Prairie Girl Collective: A project of resiliency and community
What started as a university friendship has blossomed into a digital publishing house and a collective work, all launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, by five University of Saskatchewan graduates.
For the USask graduates, Natahna Bargen-Lema (BA’14), Kayla McCutcheon (BA’15, MA’17), Danielle Richardson (BA’14, MFA’17), and Madison Taylor (BA’17), working on Prairie Girl Collective was a chance to reconnect, rekindle friendships, heal from events in their past, and immerse themselves back into the world of collective writing.
“I think our kinship as friends flows through the pages, and while each of our voices are distinct, each lends to the other. It is deeply rewarding to create something that I am so proud of with women who have seen me through so much of the bad and the good in life.”
Natahna Bargen-Lema
With the loss of her job at the onset of the pandemic, Natahna Bargen-Lema felt that she needed to use the time to work on projects she hadn’t had time for in the past. Happily, the talented writers she befriended while at university were quick to jump in on the collaborative writing project. The pandemic was a perfect time to discuss the project via Zoom across four time zones.
“We decided to emphasize prairie imagery, and I initially thought, “The sky is blue, and the land is flat. That’s it.” However, there’s extensive beauty and wilderness in our province, and such details are woven into our collection. Writing about these details was an interesting exercise because I live in Austin TX. I couldn’t just look outside for prairie scenery, so I instead had to pull imagery from photos and memories.”
Kayla McCutcheon
Not only did the project allow for them to come “back to a place of shared community and camaraderie” (Bargen-Lema, 2021) but it allowed them to work through “[their] relationship[s] with [their] home province” (McCutcheon, 2021). The collaborative writing experiencerecreated the same sense of connection that had grown from shared weekends in a small, Glenbush, SK farm house.
Prairie Girl Collective is now “a wonderful trip down memory lane reminiscing about where [they] all were at in the summer of 2020” (Richardson, 2021).
“We all have such different relationships to Girlhood, Sisterhood, Motherhood, and Womanhood and it was fascinating to see what my collaborators would create using the same prompt that I'd received.”
Danielle Richardson
With the launch of online publishing house Party Trick Press, Prairie Girl Collective made its debut into the online, literary world. Headed by Megan Fedorchuk (BCOMM’16), another graduate of the University of Saskatchewan and Natahna Bargen-Lema, Party Trick Press hopes to share their literary collection of inclusive and diverse works with people around the globe.
“Though nearly a year has passed since Prairie Girl Collective's publication date, my hope for the collection remains the same: That just one reader will see themselves in its pages and feel a little less alone in their prairie town or city because of it.”
Madison Taylor
To purchase your copy of Prairie Girl Collective or to browse the Party Trick Press catalogue, please visit https://www.partytrickpress.com/eliterature. An audiobook/cassette version is also available through Hello America Stereo Cassette here: https://helloamerica.bandcamp.com/album/prairie-girl-collective.
