Community Service Mag
A Conversation With Chloe Latour
Photography By Lola Kingsley
Interview By Sophie Dixon, October 21st 2025
Sophie Dixon: How did you start Community Service? What were your inspirations and references?
Chloe Latour: Community Service Mag started two ways at once; the first being that I was working an administrative job and I had always been a creative person, but I found that there was really no room for creativity in the role. My main creative discipline is writing, so I was looking for ways to both actively write more and get my writing out there. I couldn’t really find spaces that were accessible to me and that were merging the kinds of things in the arts that I was interested in, so I just decided to make a space myself. I really wanted a project that would act as a service for the audience, and I was interested in how the platform could be actually useful and serve a broader purpose, and not just to be self-promotional.
S: Stylistically how are you approaching the format of Community Service?
C: I worked with friend and graphic designer Guillaume Lavallée, who really brought my ideas to life. At the time all I knew I wanted was a serif font and the incorporation of some burgundy.
S: And you still work together with him?
Photography by Lola Kingsley
S: The work you do for this project is so time-sensitive, it’s difficult to take breaks and I can imagine it feeling like you always have to be “on”. Is it a challenge to stay consistent with that?
C: When I first started it was really a lot of research, like hours and hours. Now I’ve switched over to more of a submissions-based curation, which is nice. I can get a much broader picture of the kinds of events that are happening. So I will generally peak through the submissions I receive throughout the week, making sure that all of the events are up to date and the information listed is correct and present in the submission. Community Service comes out on Mondays at noon, and usually on Saturday or Sunday I will sit down to write it all. That can take anywhere from 2 - 5 hours. Then on Monday night I will do the graphic for social media that will come out on Tuesday, so all in all it’s probably a good 8 hours of work every 2 weeks. It’s quite time-consuming, but it’s also very rewarding.
S: I can definitely understand that pressure of the jack of all trades role in starting a project from scratch, there is always that feeling that there is more you can be doing. For you, it’s also a matter of juggling the Instagram format versus the Substack newsletter. Given these different formats, what is your preferred way to think of Community Service Mag? I really appreciate your conception of the content being so accessible and, from the audience’s perspective, being able to navigate so seamlessly between these platforms.
C: I’ve worked in social media for over 5 years so that has really helped with the conception of the project. There was no part of me that was ever nervous about how it was going to exist online, because that was the whole point. There are people who think it just exists as an instagram page, and I don’t really mind that assumption. Although I see it as a newsletter first and foremost. Adding “Magazine” in the title was aspirational really, because I would like to have print issues eventually.
S: Could you take us through a little bit of how the content changes for the Substack of Community Service?
C: The Substack is the usual biweekly list of events, plus intro and outro blurbs written by me, and here and there I also include occasional “special edition” versions of Community Service. I have one that came out recently, as part of a collaboration I did with Volume MTL. I have another one coming out later this month that I’m also pretty excited about. I would eventually like to include reviews and expand the offering of the
special editions.
S: Do you think of yourself as a curator, or not so much? Where does your own taste come into play with the project, if at all?
C: I tend to be quite loose with the curation, mostly because I don’t really see myself as an authority in the art world, or of what’s cool at the moment. I see myself and Community Service Mag much more as a supporting role in the local emerging art scene. As long as a given submission is focused around art or design I am usually always happy to include it, even if it’s not something I would seek out myself, someone in my audience could be into it and that’s what I want.
S: What excites you in the art scene now?
C: I’m really gravitating towards alternative settings for galleries lately. I love a DIY approach to shows, “if it doesn’t exist, make it”. I love apartment galleries. Seeing artwork in a domestic space is really interesting and intimate. This is actually what my collaboration with Volume MTL was about. I want to see a show in a basement, or in an ally, or a garage.
S: With that more DIY approach, part of it too is just having the energy to push through, and not taking no for an answer. It seems like as soon as you profile these artists and events through putting them into a collection, you are elevating them to some extent. And I think the aim is to do that kind of thing without being exclusionary, which it seems like you’ve been quite successful at. It’s also then just interesting to figure out what that means, or ways that you might question yourself in the process. I wonder if it ever moves into a headspace of considering the ethics or politics of curation. There’s kind of this set of questions that you have as you’re setting out to do these sorts of projects and making these judgement calls about who and what will be included.
Photography by Lola Kingsley
S: Another aspect is that it’s really easy to lose trust in those more commercial spaces, as it carries this disingenuous way of platforming the arts. It really can be on the level of companies coming in and praying on artists because they know they can make money off of them. And I guess navigating the commercial versus publicly funded arts ventures is another part of the difficulties in finding your footing as an organizer, curator or artist in community with other people in the scene. All of the emotions that come with those insecurities, financial and otherwise; it’s a bit of an under-spoken topic. As well, as an entity - or service - that’s working toward uplifting and supporting artists, it can be a challenge to face the realities of competition for resources and other financial barriers. Basically just maintaining your own resources enough to be able to support others.
C: This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As of now I don’t feel like I have much competition, but I do often wonder if Community Service were to go on pause for whatever reason, how long it would take for it to get replaced. As I mentioned before I spend a lot of time on the newsletter, and I recently opened up a paid-tier with additional content to get some of that time back in a way. It’s really nice to build something that uplifts people, but you also need to treat things as a job at some point.
S: I think in the culture of hustling for your art and trying to get random gigs, that landscape is also part of this hyper awareness of your body and time as directly translating to money, which can feel pretty terrible - or at least overwhelming.
C: Exactly. I can only imagine how it feels for artists and designers where there is also a real financial barrier to entry related to the cost of materials etc. As a writer the cost of entry is quite low. But it can be quite suffocating to think of your body and time in that way. I’m not one to give advice, but it’s really important to counteract those feelings and thoughts and, quite literally, “touch grass” every once in a while.
S: For your own personal writing practice, is there anything you wanted to share about anything you’re working on?
C: I definitely want to push my personal writing practice more. The last public facing work I did was read at Nouveau Poem last year. What was really fun about that reading was that I had been to all of their prior events, so I knew the energy of the crowd and what to expect. There are a couple other readings [reading events] that I am interested in, but nothing is set in stone yet. My personal writing won’t be something that appears on Community Service though, because I really just want that space to remain about the artists, the spaces, and the audience.
C: This won’t be a surprise, but I am really looking forward to seeing more DIY spaces and events. I want shows in basements, I want shows in abandoned buildings, I want people to embrace the idea that “if you can’t get into the gallery, make the gallery”. I would also really love to see the Montreal literary and magazine scene grow more, because I think that’s the scene that I was looking for and couldn’t find when I was younger.
S: I also think that kind of mindset of, “I want to do this, I am going to make it happen”, is something that does end up being rewarded by the city itself. I think older generations really do appreciate it here [in Montreal] too. So I think that’s something that we are really blessed with as artists and organizers, I really feel grateful to be surrounded by that for this time in my life.
C: I completely agree. I was born here but I’ve seen that people from other parts of Canada are super drawn to come here. There’s something in Montreal that doesn’t really exist in other cities, both in Canada and other parts of the world. I think just the fact that you can do a lot of things by yourself, and don’t need a ton of resources to do so. I was in San Francisco a few years ago, and I remember being at this party that gave all of the signs of being a more DIY thing but then it turned out that it was some kind of phone company that was behind it sponsoring everything. And obviously that’s okay too, but it’s just nice when there are alternative modes of creating spaces that are more accessible for people to participate in.
Photography by Lola Kingsley