Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: Holding Multiple Truths

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North

Editor in Chief

Pine boughs decorated with small yellow lights

As the year turns, we’re invited into a season that often arrives wrapped in a package of expectation: celebration, connection, spiritual renewal, reflection. Yet the holidays also hold multiple truths at once, and for many, the season arrives with more complexity than cheer—distance from family, uncertainty about the future, unresolved conflicts, and more questions about spirituality and religion than answers; alongside the not-so subtle pressure to reinvent ourselves on January 1st. This December/January issue of The 44 North looks at the holidays with honesty and curiosity, and joy and hope. Not because everything feels okay, but because to find joy and peace in the holiday season it is not only possible, but necessary, to hold multiple truths at once. To see the world as it is: in all its beautiful messiness. 

This issue, our team explores the realities that shape our well-being at this time of year. Our feature story by Abbigale Kernya examines what it means to spend the holidays away from home—whether by choice, circumstance, or necessity—and how distance reshapes belonging. Abbigale and Helena together take on the pressures of New Year’s resolutions and career planning, challenging the embedded assumption that success and happiness in life can be scheduled like a process, or a destination at which we eventually arrive. The latest Life Outside the Box podcast episode is a powerful and inspiring conversation with Cal Campos, focused on questioning the systems we’re in and having honest conversations about suicide.

We’re also excited to share this issue’s Artist Spotlight, featuring Extended Mic, a community-rooted platform showcasing diverse young creators pushing the boundaries of film and poetry. And in our Book Review, we take a closer look at John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis—a deeply human, vulnerable reflection on illness, interconnectedness, and what it means to care for one another in a fragile and inequitable world.

We are honoured to publish a powerful work by Rohit Doel, whose poem and essay on disability justice push us to listen more deeply, to expand our definition of community care. Our Poet’s Corner highlights Terrance Hayes’ “The Same City,” and Mikaela Brewer brings us into the world of social support with a short story about calling 211, asking what trust in community looks like when it’s tested. Plus, we offer a collaborative gift guide from our team—because hope and joy can also taste like a good meal, or arrive as a small, thoughtful gesture.

Lastly, we're excited to be offering our very first essay contest. If you're hoping to submit over the holidays before our January 6th deadline, check out the recording and resource packet from our writing workshop, here.

As we close out another year, we’re not chasing perfection. We’re choosing presence: with ourselves, with each other, and with the complicated realities shaping our world. Whether your holidays are joyful, heavy, chaotic, beautifully quiet, or even all those things at different points, we’re grateful to be there with you on your journey.

Here’s to truth, peace, and possibility!

— Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor in Chief, The 44 North Media

Book Review: Everything is Tuberculosis - The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green (2025)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor

The book cover of Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

Genre: Non-Fiction

“It reminded me that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”

― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis

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“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about COVID. 

But I still skip every episode from whatever TV show in 2020 where a pandemic invades the static screen. I don’t want to talk about it, and yes, I also can’t believe it happened. 

Sometimes I’m catapulted five years ago in the smallest of places: Standing on the crusted six-feet-apart footprints scuffed on the grocery store floor, or a blue mask snagged on a trash bin, or even the sharp moment of panic when a stranger sneezes on the bus.

Despite all my shoving and pushing it down into a crevice of my memory, the pandemic still happened, and we are still living through it. I still think about it, even when I don’t want to.

John Green is the first person to untangle my stress ball of past anxiety and future confusion about illness into one tidy book. It fundamentally changed my life. Everything is Tuberculosis follows the illness (or, “consumption,” as it was so often glorified as a beautiful wasting disease of the rich and privileged) through the threads of class and capitalism in the past centuries. Green weaves us through the romanticization of the “white man’s disease” to now, where the raging class disparities around the globe ignite the fire for consumption to not only rage on, but fuel humanitarian crises like gasoline on a brush fire.

What took this book (by no means a solely historical textbook) from a simple Crash Course about disease to a commentary on beauty and capitalism was Green’s account of travelling to Sierra Leone to see first-hand how a disease—that was once considered desirable for its beauty and attraction to upper-class intelligence—is now the beacon for a humanitarian crisis. 

In a calling card to end the disparity between the tuberculosis (TB) crisis and access to medication and vaccines, Green details the story of a little boy, Henry, treated in a Sierra Leone hospital. A hospital it may have been, but one much different from the one you and I and John are familiar with. One that is denied access to life-saving medicine. One that is impoverished by colonialism, past and present, and one where children die of an easily curable disease for the sole reason that they were born in a country that the rest of the world turned a blind eye to.

Green details his relationship with Henry throughout the book, from innocent childlike wonder to recounting stories of Henry’s family, where disease and poverty have taken more than just his childhood. Despite the catastrophic humanitarian crisis invading Henry’s lungs, he is hopeful. He is brave, and he fundamentally changes Green’s life. 

The othering of the ill is not something special to our tiny pocket in time, but rather a telltale sign of how disease is treated based on class, race, and access to medicine. From belladonna’s use in the 1800s as a cosmetic to mimic the pale, feverish look of consumption, to the vilification of TB when poor marginalized communities fell victim, to the current rise of unnatural thinness that plagues the beauty standard of our post-COVID society. Everything is connected, and everything is curable.

To paraphrase perhaps my favourite line in the entire book: Where there is a humanitarian crisis, you will find TB. Where there is poverty and colonialism and people stuck under the boot of centuries of oppression, you will find TB. This disease does not compromise on its victims; it does not judge or offer plea deals. Instead, we as humans are the sole perpetrators of the thousands and thousands of deaths every year from this entirely curable disease. It is when humans fail to act, or don’t care, or put profit over human lives, that TB will show up.

It is hard for me to briefly explain how much of an impact this book had on not only my relationship to illness, but also how I view the world. Green makes an excellent argument throughout the entire book that there is no reason that humans should die of a disease like TB. There is no logical reason that in a world where humans have gone to space and built electric cars that even one human life dies from an entirely preventable illness. In that case, tuberculosis is not a disease of medicine, but rather a disease of human empathy and the cavern standing between suffering and power.

Everything is Tuberculosis is as gentle with human spirit as it is fundamentally important to understanding the politics of human suffering. From tender-hearted stories of compassion and generosity, to a century-long study into illness as a catalyst for global misunderstanding of what it means to be alive. 

Book Review: Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe (2019)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor

The book cover of Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe

Genre: Memoir, Graphic Novel, Queer Literature

“Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.”

― Maia Kobabe, Genderqueer

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This 2019 memoir by author, advocate, and storyteller Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir) is a tender journey through childhood to adolescence, exploring gender expression and the anxieties of growing up. It’s a beautiful walk with time and acceptance of oneself—a teacher, a guide, and at times, a friend. 

It’s also been banned in Alberta schools. 

Genderqueer follows Maia Kobabe from infancy to adulthood, where the first memories of gender confusion and dysphoria peak through the pages. This is a memoir where self-love, kindness, and acceptance of the people around you are seen as radical and sexually explicit. When I first heard that Alberta was banning over 200 books from public school libraries, alarm bells immediately started going off. In my research to not only read a banned book, but also to recommend it to my readers, Genderqueer climbed to the top of my list after Alberta’s Minister of Education, Demetrios Nicolaides, released a list of “sexually explicit” and “harmful” books found in school libraries on X.

Imagine my shock, then, when I began reading this graphic novel and found that the only sexual red flag was the conservative projection of homophobia and transphobia that turns a peaceful recount of gender exploration into sexually explicit content.

Kobabe shares a story that is full of hope—one that is importantly what eir needed when eir was younger. The frustration and self-hatred of not having any non-binary or asexual representation when Kobabe was growing up cost eir friendships, relationships, and peace within eirself. I found the most important part of this novel to be when Kobabe—after years of thinking eir were “wrong” or “broken” for not fitting traditional masculine or feminine gender roles—finds eirself in a teaching position looking out onto the sea of students and realizing this is eir’s chance to be the change eir needed when eir was young. 

On the flip side, this story that beautifully recounts childhood innocence and welcomes in a new wave of kindness and “radical” acceptance has been constantly demonized by right-wing parties as sexually explicit. In flipping through these pages, I had a hard time coming up with examples to fit their narrative. 

Is it sexually explicit to talk about periods and pap smears?

Or talking about sex in a natural and relatable way?

Perhaps dismantling gender roles and the sexualization of young girls is too “radical?”

Or maybe it was too sexually explicit to depict gender dysphoria in a raw and honest way that not only acts as a refuge for those needing representation, but also as a learning opportunity for those looking to understand their neighbour. 

Kobabe’s journey from a fanfiction writing tween struggling to understand why eir can’t move through life equal to eir’s peers, to an adult on a mission to ensure no other transgender children feel the alienation or sense of “wrongness” that filtered through eirs childhood is as memorable as it is raw. One particular scene that really drove this message home for me was an earlier recount of when Kobabe transitioned from homeschool to public school, and feeling like eir was eons behind social norms than eirs female classmates for not understanding why women have to shave their legs, why they cannot swim with their shirt off, or why girls were so obsessed with boys. It was this novel’s transition from a sense of other to togetherness that filled this story not with sadness, but instead a profound message of hope. 

Maia Kobabe’s Genderqueer opened my eyes to a new perspective—the end goal of any great novel, I am so bold as to claim. Yet, it is hard to understand how a government could remove this teacher from shelves in the act of “protecting children” when unrestricted internet access and the normalization of extremely harmful actual pornographic content (found everywhere on Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube) are left out of the conversation. How is this novel—detailing the journey from self-hatred to self-love—harmful?

I’ll save you the trouble: it’s not. 

The fearmongering of queer spaces through the right-wing dog whistle of “protecting the children” isn’t about children at all: it’s about enacting harmful narratives to raise a generation that fears each other and anyone who dares to live authentically. The most important role we have now as an audience is to read and surround ourselves with as many “radical” perspectives as possible, ensuring everyone is given the same right to go through this life with peace, kindness, love, and respect.