Greetings. How do you do, fellow students?

Tell us, are you new around here? Excited? Nervous? Existentially terrified of your newfound position in life!

Rest assured, we’ve been there.

While it may be hard to imagine, we, the editors of this fine newspaper were also scared-shitless first years having found ourselves freshly independent on a big campus, in a new city, far away from our friends and family, clinging to the skin of a big ‘ol rock hurtling millions of miles an hour through space. We feel you.

No matter from whence you came or what circumstances brought you here, we are all of us united in the fact that attending Trent University is the first big mistake we have made on the rocky road to adulthood!

That said, you do presently find yourself holding a copy of Arthur, and on that we must congratulate you. Whatever you’re doing, you must be doing something right.

You may at this point be asking yourself: “Self, what is an Arthur?” To that we say: great question!

We, collectively Arthur, are a radical, independent student press for the Peterborough-Nogojiwanong area (“Nogojiwanong, by the way, means “the place at the end of the rapids in Anishinaabemowin and it’s what this place was called before colonist came and carved it up). We’re funded and staffed by Trent University students like you, and if you thought that was a lot of adjectives to describe a newspaper, just you wait until you start writing research papers. 

Then you’ll be the one describing everything as “incisive,” “eluminating,” or “seminal.”

Setting aside the matter of semen, you may well be asking yourself why you should care. It’s a valid question. Given we’re increasingly catered to in an extremely compartmentalized and individual manner from all of the digital speleology we do online, it can be hard to understand, let alone conceptualize the value of something as specific as a student newspaper whose content is, necessarily, not catered directly to you. 

Our rebuttal to that is that you probably should care about your community here, given you’re likely stuck here for the next several years. More to the point, there is a lot of merit in and around Trent University, if only you choose to look a little deeper.

Here at Arthur, we’d like to think we can help you do that.

For the past 60 years of its existence, Trent has been home to countless successive generations of students, some more apathetic towards their education than others. For almost as long, Arthur has existed to provide refuge for the misanthropes and misfits, the stoners, storytellers, philosophers, and faggots.

Where there is a glossy image or Trent, or of Peterborough, Arthur has boldly made to tear it down. Where there is an injustice to be observed, Arthur has done our best to document it—and indeed fight it—to the greatest extent of our ability.

You might call us a bit of a People’s Princess in that regard. We are beloved by the masses because we speak for the masses. We are also sometimes governed by communists.

With radical students come radical ideas, and we would like to extend to you a radical new vision of the school and community which you have elected to attend.

Trent University was first conceived as a collegiate university in the vein of the “Oxbridge” College system—“Oxbridge” being a portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge universities. This is all well and good depending on how you feel about the English, though it's fair to say that in the years since Trent *may* have strayed just ever so slightly from its intended model.

Remember when you, presumptive first year, picked your room out of one of four colleges? Well as a matter of fact, Trent actually has five. Catherine Parr Traill College (just “Traill” to her friends) is located downtown on the top of a big fuck-off hill on Dublin Street.

Traill’s cool. You should check it out. It’s got immaculate autumnal vibes, beautiful heritage buildings (and also Bagnani Hall…), and is home to a lot of cool Humanities departments that Trent would rather keep at arm's length.

All told, it’s a great place to hang out, smoke cigarettes in the butt hut, and drink copious amounts of coffee in the delightful college café, The Trend (assuming, of course, you can find it).

Traill was once a women-only college. Unfortunately we have now regressed and let the rabble in, though we suppose concessions must be made in the pursuit of equal rights. 

Traill is equally the oldest college which Trent currently possesses. We say “currently,” because Traill used to have a twin in the long-gone (but not forgotten) Peter Robinson College, which the university sold at least in part because all the students who lived there allegedly spent a lot of time making music, having sex (sometimes with professors!) and getting fucked up on drugs.

In the early 2000s Trent sold the college, dug a pit under the Jolly Hangman (the Peter Robinson College pub) and literally buried it, and built that cheese building on campus while pretending nothing had ever happened.

If you live in this town long enough, you’re bound to meet someone who attended P.R., and they are bound to talk your ear off about how great it was. In many ways, one of the most important aspects of being an Arthur staff member is getting belligerently drunk and bemoaning the fact that you couldn’t have gone to Trent in the 90s when things were cool, man.

It used to be that students and profs lived together in the colleges. That was the vision of Tom Symons, founding President of Trent University, for whom the Peterborough campus is named. Dr. Symons imagined the university as this idyllic place where one’s social life was inextricable from their education. Where students had ready access to their profs at all times to engage in constructive academic discussions, and to bond over drinks not as student and teacher, but as equals.

Come to think of it, it might make sense why all that shit happened at P.R.

At any rate, it’s no longer socially acceptable to take bong rips on the bank of the Otonabee River with your English prof, and we at Arthur think Trent is at least a little poorer for it.

Trent is poorer for a lot of things, we’d have you believe. For instance: a school which preaches reconciliation having a college named after a famous colonizer? Not a good look, hunty. Moreover, did you know that the namesake of Bata Library, Thomas J. Bata, was a noted apartheid profiteer? 

That’s right baby, Mr. Bata Library himself had factories in good ‘ol apartheid South Africa, where he and his (White) family-owned business made bank off the bad labour protections for indentured Black workers. However, money is a powerful mistress, and the Bata family has paid Trent enough that they’ll basically never acknowledge these facts—so don’t you go telling everyone, now!

Oh, the Bata family also made boots for Italian fascists in the Second World War. Whoops-y!

As a consequence of our expression of such beliefs, Arthur has found ourselves unjustly maligned by the people in the ivory towers of Trent University (that is to say, the basement of Bata Library). Senior administrators have it out for us, if not in their wanton disregard for the state of student’s lives, then at least in the snide comments about how student journalism used to have tact “back in [their] day” (yes, we know about that!).

However, our friends in low places aren’t the only ones who wouldn’t want you reading this. The Executives of the Trent Central Student Association took it upon themselves to inform us that they would not be distributing Arthur in their welcome bags this year, apparently because we “violated their postering policy.”

Now, whether this has to do with the fact that we called Trotsky a hero or the fact that we’ve reported on their systemic ineptitude for years, we’re remiss to say. What we do know is that we’re censored, baby!

Much though we hate to agree with an idiot the like of Elon Musk, it seems free speech truly is dead on Trent campus. What a time to be alive.

At least there is a brief reprieve from the ills of campus life in Peterborough proper. Just a short ride away on one of the least functional transit services in Southern Ontario is downtown Peterborough, where the cruelty is the point!

Marvel at how this city has systematically underfunded transportation, affordable housing, and social services, creating an environment in which almost everything is hostile to the most basic necessities of life.

If that wasn’t bad enough, half the bars on water street charge $13.00 for a fucking Stella, so it’s not as if you can drink your problems away, either.

However, under the skin of every backwater are the bones of a thriving arts community, and Peterborough is perhaps the greatest example of such. With this many poor gay people and nepo babies (sometimes, paradoxically, one and the same) it’s sort of inevitable, though if we had one criticism it’s that we wish fewer people would decide to be DJs and instead cultivate an actual talent.

Speaking of actual talents, now that we’ve told you a little bit about the school to which you’ve sold your soul for the foreseeable future, how about we tell you a little bit about ourselves?

Evan Robins has been at Arthur for a long time. Longer than most of you have or will be in your respective undergraduate programs, at least.

She is a graduate of Trent University’s Cultural Studies program, and a Masters Candidate in Trent’s Cultural Studies Graduate program at that. If you were really lucky, she could have been your T.A., however the university made her forfeit her placement when they realized she writes teacher/student Fire Emblem fanfiction. 

During her time at Arthur, Evan’s writing has been published in Maclean’s, Xtra, though she would like to stress that the Maclean’s piece wasn’t really her best work. A woman much smarter than she is has called her “one of the best upcoming trans journalists,” and many others have called her “a smartass,” “ungrateful,” and other epithets too impolite to repeat here.

Evan is an award-winning journalist, having been nominated for no fewer than three (3) John H. MacDonald awards for student journalism by the Canadian University Press last year, and having received a certificate of merit from World Press Freedom Canada for her coverage of the Trent Central Student Association despite their Executives’ (legal disclaimer: alleged) transparent attempts to malign, defame, and defund this very rag.

She is also the namesake of Cinevangelism with Evangeline Robins, a film column she writes when she wants to that isn’t actually about movies.

Evan is a dyed-in-the-wool homosexual, and also the brains behind the so-called “Graphic Design” which graces much of this pitiful paper. Her articles tend towards the long, and by that she means obscenely so, with her record to date being just shy of ten thousand words.

If all this makes her sound cool, and mysterious, or like the kind of person you’d like to date, she implores you to please not go to the Only Cafe, where she can be found spending ~90% of her waking time.

She also hopes that neither her mom or her girlfriend are reading this, as they are the only two people she still cares to impress.

If anyone was wondering why she spells her name like that, Abbigale Kernya was named after a nightingale bird. She is also in her fourth year of an English Literature degree with a specialization in creative writing which explains the whole attachment to her namesake. Abbigale has not been at Arthur for as long as her co-conspirator, having been effectively kidnapped after applying for a copy editor position at midnight on the deadline way back in the holy year of 2022.

She has also worked as an editor of a magazine since the tenth grade, so she somewhat knows her way around this block.

During her time as a copy editor, Abbigale frequently had anxiety-induced nightmares about missing a submission, but assures anyone reading this that she is very normal and cool. In May of last year, Abbigale graduated from purveyor against comma splices to coordinating editor whereupon she gave birth to the running bit that the then three-piece editorial team of Volume 58 were “literally boygenius”.

But that was then and this is now, and she has yet to find the right musical duo to advance as corrollary to Volume 59’s comrades. Maybe that will be the last act of her role as editor. Perchance.

With that said, in her final year of a Bachelor’s degree in the city she grew up in, Abbigale has become rather jaded and wants to formally disclaim that anything she writes in this gay newspaper is not specific to one person, class, or professor. If you find a resemblance, simply stop reading, it’s for your own good.

Last volume, she had a recurring column about her obese cat named Gator that quickly formed from a way to hide behind her little guy, into a monthly burden where she quickly realized her only personality trait is having a cute looking feline. 

And books. She can read, allegedly. Just don’t ask her about BookTok, she prefers not to relive that part of her life. That said, her first Arthur article was a short piece about “book boyfriends” on BookTok and why they suck, but she urges anyone who has made it this far in the article to not go looking for that. People change, you know?

When she is not complaining about a major she willingly choose to study or trimming her bangs, Abbigale can be found rocking up to city hall to write “misleading” headlines and making faces on camera. Municipal politics can be fun, wouldn’t you know it?

She never thought she would be the type to be involved in campus politics, or have her name widely out there to begin with. But as she begins the final adventure in her time both at Trent and at Arthur, she couldn’t have imagined a better way to spend these last few years. Arthur is a pillar in this community, and no matter where you see yourself going, you’ve got a place in this paper. 

Abbigale often reflects on what would have happened if she never applied for that initial copy editor position, but thanks her scared second-year self every day that she did. Getting involved in her community in such a meaningful and impactful way has changed her life this word count won’t allow her to elaborate on, but trust when she says that Arthur has granted her the best few years of her life.

Having read this, you may well be thinking “Who pays these idiots’ salaries?” Regrettably, friend (can we call you “friend”?) the answer is you! 

That’s right, as a levy-paying Trent University student, you contribute $14.30 to the yearly operations of Arthur. Technically, this makes you 1/10,000th co-owner, but you shouldn’t apply that same logic to your student union because they think that sounds too much like socialism.

Should you like to commit yourself to the informational insurrection, however, we have many ways to get involved. We will be hiring accomplices (journalists) in short order to help us proffer our message. If you’re the type of person who loves writing, money, and writing about things for money, why not toss your hat into the ring?

Our hiring call will go out mid-September, in all likelihood. We tend to ask for a resume, cover letter, and writing sample on which to judge candidates' merit. Word of wisdom: most people spend all of five minutes on their cover letter, and it shows! If you want to instantly improve your odds of getting hired, why not spend ten?

If writing’s your thing but getting paid for it not so much, we do take submissions on a volunteer basis. Our story meetings, which we hold in Sadleir House every week, are free for all to participate in, and nothing says “cool” like hanging out with writers on your Friday night [FINAL TIME TO BE CONFIRMED AT FUTURE DATE].

Beyond that, should you wish to learn more about the guts of this particular institution, we suggest you check out our website, www.trentarthur.ca. If you’re reading this on said website, of course, feel free to disregard. Either way, you should also subscribe to our newsletter, The Courier. 

What with our being proverbially castrated by Facebook’s response to the Canada Online News Act, it’s the best way to keep up to date on what we do. Also we love to write deranged little blurbs with their own pseudo-factual continuity at the start of each one, which have (all told) been received very positively! 

Should you have read through all this, we must congratulate you on your attention span. You’re probably not going to be one of the several hundred people watching TikToks in Psych 1001H. 

More to the point, you’ve demonstrated your devotion to this inimitable rag. If you’ve read this far it’s likely that you are “our kind of people.” With any luck we’ve lit a fire in your heart (and possibly your loins) and you’re ready to get up and spread the good word to all that you meet. 

If that’s the case, come see us at Clubs & Groups day. We’ll give you a tote bag or something.

Up the revolution, and long live Arthur!