Period Poverty and Equity: Button Making Workshop

The workshop featured Ariel Gordon (she/her), a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. Ariel is the co-editor, with Rosanna Deerchild and Tanis MacDonald, of the anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our age (Fontenac House, 2018). In GUSH, more than 100 women and nonbinary writers from Canada and around the world take apart the bloody instruction of menstruation: its cultures, its lessons, its equipment, and its lexicon. Co-edited byRosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon, and Tanis MacDonald, GUSH offers menstrual manifestos for our time that question the cultural value and social language of monthly blood loss, with rage, humour, ferocity, and grief, and propose that the ‘menstrual moment’ is as individualized, subjective, personal, political, and vital as the ‘feminist click’. With work from emerging and established writers in poetry, cartoons, flash fiction, personal essays, lyric confessions, and experimental forms, this anthology features the voices of Indigenous writers, writers of colour, writers with disabilities, rural writers and urban writers, representing four generations of menstruators: writers who call down their bloodiest muses. Including work by Yvette Nolan, Mini Aodla Freeman, Sheri-D Wilson, Sonnet L’Abbe, Pamela Mordecai, Susan Holbrook, and many more.