The Skeleton Press, a free quarterly publication presented by Skeleton Park Arts Festival (SPAF), released its spring issue Mar. 11.
The paper is distributed to over 4,000 people door-to-door. Issue nine can also be found online or at locations like the Elm Café, Union Gallery, CFRC Radio, and the Kingston Community Health Center.
The Journal spoke with Greg Tilson, The Skeleton Press co-editor, about the subjects inside.
“We’re trying to share stories and learn from each other in the neighborhood,” Tilson said. “We’re fortunate that in the Skeleton Park neighborhood, there’s a vibrant literary community.”
The nice weather approaching Kingston inspired the spring issue, with pieces highlighting community agriculture initiatives like markets, urban farming, and gardening.
“We figured it would be a hopeful theme to look at gathering again at our markets and growing food and eating local food again,” he said.
The issue also features several pieces about Kingston’s housing crisis, a problem Tilson said Skeleton Park community members are passionate about.
“With housing, it can be a polarizing topic,” he said. “It’s a delicate conversation because there are a lot of people who are being displaced—there are a lot of people who can no longer afford to live here.”
Tilson explained how including multiple voices was important to The Skeleton Press when it came to discussing the housing crisis.
“We tried to come at it from many different perspectives and many different voices about people’s experiences and people’s ideas of how we can work at this problem together.”
Issue nine also covers the climate crisis as community members continue to question what can be done to solve the worsening problem.
“We’re coming up to a municipal election, and a priority issue for people is, ‘What are we going to do about this?’” he said. “On a neighborhood level, it can be very empowering to take a massive global crisis like climate change and think locally about it.”
While the paper includes many fun stories, comics, and illustrations, Tilson acknowledged the heaviness of much of issue nine’s content.
“A neighborhood newspaper like this can be empowering and hopeful in terms of what we can do just at this level,” Tilson said.
“We’re just trying to write about what people are talking about. That’s maybe unlike other newspapers, in that it’s sharing stories by the people that live here.”
Tags
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s)-in-Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.
