Odyssey Press Catalogue by KB

Odyssey Press Catalogue is a catalogue for an imaginary lesbian press based in the Canadian prairies. I was inspired primarily by two feminist press catalogues from the 1980s, Sister Vision Press and Kitchen Table Press, that I came across in the City of Toronto Archives. Both were feminist publishers who focused on content by and for women of colour. These catalogues of course contained images and blurbs for current and upcoming books, but also contained a publishers note describing their ethos and goals, and advertisements for upcoming writing workshops and fundraising events, which I’ve included in mine too. I was also inspired by the ideas presented in The Watermelon Woman and MOTHA of creating your own history and imagining how that history (as well as your present experience) might be preserved and presented to the outside world. The catalogue is essentially a collage of images and text both from archival material and current queer experiences and spaces in the prairies. As noted in Inside Killjoy’s Castle (2019), lesbian (and other) archives tend to overemphasize urban experiences from major cities. Odyssey Press Catalogue explores the theme of the limits of the archive by discussing perspectives from outside major cities that are often left out of queer archives.