ALT 5 femme-presenting people in various shades of brown, two of which are wearing hijabs. Everyone is smiling.

ALT Description of the book’s cover: The book’s title appears on two lines across the top of the cover which is a salmon tone. The names of the editor and the author of the foreword appear in white letters at the bottom of the book. The publisher’s name is printed along the right side in white letters. At the centre, a vertical white rectangle is the background for a sculpture by fibre artist Judith Scott. The sculpture combines layers of shiny yarn in various colours including orange, pink, brown, and rust woven vertically on a large cylinder and horizontally around a smaller cylinder, as well as blue yarn woven around a protruding piece at the bottom of the sculpture. The sculpture seems to represent a body and head of a being sitting down, a being with one appendage, a fat person, or a little person.

ALT Access statement. Before I dive into my remarks, I want to take a moment to invite everyone here to occupy this space in a way that is as comfortable and accessible to you as possible. Comfort for you might mean drawing, knitting, rocking, ticking, or stimming while we talk. Access might include standing up, lying down, walking laps, or taking breaks. You might keep your camera on or off. You might need to leave the Zoom for awhile and come back, or you might just leave. We all have different bodies and different minds, and I want to encourage you to honor your own bodymind and all its exquisite variations. I also want to acknowledge that comfort and access are not available to everyone in the same way or to the same degree. It is the case, for instance, that I am zooming in from Musqueam land, meaning that the place I’m in is violently inaccessible for many Musqueam, as well as Squamish and Tsleil-Watuth, people so long as it remains governed by a settler-colonial state.