T.M. Scanlon. I struggle to read philosophy on its own. If memory serves, what I actually followed this read up with was The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, being more comfortable with the Canadian fiction writer’s exploration of materialism than formal philosophy. I wonder if I could read it to completion now, 15 years later.

Follow up: In 2011, the NFB released a documentary based on this book. I haven’t watched it yet, but there are English captions. I’ll check it out in March when I’m done with my streaming fast.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster

Link: theoryoffun.com

I like a book with pictures. I am an illustrator – it would be pretty hilarious if I didn’t. But I am also really fond of storytelling as a way to teach. This book has both. It is a recommended text on the reading list for many game design programs, and it has been recommended to me by both game writers and academics. The book explores game theory and philosophy, but most importantly, games as pedagogical tools. I linked to the book’s landing page, which in turn links to an Amazoon link, but if that’s where the author wants you to buy, then at least click through here so that he gets an affiliate credit. However, by clicking through, you can also find his blog, which I also recommend.

I don’t want to say too much about this one – it’s easy to pick up, and I think any author, public programs designer, or workshop facilitator should read this.

Games are fun – so too should be your work!

How to Draw Black People, Malik Shabazz

Link: Ugh Amazoon – the author’s website is down – but when it’s up, I’ll link.

Drawing stereotypes is a common lazy practice in illustration. If the goal is to convey as much visual information as quickly as possible, prejudice can become an easy tool to misuse and is defended as essential to serving an audience, which then, in turn, tries to argue the creator/artist is not to blame. They also say to write/draw what you know. If I wanted to respectfully represent and diversify, including bodies in my illustrations that were not part of my personal experience and training, then I needed to know. I needed to learn. And I needed to learn from someone besides the white instructors in my illustration program. Enter this spectacular book that not only talked about how African phenotypes were ignored or misrepresented in illustration but also discussed colour theory and gender representation. For every project with a book budget, I got a copy of this book before it went out of print/sold out.

The first edition (which I own) was offered through Kickstarter. Since then, it has been reprinted and expanded into a second volume that includes more techniques, collaborator insights and history. Both editions and volumes are available from a few smaller bookstores and amazoon (unfortunately, the artist’s website has come down while they are facing eviction) – but you can still find copies of the book. If you can get your hands on this – I recommend it.

True Biz, Sara Novic

Link: Massy Books (paperback)

Strangers often tell me that they have always wanted to learn sign language.

It’s a thing – humans want to make a connection, so when people see me signing or are unsure how to respond to my hearing loss (hint: face me/ask), they will tell me about how learning a signed language is on their bucket list.

For all of you who want to learn ASL (which is a full language and is as much a commitment as learning any language – spoken, signed, or written, so I understand putting it off…), who are learning ASL, who are hard of hearing or deaf but don’t sign, are Deaf and haven’t read Sara Novic’s novel yet, here’s your invitation. You don’t have to be deaf or hard of hearing “enough” (if you know, you know) to find yourself in this story, and the coming-of-age story is a good introduction to the culture and the barriers that continue to challenge Deaf communities and families across Turtle Island.

Skin, Tooth and Bone, Sins Invalid and Patty Berne

Link: Flipcause – PDF and Spiral Bound Book available.

“Where do I even start?” This is the common question I get asked when I work with other cultural workers. Now that we are facing the pendulum swing to the right following a 5-year period where I cannot deny that access and justice have been trending, if only in comparison to the now-times as inclusion and access information are being scoured from websites and resources organizations are denying that it was ever a priority to begin with. I hope to still get asked this by peers and partner organizations in the future.

But this isn’t new. Ableism and racism existed before, and save for something miraculous or disastrous, it will persist. Climate change is real and will not disappear if we ignore or deny it. Audism still exists even after our government finally recognizes ASL, LSQ and ISL as actual languages. Take a breath. Read this book. Buy it for a friend. Eat with your community. Cut vegetables for your neighbour. Give money to the IRSSS. Volunteer. Rest. Carpool. Love.

Le Cirque / La Maison Hauntée, Clermont, Marie-Andrée

Link: Out of Print

Why would I list an out-of-print book?

The Choose Your Own Adventure® genre of book, or game if you’ll allow it, has been an essential part of my upbringing, and I know not alone. I grew up dragging the Canadian French translation (merci Heritage-Jeunesse) of the Choose Your Own Adventure Skylark spin-off series with me wherever I went. I have fond memories of guiding camp trips to the water’s edge, finding solitude in group settings where I could read the books repeatedly, even when I knew where my choices would lead me. I have enjoyed reading for as long as I can remember, but these were the first stories where I felt afraid or let down. Disappointment and disgust are strong memories for me here.

When a single story is “sad,” “gross,” or “scary,” that tends to persist as the most prominent label whether you judge that as good or bad. You’ll either recommend or disregard the story based on this impression. But these books – these adventures – were multiple things. This wasn’t “anthology” (which perhaps I had experienced by then in school) but parallel universes! The same characters could die, transcend, multiply, disappear, and succeed within the same bound pages. I was addicted.

I went to a French Immersion school, and so I had a plentiful selection of books in French when I was growing up. I didn’t understand that many of my favourite books were translated until I was older. Trips to the public library revealed to me that it was more common to have three shelves of books in a language other than English, and by the time I entered high school, I started reading more often in English unless I was assigned reading in class. But in elementary school, it was at least a 50/50 split. I adored Le Cirque – a specific ending I still remember clearly, where I made the protagonist climb a never-ending ladder. It never ended. That was the ending. The lack of conclusion – that the character neither died nor lived happily ever after. It was a big deal.

La Maison Hauntée is a translation of the original 1981 Bantam-Skylark Choose Your Own Adventure – The Haunted House. Years later, I read the English version and thought they had done a poor job translating it—another significant milestone. Not only was the French version (in my nostalgic memory) written better, but I recall the author had taken liberties to make it a better story. I didn’t ask myself about the implications until decades later, but before that, French was the same as English. If I understood a French sentence as “being” or having the same meaning as the English sentence, how was a book with the same title and cover art within the same series different? Mind = blown.

Recently, one of my collectives did its own take on the choose your own “way” or chooseable path (the non-trademarked genre name) stories, working to build interactive fiction under a collective theme. I loved those events, and while my earlier works are either buggy, incomplete or just bad, it has become one of my favourite ways to tell a story. If I could find a copy of these original youth books, I would ask FLEET to include them. Even if one of these other books is chosen, I might slip another book for youth onto the shelves.

Follow up: Looking for an “adult” choosable path story? Ryan North did a version of Hamlet (To Be or Not to Be ISBN: 0982853742) that is truely wonderful, including artwork from even more award-winning contemporary comic artists. Here’s the interactive fiction as a video game.

There goes my baby, Lynn Johnston

Link: Read the series (undescribed) on fborw.com / buy a print.

Lynn Johnston, the first woman to receive the Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year (National Cartoonist Society), wrote the story of For Better or For Worse for 29 years. Like many Canadians, I grew up with the Pattersons. My age is between the eldest child, Michael, and the middle child, Elizabeth, who experienced milestones right around the same time I did. I felt things deeply while growing up and reading this comic series more than any other book because it was about a white, Canadian, middle-class family living through the 1980s. I was watching myself, my sister, my parents, in black and white.

That’s not to try and take away the skill as an artist and writer that is Lynn Johnston. She is expressive, funny, and concise. She crams life into each panel – and did it for 30 years. That she could make these iconic characters and still have them be so relatable is talent, to say the least.

In 2016, the WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, Ontario, hosted an exhibition which produced the publication, For Better or For Worse, the Comic Art of Lynn Johnston. It’s 200 pages of biography and history – I should recommend this book to the FLEET library. I want to continue to push that comic and visual storytelling are powerful and, at times, more accessible than the written word (*cough – sighted person). I have pushed to incorporate Lynn Johnston as a significant figure in exhibitions I have designed and co-curated in the last decade. Comic artists are fine artists. This should be the book.

But instead, I present the collection (either the 14th or the 15th, if you count the 10th Anniversary collection in the sequence), There Goes My Baby, from 1993. In this edition, Michael gets his driver’s license and moves through his final year of high school. Elizabeth deals with teenage drama and supports her friends, and April watches, compares, and experiences jealousy as the youngest child. John (Dad) throws his back out, and Ellie (Mom) continues to stress and hate her body in ways that echo how my mother did – reinforcing that behaviour in me. Honestly, there have been more dynamic and rollercoaster collections in the past, and this book covered what were mostly “keep on, keepin’ on days”. That’s aging. That’s white, suburban North American life in the late 20th century. Not every year is a blowout.

However, in the last few pages of this collection…spoilers ahead:

…Michael’s best friend Lawrence, whom readers have also grown up with as a neighbour and schoolmate, comes out as gay. Lynn has collected the story with a landing page called Lawrence’s Story. . In 1993, or probably 1994, by the time I read it, I was 13. Gay and lesbian hate was certainly something I had witnessed, and I had been told that some people were gay, which was “fine, but not if they shove it in our faces – what they do in the bedroom is their own business…” 🤦 By 1995, I was questioning and forming opinions around not hating any particular body or gender/sex (but my own), although the coming of age stories I was watching and sometimes reading would suggest that I should by the time I got to high school. It wasn’t until I was in grade 9 that I was overtly bi in public – but I didn’t come out to my family until well after I moved away from my family home.

I still cry reading the mini-story. In these few panels (4 weeks in print), Lawrence tells his friend, who rejects him, regrets and then accepts it. He doesn’t magically become an ally – both characters are still teenage boys. Lawrence is encouraged to take the same chance with his family, who also reject him, regret it, and then accept it. It…was so important to me – and as Lynn puts it on her website – to others as well. From reading between the lines, I also imagine she lost readers and received a lot of hate mail. I can’t know for sure if this made me brave in my own coming-out story (which has been messy, incomplete, confident and awkward all at once), but I know this was a piece. It was a brick. It is a part of me – and I am glad for it.

Follow up: It was honestly a tie here. I let this Canadian female powerhouse take the lead – but if we’re talking artist resource libraries – it’s just not complete without a copy of Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud.

For Your Own Good, Leah Horlick

Link: Caitlin Press (Paperback)

All of Leah’s work is worth buying – if I had to recommend one, I would choose For Your Own Good because it was the first one I read, and I think it’s the one I could comfortably suggest to a resource library without a preface. Leah’s recently published work, moldovan hotel, is one I would want someone to read in a safe place. With time to process and space to think, cry, love, and exist in awe and horror because that’s where it will take you. It’s a worthy journey.

If I haven’t yet convinced you – buy the linked book. Buy all of them. However, Leah changed my life not through her written word (initially) – it was through her programmed events, where she modelled practicing access and care to my community. While REVERB, a queer reading series, is no longer an active event, it lingers in my heart as being a turning point for me. In being allowed to be messy, queer, unsure, and having access needs that weren’t a burden, I got to experience community in a way that I hadn’t permitted for myself before. Leah didn’t text me and say, “Hello, queer mad human, come as you are to my event and experience queer joy,” but she might as well have.

Ringing my own bell:

Artists on Access, Edited by Kendra Place and Jaz Whitford, 2025

Link to be updated – vivo news

While not yet published, it would feel funny to not list a forthcoming publication, published locally, featuring peers, collaborators, and community artists sharing their thoughts and responding to access. I have seen the draft – I know it is coming – and yes, I have a piece in there too. More to come.

Technology note:

I used chatGPT to create a summary and reading estimate, and recommend some content warnings for this blog, and Grammarly to assist me in spelling and grammar.

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