Left to right: Joshua Best, River Halen (photo by Justine Latour), and Smokii Sumac.

		<p><em>Briarpatch</em>&rsquo;s annual Writing in the Margins contest is back for its 15th year, spotlighting new poetry, creative non-fiction, and photography that bring to life issues of social and environmental justice.</p>

This year, we have a very exciting panel of judges: River Halen will judge creative non-fiction, Smokii Sumac will judge poetry, and Joshua Best will judge photography. 

You have until December 15, 2024, to enter the contest – details on how to enter can be found at

Left to right: Joshua Best, River Halen (photo by Justine Latour), and Smokii Sumac.

		<p><em>Briarpatch</em>&rsquo;s annual Writing in the Margins contest is back for its 15th year, spotlighting new poetry, creative non-fiction, and photography that bring to life issues of social and environmental justice.</p>

You have until December 15, 2024, to enter the contest – details on how to enter can be found at briarpatchmagazine.com/writinginthemargins. It costs $25 to submit (which also gets you a one-year subscription to Briarpatch) and we have bursaries that allow 10 low-income writers and artists to submit for free. Winners are published in Briarpatch Magazine and receive $500 each in prizes; runners-up are published on briarpatchmagazine.com and receive $150 each.

Vicky Huang asked the judges about grief, their dreams for a better future, and creating art amidst facism.

Meet the judges:

Joshua Best is a Toronto-based documentary photojournalist dedicated to chronicling the global and local struggles for social and environmental justice. His work, focused on grassroots movements, inequality, and the human cost of systemic failure, is built upon building relationships of trust and a dedicated, long-term presence within communities.

River Halen’s poems and essays dealing with relation, ecology, transformation, and sexuality have been published widely in Canada, as well as in the U.S., Australia, and in translation in Japan. Their most recent book, Dream Rooms, a collection of essays and poems, was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and selected by Renee Gladman for Artforum Magazine as a top-ten pick of the year. They live in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.

Smokii Sumac is a Ktunaxa two spirit poet, emerging playwright, and youth cultural worker. His first book, you are enough: love poems for the end of the world (Kegedonce, 2018) won an Indigenous Voices Award for published poetry, and his second book Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine came out in April 2025 with Roseway, an imprint of Fernwood Publishing. Smokii lives in ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa with his husband, their cats and a "big ole rez dog" named Kootenay Lou.

Joshua, your protest photography is strikingly kinetic. Mouths are ovaled midst chant, bodies are dynamically twisted, flags are pumping in the wind – there seems to be a visual emphasis on the action in collective action. What does the word ‘movement’ mean to you in the contexts of art and politics?

Joshua Best (JB): Movement is a defining characteristic of both art and politics. In art, movement is essential and omnidirectional; without it, art dies. Artists are perpetually in motion, driven by the endless need for growth. They move toward personal or professional goals, or away from outdated versions of their art or themselves. In politics, however, movement is often problematic. Governments can appear glacially slow or entirely stagnant on critical issues, or conversely, they may move at a reckless pace that precludes thoughtful discussion. In my own work, movement is a vital conduit for emotion. I strive to capture subjects in a state of flux, aiming to convey energy – whether it's as subtle as an embrace or as jarring as a punch.

River, in Dream Rooms you detail the despair of learning that your bookshelf is decorated by the works of “rapists and manipulators and assailants,” yet you also describe a contradictory compulsion to keep and study their literature for signs of violence. You write that exposure to these books is a form of resistance: it trains us to see, identify, and respond to the creep of fascist aesthetics. How do you hold that contradiction – between revulsion and study, refusal and engagement? What can this practice teach us about reading ethically in violent times?

River Halen (RH): That essay, "Six Boxes," is about a moment in time when I, as a younger person, was grappling with received Western, patriarchal literary culture and all the different forms of violence encoded in it, or invisibilized by it (the emphasis in the essay is on sexual assault) and what it might take to stop being complicit. The essay entertains a lot of different possibilities along the way, among them this idea of “resistance training”: reading texts specifically to understand the ways in which they are violent and getting consciously angry about it. The idea appears as an almost desperate possibility – a justification for continuing to hoard books I no longer believe in – and, in the context of the essay, it's meant to be a bit ridiculous.

My feeling is that there isn't any art so sacred or captivating we can't let go of it; we get to choose consciously, moment to moment, what's interesting or important to us, and we're allowed to draw lines about what we'll accept from a writer in their life or work.

I don't figure out in that piece (and I can't say I've figured out in my life since) how to hold the contradiction you're talking about. This isn't to say that no one could, just that I didn't. The way the essay ends is with me taking a big load of books (the titular six boxes) to the thrift store and choosing to place my attention elsewhere, on other books and ideas. My feeling is that there isn't any art so sacred or captivating we can't let go of it; we get to choose consciously, moment to moment, what's interesting or important to us, and we're allowed to draw lines about what we'll accept from a writer in their life or work. Those of us whose identities and histories have been marginalized, especially, don't owe our attention to the people who have put us in that position, and if we do choose to look in their direction, we get to set the terms. 

Smokii, you’ve mentioned before that one of the core problems with settler-colonial society is that “they don’t know how to grieve.” In Born Sacred, your poems trace your affective responses in witnessing the ongoing Palestinian genocide. How does grief function for you as a ground for solidarity across settler-colonial contexts? And how do you express that grief-as-solidarity through your poetry?

Smokii Sumac (SS): In my first book, you are enough, I have a couple poems; one is describing a moment where I was on a flight soon after the acquittal of Gerald Stanley, who was on trial for murdering Colton Boushie, a young Cree man. I was devastated, and the poem reflects on hoping the settlers on the plane around me were at the very least kind and gentle as I held my grief – it was too much for me to hope that they would even know Colton's stories, that they may be grieving with me. Far too many don't pay attention to the case at all, or worse feel that Colton's killer was justified in his actions. In the second poem, I speak about missing and murdered Indigenous women – I call on settlers to learn their names, to write a name on paper and carry it with them, to weep for our women.

I committed to having my world stopped even for just the brief minutes or hour it took me to write each poem in Born Sacred. I refused to look away. When we forget to grieve, it becomes easier to assume others don't need to either.

I was late in understanding [Israel's actions] in Palestine as genocide – it wasn’t until October 2023 I began to really understand what was happening there. What I began to see was Palestinians feeling the same frustration [as us] at a world which refuses to witness, refuses to speak out on behalf of them, and refuses to believe their stories. When loss happens, the world stops for our families, our communities, our nations. I committed to having my world stopped even for just the brief minutes or hour it took me to write each poem in Born Sacred. I refused to look away. When we forget to grieve, it becomes easier to assume others don't need to either. Dehumanization happens not only to living Indigenous people, but also in our deaths. Why is bereavement leave only four days (if that)? In Indigenous cultures, grief lasts many days; in some worldviews we practice grief for one year, four years, seven. We lose a piece of ourselves when we are unable to grieve, and I believe grief helps us hold our humanity. 

RAPID-FIRE ROUND

What’s the most intriguing work you’ve read or seen recently, and why did it interest you?

JB: I haven't encountered any single piece of recent work that I find intriguing. Instead, my attention has been dominated by the global coverage of Palestine and of Israel's genocide against Palestinians. Witnessing the mainstream media contort itself to justify Israel's actions and demonize Palestinians has been a shocking spectacle. The overwhelming one-sidedness has completely stripped corporate media of its credibility as any kind of harbinger of truth. Over the past two years, I have found this entire dynamic to be profoundly compelling.

RH: For about the past year, I've been obsessed with the novel My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel. In it, Lemebel makes a brilliant and devastating parallel between queer desire – specifically impossible, unrequited queer desire – and revolutionary desire: the idea of pursuing a better world against all reasonable odds, or, I guess, setting relationships right on a large scale.

I experience, viscerally, reading [My Tender Matador], how desire itself is an action.

The book sets it up such that the idea seems to reach retroactively into every sad, clichéd, kill-your-queers narrative that popular culture feeds us and pulls something redeeming from it. I experience, viscerally, reading that book, how desire itself is an action.

SS: I am grateful to have just come off a tour with my collaborator, writer and artist Zaynab Mohammed. Her one woman show Are You Listening? is now a book published by Pownal Street Press. Her stories of growing up as a Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi woman in Canada and Lebanon, with a birthday on September 11th – 2001 was when she had her 11th birthday – as well as surviving war in Lebanon, the triumphs of her mother (who writes an afterword), and of her understandings of "home" only got [more vivid] as I heard her read at each of our 10 tour stops. I truly recommend you find a copy for yourself. I think often we see these things as far away. Every one of us may remember where we were on September 11, 2001, but as Zaynab says, her people have lived through "a thousand September elevenths." Her strength of voice invites the reader in to understand the realities that Arab people face whether they travel home or are living in the diaspora. 

What projects are you currently working on?

JB: I'm currently working on a portrait project documenting the stories of individuals within the pro-Palestinian movement. I'm asking participants to explain what the past two years have meant to them and what they have been experiencing since the genocide began. The scale of the project is still undetermined. A community has grown around this movement, and I believe it's crucial to document its essence in their own words.

RH: My current projects are on pause for combined economic and disability reasons – as my health gets more complicated, my life gets more expensive, and so I'm currently back in school to find more stable work. One day I hope to return to my novel about an evaporated transgender consciousness that follows people around.

SS: I am grateful to have a Canada Council for the Arts funded spoken word album forthcoming. We recorded in July 2025, and I am so grateful to my producer G.R. Gritt for the beautiful music they have added to my words. I can't wait to share it with you all!

What are your dreams of a better future?

JB: It’s difficult for me to be positive about a better future as I've always been a rather cynical person. The constant barrage of doom broadcast through the media certainly doesn't help.

My only glimmer of hope lies in the rise of communities that place value in in-person interactions, drawing on their collective strengths to build from within.

The forced rise of AI, which permeates  every aspect of our lives, keeps me up at night. Global fascism, bolstered by AI is also on the rise – not even Black Mirror could have conceived some of the things we are witnessing. My only glimmer of hope lies in the rise of communities that place value in in-person interactions, drawing on their collective strengths to build from within. These communities are filled with artists, tradespeople, tech-savvy individuals, and others who want something real – something they have a say in. Younger people have become far more politically aware, forcing governments worldwide to take notice. If I have any hope, it's that the younger generation will clear a path to a better future. But I suppose every generation thinks this of its youth; it is an unfair burden to place on them.

RH: Land back, here, in Palestine, and everywhere it's been stolen. No rich people, accountability to all life forms on earth and restored relationships with animals and plants, free food and housing, no need for ID and especially not gender markers, non-violent healthcare, and ideally a lake I can swim in regularly with my friends.

SS: Capitalism must fall. We have never been able to sustain this level of resource extraction on this earth.

I dream of children who get to taste the foods from plants their great grandparents planted. I dream of our languages returning across our lands.

I believe that unfortunately we will see things continue to get harder, and when that happens, may we remember how to take care of each other. I dream of children who get to taste the foods from plants their great grandparents planted. I dream of our languages returning across our lands. I dream of land back and a free Palestine, which to me are the calls for the liberation of all including Sudan, Congo, and all oppressed peoples throughout the world.