Textile, Issue 01: In Transit

We’re often asked why we chose the name “textile” for the magazine. As a noun or adjective, textile refers to cloth or woven fabric. Individual stories are strands of thread, fabrics spun from diverse walks of life. We want to weave a tapestry of creative writing and visual art that reflects a literature of Kitchener-Waterloo. Textile also represents an artifact that ties the past, present, and future of our region together, shaping our historical, contemporary, and future relationships. The Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples, whose promised land is the Haldimand Tract, have always woven the material, social, and spiritual worlds together in art and in oral traditions. Indigenous traditions have undergone erasure for hundreds of years, and the violence continues to this day. Even while conversations with Indigenous communities are becoming more commonplace, when it comes to truth and reconciliation, our region falls short in many ways. To be able to ignore the stories and ways of others is often a privilege, reflecting social structures and systems of control. Which stories are valued the most? Where does power reside?

For settlers, “textile” might evoke the region’s industrial history, where some of the livelihoods available to residents in the late 1800s and into the later part of the 20th century were contingent on textile manufacturing. Hespeler Yarns, the Alpine Knitting Co., and Day-Smith Limited were some of the old mills in Waterloo County that were greatly impacted by post-war era realities, the automation of jobs, and the growing reliance on mass producing industries worldwide. Shirts, collars, cuffs, buttons—our local economies depended on factories that produced fabrics, clothes, and related products. While these industries no longer figure prominently in the region, their legacies linger. The Forsyth Shirt Company, Arrow Shirt Factory, and the Kaufman Footwear Plant used to employ thousands of hard-working people; now, they are luxury lofts that only a handful can afford to live in. As the region has become a hub for tech, money is pumped faster and faster. Amenities proliferate, some more organically than others.