Abstract
Love Letters is a collection of personal and researched essays that grapple with queer family, intimacy, substance use and the Vancouver DIY punk scene. The collection begins with a set of essays exploring place and community-making against the backdrop of gentrification and a crisis of toxic drug deaths. It then dives deeper into the workings of a series of relationships in the speaker’s life, interrogating the nature and function of intimacy, and the shapes that love may take. The final, five-part essay explores the writer’s own family history, the ways that privilege can protect or harm a person, and what happens when family narratives come into conflict with one another. These essays consider the ethics of memoir when stories overlap and push against each other, and the ways that creating community is itself an act of resistance. This collection is inspired by the self-taught, self-published writing that is copied on scammed manager codes at an understaffed Staples, circulated hand-to-hand at a basement show or a street party, or gifted to the friend who helped pack up your bookshelf for a move, only for it to resurface six years later on her coffee table, when you are passing through on your drive to the coast, and just happened to be wondering if you would ever be able to find that little essay again, because you can’t shake the opening sentence out of your head, and you know there is a good zucchini bread recipe at the back of the booklet.