Caring for our futures: Epistolary praxis and the promise of slow

Abstract

This creative–critical article advocates for the promise of letters in imagining possible futures. The piece includes ten of my Letters to the Future, epistolary poems written as fictocritical conversations between the texts that I read and imagined future readers. In the letters, I write of listening and care, patterns and methods of making passed between our hands, embodied forms of knowledge and slow practices, as I imagine and speak to our future caring communities. The letters are interspersed with short scholarly reflections on feminist epistolary history, traditions of matrilineal knowledge and slow reading as maternal performance. As part of my multimodal research-creation project on listening as artistic practice, this epistolary work takes visual form in drawings, paper-cut installations and letterpress prints, exhibited most recently at the University of Alberta in 2022.