Butterfly Press is a digital publishing space designed to identify and amplify rural artistic production and culture without political or sociological expectations. Artists embody and perform “the periphery” in complex, vastly diverse ways, and this project makes no attempt to assign comparative values to those cultural performances. It welcomes and values diverse expressions of ruralness and accepts rural identity formation based on geographical, cultural or genealogical affiliation.
Aldora Cole, Founder and Editor of Butterfly Press, grew up on a farm in Central Alberta, has lived in both Edmonton and rural Denmark, and has a deep interest in exploring how the conditions of peripheral existence shape the identity of individuals and their communities. How this “ruralness” influences the production of art and its value is of particular interest to Butterfly Press. Artists featured by Aldora are interviewed with standardized research questions, and article shorts and reviews are written to explore these ideas of how specific personal identification influences what is produced, how it is produced, and by whom. Butterfly Press also accepts submissions of articles and reviews from other authors and is excited to contribute to and amplify knowledge of rural cultural production.
Butterfly Press recognizes that in the Canadian context, rural culture is often conflated with European Settler culture. Popular discourse has ignored and excluded Indigenous people, languages, arts and culture, as well as the traditions of non-European Settlers from conversations about identity. Butterfly Press has been partly conceptualized on Treaty 6 territory, land traditionally stewarded by Cree, Plains-Cree, Stoney, Blackfoot, Metis, Dene, and Nakota Sioux Peoples, and considers deeply the impact of colonialization on rural identity.
“I don’t think I would have been nearly so brave as a writer if I had lived in a town and if I had gone to school with other people who were interested in the same things I was, and what we might call a higher cultural level,” the 82-year-old wordsmith said in an interview with the Swedish Academy, which awarded her the Nobel literature honour.
Will Campbell, Canadian Press, on Alice Munro
2013
https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/nobel-laureate-alice-munro-says-rural-canadian-upbringing-inspired-her-to-write-1.1579300
Butterfly Press 