Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist after their conversations.

Maya Preshyon (she/they) is a librarian. Follow them on Instagram at @vanblacklibrary, and/or support Vancouver Black Library at https://ko-fi.com/vanblacklibrary.

Visit their website at https://www.vancouverblacklibrary.org, or the library in real life on the basement floor of the Sun Wah Centre, 072-268 Keefer Street, from 12-6pm, Thursday through Saturday.

Location: Hunnybee Bruncheonette

What do you make/create?

I create community space and opportunities for people to learn.

What do you do to support that?

To support creating community I rely on friends, listen to people in the community, and work together/collaborate with people to create what people would most want. When I made the Vancouver Black Library (VBL), I created something based out of where I felt I was lacking, something I felt that I needed. To create the best kind of community space for people, I try to listen to people, hear what they need, or what they wish they had, and try to support them by offering that. It sounds kind of complicated, but it’s really as easy as just talking to people and asking them what do they like, what makes them happy. That’s it. And then yeah, making it.

I guess the bridge between finding out what makes people happy to just making it, that’s a bit of a jump. With support from these people, community, and friends, it’s not so big of a task. It is intuitive when you’re doing it with friends and people you care about in community, so I don’t look at any of it as a big task and that’s what helps me, or supports me, in doing it.

I have ADHD, so when I get excited about something, I get fixated on it, and then I just deep-dive into it and do it. All my friends on the team do too, so I guess we get hyper fixated on doing good things. We’re also very young, so I guess that naiveté; the lack of foresight lets us do things that older people might think is too hard.

I have said this a million times: I don’t even really read books, but I have skimmed Emergent Strategies by Adrienne Maree Brown, and it’s amazing. Something that I really liked from that, and took away from it, is that everything that you need to be enough, or to achieve anything you want, is already inside of you. You don’t need to have a certain credential, be a certain kind of person, or outsource any sort of knowledge or skill; you have enough in the fact that you feel like you want to do it.

As far as the tangible – how do we pay the rent, how do we actually do it – I would say it goes back, as well, to the fact that our team is young. I always try to amplify, in spaces where people maybe wouldn’t put a lot of trust in youth, that I’m not some special case of a young person who “did a good thing”; all young people have great ideas but not often are they given the trust and belief to enter spaces where they can make changes. I spent a lot of time, when I was even younger than I am now, community organizing and what-not in the creative and art community where my voice wasn’t seen as valuable, but I could look around and tell, through lived experience, that I was contributing things that nobody else could contribute. A lot of youth have perspectives that are priceless.

What helps us pay the rent and get the bills done is that even though it’s been really uncomfortable and challenging, and sometimes really belittling to be undermined, I’m proud that myself and my friends were able to break through that knowledge boundary in “philanthropy,” or non-profit building, and make it youth centred. There’s a huge dissonance in non-profits between what community actually wants and what they’re doing. As youth we are able to change what non-profits can be like, and I don’t think that’s often supported or encouraged. It was really hard to access information and figure out how to do things that I guess some people would think are simple. To us: Registering as a society? Crazy hard! Applying for grants? So hard. Signing a tenancy sublease? I’m going to have to file taxes! These are all things youth can’t do, but if they can’t do it, it’s because no one’s reaching down to tell them the information, lift them up, or help them do it. 

Through VBL, we try to disseminate this information to youth and give crash-courses on how to start a library, how to start a non-profit, or how to start a music venue – how to start anything! – because we’re so lucky to have information to pass through to our networks to other young people who haven’t been told this information. We’re trying to be the “Robin Hood’s” of non-profit, telling people hard things.

Describe something about how your art practice and your “day job” interact.

I’m a student, so no “day job.” I’m a prospective social work student, and I want to be a therapist. I started putting so much into VBL from the beginning because I’ve never been a school person; it’s the ADHD and perfectionism clashing, so university is not my fav. I put so much into VBL in the beginning, and still now, because I would tell myself, “This is related to my degree. This is going to count as hours for my program.” (I was going to go on a side note about how I put so much energy into VBL that my grades went crazy but, you know, I’ll find balance at some point.)

I think that VBL connects to my day job of being a student because I’m learning so much about community building; learning so much about community in general: different kinds of people, how to support people, how to access resources. So much of social work and mental health care is the bureaucracy of paperwork, applications, and connecting people with resources. That part is not fun but at least, rather than struggling through a very monotonous practicum in the last year, I was able to do something I was passionate about, and learn new things. I may not be the best student, but I do think when I’m able to be a therapist that I have lived experience that will make me the kind of advocate that I wish I’d had when I was younger. I ignore my homework and do VBL because I feel like they’re related.

What’s a challenge you’re facing, or have faced, in relation to this and/or what’s a benefit?

There’s been so many challenges because it’s difficult to learn so many new things with what feels like a lot of pressure. Because it’s for the community, we have people we feel accountable to. We’re doing something that is kind of directly connected to a forgotten legacy of a whole community (Black Strathcona), so there’s definitely a lot of pressure to fill the gap. With that pressure, our team definitely has been through burn-out, over-extending ourselves.

At one point, as we were leading up to the opening, the burn-out was so intense that even at the opening party, I could feel proud of all the team, proud that we made it to the finish line in the first week of September, before we had to go back to school; but I was so wrapped up in stress that I couldn’t feel proud of myself. I still struggle to feel proud of myself because I have really high standards for myself, because the pressure is so high. It’s been a part of our ethos to go through the work we do with a sense of abundance and joy, never deficit and stress, and that’s definitely easier said than done.

In community organizing, I have definitely been on the end of volunteer exploitation before, so it’s so important to me to do the opposite of that, yet we don’t have funds to compensate our team, I put a lot of emphasis on making sure I can appreciate the team through currencies like affirmation, and giving time when they want their own time, giving space when they need space. No deadline is a real deadline at VBL; self-care is the #1 priority.

To facilitate that for the team, sometimes I have to put on an “everything’s fine” face, but my to-do list never goes away. With that being said, sometimes I do respond to my burn-out by saying, “I’m going to sleep for two days, guys,” and the team totally supports me in that; finding balance in work that can be never ending. If you love it, then you’re going to keep doing more, so it’s kind of never-ending. It can be hard to find balance in that, especially when it’s important to us to leave this work with joy, and stress does not equal joy.

The challenge is finding balance. At the same time, a benefit of how much we put into the work is that we think of VBL as a springboard for literally anything. If anybody wants to do anything, they can come to us, and we can do it. Our ambition for mutually creating things–collective work, collective power–is that it is endless, and that’s super exciting that we believe we can do anything. Our ambition and our excitement make us work too much, to a point where we’re depleted, but also, we work that much because we’re excited about what we’re doing.

Have you made, or created, anything that was inspired by something from your day job? Please describe

For Black History Month, we’re doing a big research series where we’re doing a deep-dive into our collections about the Black community in Vancouver and BC, and we’re compiling that information into Instagram posts to support our campaign for education and liberation through education.

With my day job as a student, and with everyone else on the team being a student, everything that we do at VBL is of course connected to education, liberation through education, access, opportunity, and joy in learning. We’re all students (and all with ADHD) who are all consumed by our academics. At the same time, we know that we’re so fortunate and privileged to be able to learn at a university that is – I mean, we’re doing a whole campaign against UBC right now (Black Void UBC) – so, yes, a research institute that we’re privileged to be able to access great learning and information from.

We try to have everything we do be completely low barrier, no paywall, all free, open-access education. Our day job as students is to try to make information accessible, make information cool. We have a slogan on our merch, and stickers, that says, “Reading is Hot.” We like to think of ourselves on the community centre front as a bougie community centre, and then on the library front as a hot library. Making information accessible – there are so many things to hate about academic elitism, the institution of barriers, and education barriers in university. We’re just trying to take as much as we know, and, through the library, make it for everybody.

Angela Fama (she/they) is an artist, Death Conversation Game entrepreneur, photographer, musician, previous small-business server of many years (The Templeton, Slickity Jim’s etc.). They are a mixed European 2nd-generation settler currently working on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.

Follow them at IG @angelafama IG @deathconversationgame or on their website www.angelafama.com