Welcome to Living Hyphen

Living Hyphen is a community that explores the experiences of hyphenated Canadians. From the Haitian-Quebecois commuting along the Montréal Métro to the South Asian trans man applying for permanent residency, from the young Filipino-Canadian woman texting her immigrant mother to the Plains Cree and Métis man meeting a traditional healer, we reveal the rich inner lives of Canada’s diverse communities.

We publish a magazine and host a podcast featuring the voices of artists and writers all across Canada, as well as deliver cultural programming to encourage courageous and tender storytelling within our communities. Through short stories, photography, poetry, and illustrations, we uncover what it means to live in between cultures as individuals who call “Canada” home but with roots elsewhere. Our stories are beautiful, heartbreaking, uplifting, contradictory, and constantly unfolding.

Living Hyphen’s aim is to reshape the mainstream and to turn up the volume on voices that often go unheard.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR STORYTELLING WORKSHOPS

At Living Hyphen, we believe that anyone who writes is a writer, and anyone who makes art is an artist. We’ve designed a series of workshops to help honour your creative storytelling practice. 

We’ve thoughtfully designed each and every one of our workshops to be intimate, generative, and jam-packed with creating and sharing. We give you prompts to spark your creativity and give time and space to share your story in a safe and positive environment.

““[Living Hyphen] made me feel comfortable in my writing. I’ve written everyday since the workshop. You helped me see how writing is a combination of personal experience and practiced technique. At some point, writing just became something for marks or a tiring lesson to teach others. You helped me remember why I loved writing and reading.” – Jan Michael Valles Itong”

What’s New on the Blog

Featured
Measuring The Distances Within & Between Us
Measuring The Distances Within & Between Us

Throughout the last few years of doing this work, I’ve noticed that much of the conversation is still centered around whiteness. When mainstream conversations address racism, the discussion is often – as most things always are – centered around white people. So much of our discourse today is still very much trapped in binary thinking – white people against all non-white people.

Resistance Through Our Voices: Creating the Living Hyphen Podcast
Resistance Through Our Voices: Creating the Living Hyphen Podcast

To think that at school, I’d been studying a history pieced together because, once upon a time, someone cared enough to write long letters and poetry about the political upheaval they witnessed. Why should it be any different just because the present is yet to be the past? 

That’s the first truth that working on the Living Hyphen Podcast brought to light for me: that to live and tell your story as no one but yourself is, by default, a refusal to accept anything that might seek to bury your voice. Sometimes it is up to you to preserve your own experience, your own story. Someone has to. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be you.

Critical Connections Over Critical Mass: 5 Years of Deepening with Living Hyphen
Critical Connections Over Critical Mass: 5 Years of Deepening with Living Hyphen

Contrary to the world we live in that prioritizes fast and exponential growth at all costs, we lean into and luxuriate in the slow and meaningful process of building relationships, creating reciprocal partnerships, and collaborating with like-minded people, organizations, and institutions who strive to do things differently in a world that so desperately needs new approaches and new systems.

SUPPORT LOCAL & DIVERSE STORYTELLERS

The pages of our magazine are full of some of the most incredible stories you’ll find from artists and writers all across what we now know as “Canada”. Our stories span borders and generations, weaving across space and time. From short stories to essays, from illustrations to photography, from poetry to paintings, we capture not just a diversity of lived experiences, but of genres too.

lh-2.2-cover.jpg
Issue 2.2: Healing Across Generations
CA$35.00
Quantity:
Add To Cart
Across Generations Bundle
Across Generations Bundle
CA$65.00
Quantity:
Add To Cart

Let’s Get Social

AS SEEN IN…