Canada

Hello Friends,Canadian Young Friends

Please check out the new Fall 2008 Sporadical Edition! It is the first online edition of the Sporadical and, wow, is it a magnificent one!! I hope you enjoy it! It may take a long time to download if you have a dial-up connection. If you would like one that can be printed out into a beautiful little zine, you can soon go to www.yf.quaker.ca to download a copy. You can print it out double- sided, and read it on the bus, show it to your friends, etc.

The Sporadical is a publication sprouting out of the rich community of the Canadian Yearly Meeting of Young Friends. The very first Quaker periodical in Canada was the Young Friends' Review, which was published from 1886 by Coldstream Young Friends, 18 years before The Canadian Friend. This summer I was honoured to be nominated as the co- editor of the Sporadical along with Grace and Brigid Egan-Pimblett and to help continue this long-established tradition.

At the beginning of November, I gave a talk after Meeting at the Yonge Street Meeting House. It was called “Communication within the Society of Friends: Intra-Faith dialogue”. I called it this because I was able to talk about visiting with Friends in Guatemala, the May 2008 Young Adult Friend (YAF) gathering in Richmond, IN, as well as my work at Canadian Yearly Meeting (CYM) gathering reviewing CYM’s participation, relevance, and affiliation with Friends United Meeting. Much of my diverse work amongst Friends these days seems to be about making personal connections across the wide spectrum of the Society of Friends, and realizing that despite our ideas and stereotypes about different ‘types’ of Quakers, no one fits neatly into a box and in every interaction and connection there is much to be learned. I believe that the Sporadical can be a place for Quakers across the 9.9 million square kilometers that make up Canada to find connections. I hope this little zine provides a conduit for laughter, for learning, and for love. I hope it is a place to listen deeply and build relationships among Canadian Young (Adult) Friends.

If you have something to say to Canadian YF/YAFs, there is another edition coming out in January. We'd love to have your photos, drawings, articles, poems, etc. Deadline: December 20th 2008. See www.yf.quaker.ca/ for further details about submissions, or email me at: rebecca.ivanoff@gmail.com

Much Love to all,

Rebecca Ivanoff,
Yonge Street MM