About Briarpatch

Briarpatch

Briarpatch is an independent magazine of politics and culture published in Regina, Saskatchewan. Founded in 1973, it is one of Canada's longest-running left-wing magazines, publishing investigative journalism, political analysis, and cultural criticism from a social-justice perspective. It is published ten times a year by Briarpatch Inc., an independent non-profit organization, and its website is briarpatchmagazine.com.

Overview

Briarpatch provides an open forum for disadvantaged peoples and supports progressive movements working to change unjust structures and build genuine political and economic democracy. Its stated commitments include peace, equality, democracy, social justice, Indigenous self-determination, and protection of the environment, and it opposes oppression on the basis of nation, class, race, gender, ability, and sexual orientation. The magazine carries the ISSN 0703-8968.

The magazine has been described by a former editor, Clare Powell, as "a champagne magazine on a beer budget" — a publication that punches above its weight while barely scraping by financially. It relies heavily on reader support: donations, subscriptions, and sustaining memberships are its most consistent source of funding, given precisely because of its radical politics.

History

Briarpatch began as a poor people's newsletter. Its earliest incarnation was Notes from the Briar Patch, produced in 1971 on a Gestetner duplicating machine at the Saskatoon Community Clinic, with co-founder Maria Fischer recalling months of scraping together $300 to print each issue — funded by donations of dollars and fives, handfuls of stamps, quarters taped to letters, and donated paper from supporters across Saskatchewan.

The magazine proper — then styled Briar Patch — released its first issue in August 1973: ten pages, stapled in the corner, published by the Unemployed Citizen's Welfare Improvement Council. The name was both a dig at Larry Brierley, a social services administrator with whom the staff were often at odds over funding, and a nod to anti-poverty organizations in the United States that had adopted the same name.

From those beginnings Briarpatch grew into a national magazine of the left, published ten times a year from its Regina offices (historically at Huston House, 2138 McIntyre Street, Regina). Its history includes repeated collisions with funders over its politics: in 1979 the Saskatchewan government cancelled the magazine's $54,000 annual grant amid its fierce criticisms of uranium mining — a blow that could have been fatal, but readers rallied to keep the magazine alive. In the 1980s and 1990s volunteers organized garage sales and bottle drives to sustain it. Government grants and advertising revenue have periodically been withdrawn when its journalism hit too close to home, teaching the magazine to rely on its readers as its most dependable supporters.

The magazine's journalism has earned national recognition: it won a 2012 Canadian Association of Journalists Award, beating out CBC's The National and the Ottawa Citizen — a notable achievement for a small independent magazine. Its history is intertwined with the building of left infrastructure in Saskatchewan, including collaborations with Indigenous media such as the Métis publication New Breed.

Content

Briarpatch publishes investigative reporting, political analysis, interviews, and cultural reviews. Its coverage spans labour struggles, Indigenous rights and decolonization, environmental justice, anti-war movements, globalization, and critiques of corporate power. Many articles and photographs are contributed by volunteers. The magazine is indexed in the Canadian Periodical Index and the Alternative Press Index, reflecting its standing as a substantive journal of record for progressive movements.

The magazine's pages have featured interviews with figures such as Noam Chomsky, reporting on the NATO war in Yugoslavia, investigations of corporate power, and coverage of social movements across Canada and internationally. Its editorial stance is forthrightly partisan: it does not merely report on social movements but aims to help build them.

Fifty Years and Counting

In January 2023 Briarpatch marked its 50th anniversary — a half-century of radical publishing from Regina — with a public thank-you to the readers who made it possible. "It's taken thousands of people giving what they can — quarters, stamps, bottles, artwork, tables, and more — to keep this magazine going for 50 years," the magazine wrote, describing that funding model as the engine that lets it tell different stories: stories about ordinary people pitching in to change their communities and the world. A companion retrospective, "50 years of editing Briarpatch," traced the lineage of editors who kept the magazine ferociously principled across five decades.

The anniversary pieces also celebrated the magazine's signature fundraising ritual: the swim-a-thon, in which one former editor, Tanya Andrusieczko, famously taught herself to swim just to take part. When the pandemic made indoor gatherings unsafe, the magazine moved the tradition outdoors as a skate-a-thon — supporters taking to the ice in Regina, Edmonton, Toronto, and on Ottawa's Rideau Canal in what organizers said was the biggest year yet. It is a characteristically Briarpatch way to raise money: participatory, physical, and proudly low-budget.

Near-Death Experiences and the Reader-Funded Model

Briarpatch's history is punctuated by financial emergencies that its readers have repeatedly resolved. In the early 2010s the magazine publicly called on readers to help raise $15,000 by July 30 "in order to stay upright": its total annual budget was just $148,000 — covering wages, printing, office expenses, contributor fees, distribution, and web hosting — and, editor Tanya Andrusieczko and publisher Rhiannon Ward wrote, there was "only enough money in the budget to print the next issue." The appeal framed the bind as a point of principle: "We're not about to turn to capitalist models of publishing for an easy fix." Readers answered, as they had when the Saskatchewan government cancelled the magazine's $54,000 grant in 1979.

The magazine's workplace practices have mirrored its politics. In 2010, following the departure of editor David Oswald Mitchell, Briarpatch adopted "balanced job complexes" — editor and publisher duties shared between Shayna Stock and Valerie Zink, alternating editing duties each issue with publishing and administrative work in between, so that empowering creative tasks would be shared along with the mundane. The magazine remains a member of RWDSU Local 568.

In March 2022 the magazine appeared alongside Press Progress, Xtra, and The Hoser on the Harbinger Society podcast's episode on how independent progressive media "punches above its weight" — a fitting description of Briarpatch's five-decade argument that media consolidation by a small handful of billionaires demands an alternative: media by and for the many, not the few.

Coverage & Audience

Briarpatch's readership is Canada's progressive activist and intellectual community: trade unionists, social-justice organizers, academics, students, and readers of the independent left press. Published ten times a year from Regina, it reaches a national audience of subscribers and sustaining members who support it precisely for its radical politics. The magazine describes its community as "the vexed and the visionary" — people building shared capacities to understand and transform the world.

Ownership

Briarpatch is published by Briarpatch Inc., an independent non-profit organization based in Regina, Saskatchewan. Membership in Briarpatch Inc. is open to groups or individuals upon application and payment of a nominal membership fee. The magazine's staff have historically been members of RWDSU Local 568. It operates without reliance on corporate advertisers or wealthy benefactors, sustained instead by readers, donors, and subscribers.

Digital Presence

The magazine's website at briarpatchmagazine.com publishes articles, subscription and donation information, and archives. Its history — from Gestetner-duplicated newsletter to nationally recognized magazine — is documented in IndependentMedia.ca's historical features, in archived print issues preserved on the Internet Archive, and in the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association's records.