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Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: Who is Seen, Who is Heard, and What Happens When the Truth is Obscured

by Gillian Smith-Clark ​for The 44 North

Editor in Chief


“Tell the Truth” stamped on pavement in white capital letters
“Tell the Truth” stamped on pavement in white capital letters

This February/March issue of The 44 North is, at its core, about visibility: who is seen, who is heard, and what happens when the truth is obscured: by power, by indifference, or by deliberate misinformation.


Across these pages, you’ll find work that grapples with Black history and resistance, the freedom to read, women’s and girls’ safety, sexual and reproductive health, homelessness, and the quiet, daily ways communities hold one another together when institutions fail them. These themes may appear distinct, but they are bound by a single throughline: access. Access to knowledge, to care, to dignity, and to platforms that refuse to look away.


That tension feels especially sharp right now. In recent weeks, more than 300 journalists were purged from The Washington Post—a decision that lays bare how vulnerable even legacy newsrooms are when journalistic missions collide with corporate ownership. The paper’s slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness—introduced in 2017 and greeted at the time with both praise and pointed skepticism—now reads less like branding and more like an unintended indictment. What does that phrase mean when an iconic publication is hollowed out by fear and corporate priorities, and when media power increasingly determines which stories survive, and which disappear?


This issue is our response to that question.


Independent media matters not because it is perfect, but because it is accountable. Because it asks uncomfortable questions. Because it makes room for more voices—especially young and marginalized voices—that are too often dismissed, underestimated, or filtered through institutions that no longer serve them. At The 44 North, we remain committed to publishing work that is courageous, ethical, and grounded in empathy, including, and more specifically, when doing so is inconvenient.


You’ll see that commitment reflected throughout this issue. Our review of All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews explores grief, agency, and the limits of language when pain resists resolution. In our Artist Spotlight, Feels Zine offers a bold and tender exploration of queer sex and romance, reminding us that intimacy itself can be an act of reclamation. Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Rosa Parks,” featured in Poet’s Corner, anchors Black history not in abstraction, but in lived courage.


Several pieces examine storytelling as both a mirror and an intervention. Our feature on libraries as vital “third spaces,” including Dear TPL: The Passport Project, highlights how access to books and community resources can quite literally expand lives. “Novel Idea: How Fiction Helps Us See Ourselves” reflects on reading as self-recognition and survival. In The Writer’s Room, “ICE Murders: Lives in Slow Motion” uses current-events-based fiction to confront state violence in ways conventional reporting often cannot.


This issue also includes my own essay, “Watching Minneapolis from Canada: When Power Stops Explaining Itself,” which wrestles with proximity, responsibility, and what it means to witness injustice across borders in an era of relentless images and insufficient accountability.

At the heart of this issue is the winning essay from our inaugural essay contest: “The Pathogen of Perception: Quantifying the Multi-Dimensional Cost of Medical Misinformation” by Jason Wang.


Wang’s essay embodies everything we hoped this contest would epitomize: thoughtful analysis, moral seriousness, originality, and something more: a refusal to treat misinformation as a harmless difference of opinion. “Misinformation is not a victimless exchange of ideas,” Wang writes, tracing how falsehoods about vaccines during the global pandemic translated into preventable deaths—often borne not by those who rejected care, but by infants, immunocompromised patients, and those who never consented to the risks imposed upon them.


What makes this essay especially powerful is its insistence that the solution is not censorship, but literacy: scientific, media, and civic. “The answer is not censorship,” Wang argues. “It is teaching people how to think critically about health information the same way we teach them to read or do algebra.”  In a moment defined by fragmentation and distrust, this is a call not for control, but for collective capacity.


What happens to a society when it loses the ability to respond to shared threats? When truth is drowned out by noise, and institutions designed to inform either retreat or collapse?


This issue is our answer: we build capacity by telling the truth carefully. By amplifying young thinkers who understand the stakes because they have lived them. By defending the freedom to read, to question, to imagine, and to care for one another beyond narrow definitions of individual choice.


If we take the Post’s motto at its word and accept that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” it is worth remembering that darkness thrives in silence and isolation. It recedes when we insist on seeing the world as it is, clearly—and when we choose, together, to keep the lights on.


— Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor in Chief, The 44 North Media


Writers Room | ICE Murders: Lives in Slow Motion

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor


White chalk letters on orange tile. They read: “#LeaveNoOneBehind”
White chalk letters on orange tile. They read: “#LeaveNoOneBehind”

Please note: this short story discusses targeted violence and death. It may activate folks with similar lived experiences, beyond what feels safe to spend time with. Please engage with this story how/whenever it feels safe for you.


For a preface to what’s been transpiring in the U.S., please read this article by Gillian Smith-Clark, our Editor-in-Chief. 


***


“I’ll say it again and again: trauma is not what happens to us, it is the space between us.”


They say that in the last seven minutes of brain activity, approaching death, a person re-experiences their whole life. Others say it’s just surges of memory and awareness. Me? I’m a writer. At least half of my life happens in my head with characters I’ve never met. But they’re the residue of not only people I’ve known, but people I’ve passed in life—on streets, at schools, in restaurants. Mothers, poets, fathers, cooks. So I say, why not?


In some way, I know Renée Nicole Good, Keith Porter, and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, because so many others did. Because ‘I’ is such a falsity, sometimes. It’s lonely before it grows branches into the ‘T’ of ‘Tree’ or ‘Together’ or ‘Truth.’


We breathe in what trees breathe out. And we walk and run. We’ve breathed in one another.


With that breath, I imagine Silverio’s seven minutes. Even in his focused severity, he relives the moment he dropped his two children off at day care and school. At each place, he does the same thing: moves their dark hair from their foreheads with a warm palm, and places a kiss. I picture him first learning to cook, maybe from a family member. Perhaps he remembers the scented smoke in a kitchen with windows overlooking beautiful Michoacán on the Pacific Ocean. I see his fingerprints across kitchen utensils in a restaurant near Franklin Park. His careful, responsible hands make art for eleven hours, and then, in the sixth minute, reach back to his children. 


And after seven minutes, the world is without another father.



“I know how to build a survival shelter / from fallen tree branches, packed mud, / and pulled moss. I could survive forever / on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me / to stop measuring my lifespan by length, / but by width?”


Width. I imagine the width of Keith’s heart beat, soul, and smile. He relives meeting his best friend, Adrian, in 1996 as a teenager. He hears his nickname echoing, “Pooter!” He sees the laughter and life his jokes brought to parties, the students he supported, and the teens he helped Adrian foster parent when he was only in his twenties. Two beautiful girls’ faces sparkle for him here, as they always have. There are Dodgers games and rich conversations with God and family. In the sixth minute, his spirit never broke—love kept repairing any cracks.


And after seven minutes, the world is without another father.


“The role of us poets is to witness the world,” writes Danez Smith in “An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good.” But it’s the role of everyone.


I see Renée crafting her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which won the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020. She relives the sparks of that better life in Minneapolis—maybe a drive from Kansas City with her wife, Becca, and her youngest son. The wind is warm and made of dreams. I see her feeling the joy, vibrancy, and safety of new friends and community—felt because she helped make it real. I imagine she ventures through moments with Timmy before his death, her second husband’s love. And her three children’s lives, like the once disparate strands now a fierce braid, tether together the expanse of her life. She revisits the moment, perhaps on a soft couch after school, where she and Becca taught their kids to “believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness.” In the sixth minute, she’s smiling. The sunshine she radiated is returned to her, and she feels its glow: every moment she stood up for others. 


And after seven minutes, the world is without another mother.


Minneapolis, LA, and Chicago keep fighting amid the plummeting temperatures—the coldest we’ve seen in a long time. They will not be frozen. Together, they’re warmest. And we must keep the fire burning against what freezes; against the threat of ice build-up on bodies, hearts, and minds. 


Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-headed Calf” reads:
















And then, years later, Matthew Dawkins writes, “Even two-headed, the calf is mourned.” 


Who is called two-headed? And targeted as such?


Maybe the two-headed are the people most balanced by two heads. That is to say, those who hold much more than themselves.


And what a beautiful thing this is. ICE may have killed one head. But beneath twice as many stars to navigate with, there’s another. And it’s always been us—each other, right now. 


***


Resources

Poet’s Corner: “Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor


“Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. Copyright © 2002 by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted in Poetry by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Inc.


A white sign with black capital letters, held up at a protest.
A white sign with black capital letters, held up at a protest.

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.


In 1971, Nikki Giovanni spoke with James Baldwin at length in A Dialogue (also released as a book). When I first read it, not long after she passed away in December 2024, the texture and resonance of her voice felt like double-sided sticky tape. It hasn’t left me, and sticks to what I read now. Her conviction is unparalleled not only in its power but in its grace; grace as in its dexterity of love. And for that reason alone, I struggled to choose just one poem for this essay. Nikki still calls us with wit, fervour, and care. 


“Rosa Parks” stands out in its dense, uniform block of text. It conforms, you might say, to the shape of a column in a newspaper, complete with narrative flow. But it certainly doesn’t conform in its content, which isn’t beneath complex diction or syntax, but under the literal act of reading the poem. So few of us read poems by Black women. It’s a great month to start. They’ve been writing the truth—of love and violence—for centuries, under persecution and censorship, sowing wisdom the way enslaved Black women, aboard ships crossing the Atlantic, hid seeds in their hair.


Nikki’s poem is also the shape of an elegy, ode, or brick—to be thrown or built with. It’s the shape of heaviness. The ghosts of Thurgood Marshall, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emmett Till, and the Pullman Porters are with us. And they remain alive, in part because women like Rosa Parks (and Claudette Colvin, Viola White, Pauli Murray, and Elizabeth Jennings Graham) sat back down on a bus, and kept what was always theirs. It wasn’t her feet that were tired when Rosa, the field secretary of the NAACP, reclaimed that seat—on the bus and elsewhere. It was hers, and everyone’s before her. Nikki’s poem reminds us of a few things: Rest is a human right, and yes, Black women are strong in innumerable ways, one of which is when they choose rest as resistance.  


“Rosa Parks” further connects modes of transportation through time, non-linearly, resisting the linear flow of news that frequently refuses the past’s life in the present. “And this is / for all the people who said Never Again” remains a call to action. It feels eerily applicable, and even at the time the poem was written (2002), could be a reference to wars on Palestine and Afghanistan, still raging today.


And in our role, as readers and distributors of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, we can look to the Pullman Porters she writes of. 


“The Pullman Company established its sleeper cars as a unique and luxurious way to travel, complete with the [carefully trained, typically formerly enslaved Black men], hired to be porters. Pullman Porters quickly became a staple of the Pullman Sleeping Car experience, often fighting to maintain a balance between good relations with the Pullman company and protesting for better conditions and wages. Pullman Porters are often attributed to helping create a [B]lack middle class in the United States, with their employees forming the first all-[B]lack union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925.”



The Pullman Porters were the keepers of care and right to protest for their Black passengers. With this in mind, I admire the beckoning of a new manifesto, of sorts, with capitalization of ‘No’ in Nikki’s poem:


“No longer would / there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. / Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, / the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and / the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young / men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No.”


“Rosa Parks” is an example of poetry as resistance, and therefore, as a commitment to storytelling in ongoing violence and its ever-unfolding aftermath. It’s a vow to truth-telling. And with that, because no one will ever say it better:


“But it was the / Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it / was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not / being able to stand it. She sat back down.”

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