I have never responded to a periodical that has rejected a submission of mine, knowing that they are all staffed by ardent volunteers working overtime to make something beautiful and, moreover, that consensus is always difficult to reach. In other words, I appreciate their hard work and what they are doing for Canadian literature!

BUT the Ex-Puritan just stepped over the line with their latest call for entry which declares:

“My hope for this special issue is to co-produce a creative folio of political education that consolidates ‘Resistance’ as armed resistance against US-led imperialism.”

“Every time there was the zionist demand to ‘condemn’ this group or that group there was an admission: armed resistance must be criminalized, censored, shamed, and stripped of political legitimacy. Armed resistance clarifies the limits of purely symbolic accounts of struggle because it forces us to confront liberation not as an abstract relation of domination, but as a material relation of violence and force. To affirm revolutionary violence, then, is a historically accurate, materially grounded, and ethically sound position to hold.”

“In an interview with Ebb Magazine, Palestinian writer and intellectual Abdeljawad Omar explained, ‘resistance is and always was a hopeful pathology.’ Any reductionist, dismissive, or nightmarish view of armed resistance is, to Omar, anti-intellectual and ultimately invested in the status quo.”

This was so offensive that I sent them this email:

I am so relieved that you did not accept my poems! Given that you are publicly endorsing violence in your latest call for entry, I don’t want to be associated with your publication. In fact, I will never submit to you again, and I suspect I will not be the only Canadian writer boycotting you.
I quit being a union steward for graduate students at U of T back in the day when my union was taken over by CPC-ML adherents mouthing platitudes like yours, which cost them absolutely nothing since they were living in Canada and were not repressed in any way. All over the world innocent people are dying because those more powerful than they have decided that violence is their right. But they are all wrong. Including you.