Robin Lee Jordan : Wiggle [rooms] (for Brenda Iijima

from Report from the Iijima Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

after Brenda Iijima's Daily Life in China

 

 

Text sources: Brenda Iijima and Daily Life in China, George Bishop’s The World of Clowns

 

 

 

 

Robin Lee Jordan is a poet and collage-based visual artist with poor fine motor skills. She wrote the chapbooks Morning Blessing Poems (Foundlings Press) and THEY ATE EACH OTHER UP (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). Robin is the coordinator of the Just Buffalo Writing Center, a creative writing center for teens, and occasionally maintains the (B)uffalo (A)rt (D)ispensary, a coin-operated, micro-art dispenser that travels around Buffalo, NY.

 

 

 

 

Patrick De Coste : Three paintings

folio : Marsh Blue Violet: Queer Poetry from New Brunswick

Patrick De Coste is a visual artist based in Toronto and Lafontaine, Ontario. He studied Fine Arts at Mount Allison University and later Graduate Studies at OCAD University where he received the President’s Award for Outstanding Achievement. His interdisciplinary art projects are rooted in Indigenous identity and colonial first-contacts. DeCoste descends from French settlers and Mi’kmaw people of Port Royal, Nova Scotia; the earliest Métis people of Canada. He has exhibited extensively across the country and has received many awards and reviews. His latest solo exhibition, 13 Moons and a Canoe, opened at J.B.Aird Gallery in Toronto, in 2017, and later travelled to the Thames Gallery and the Tom Thomson gallery. His next project is a love story set in Cape Breton in the 1700s. 

The Len and Cub Project

folio : Marsh Blue Violet: Queer Poetry from New Brunswick

In 2016, Dusty Green uncovered the story and photos of two young lovers Len & Cub while working in the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. Leonard O. Keith and Joseph Austin “Cub” Coates were both from Havelock, a village in South Eastern New Brunswick. Len was an amateur photographer and his photos not only document rural life in New Brunswick at the beginning of the 20th Century, but also his relationship with Cub. Sadly, Len was eventually exposed as a homosexual and driven out of town in the 1930s.

The tale of Len & Cub is a rare example of an early queer relationship in New Brunswick and Canadian history. Green, along with the help of archivist Meredith J. Batt are in the process of writing a book on the lives and relationship of Len & Cub set to be released along with an exhibit at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick in 2021.

Postcard portrait of Leonard Keith (left) and Cub Coates, c. 1915-1920

Len Keith and Cub Coates c. 1915

Leonard Keith (left) and Cub Coates sitting together in a shirtless embrace c. 1915