“I feel like a kid again!” Marcus exclaimed while drawing the torso of his “exquisite creature”.

Everyone is looking over each other’s shoulders, trying to get a peek at what the other person has drawn, comparing notes and giggling at the ridiculousness of the “assignment”.

I’m in a medium security prison in the Fraser Valley, facilitating storytelling workshops with incarcerated men, and our icebreaker activity is “exquisite corpse” (though I prefer to call it “exquisite creature”). For those unfamiliar, it’s a game where each participant takes turns drawing parts of a “creature” on a sheet of paper, starting with the head, then the torso, and finally, the legs. At each step, they must fold the paper to conceal their contribution and then pass it to the next player to continue the drawing.

Once we’ve completed a round, I ask them all to unfold their sheet of paper to reveal what they’ve created together and to tape it up to the wall at the front of the room, which I like to call “our art gallery”. I invite the guys to stand up and admire each other’s artistic expressions.

At this point, it is complete chaos in the room. Everyone is howling with laughter.

I am remembering how I would spend my mornings driving on Highway 7 with the river to one side and the stunning mountains up ahead and all around me. I would spend these mornings just in awe of all that surrounded me, so full of gratitude for the natural world.

And then I would slowly pull up to my destination and see the fences surrounding a cold, sprawling compound of grey, soulless buildings heavily secured with barbed wire. The disconnect was, as I wrote, jarring, bewildering, and infuriating.

I couldn’t help but think to myself about how settlers really saw all this abundant, fertile, beautiful land, stole it from Indigenous peoples, and chose to build systems of control and punishment. And how politicians of today really see all this abundant, fertile, beautiful land, ignore our treaty obligations, and continue to choose to expand these systems of control and punishment. What stunted imagination…

Last year rocked my world.

My dad had a medical emergency while living in the Philippines and had ongoing health issues throughout the year…as in had-a-medical-emergency-and-ongoing-health-issues-and-then-moved-back-to-Canada-and-lived-with-me-and-my-partner-for-6-months kind of a situation.

A few months later, my mom almost died…as in, had-a-medical-emergency-abroad-and-couldn’t-breathe-on-the-plane-home-and-had-to-be-rushed-to-the-hospital-upon-landing-and-had-to-stay-there-for-weeks kind of almost died.

So yeah, last year rocked my world.

Why am I sharing this with you all?

I spent most of this past November in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Sto:lo, Sts’ailes, Semá:th, Mathxwí, Kwantlen, Sq’éwlets, Katzie, and Leq’á:mel peoples. I was there because Living Hyphen was asked to facilitate a series of writing circles in the federal prison system. We wrote and shared stories with 60 incarcerated men from Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities exploring our heritage, our ideas of home(s), and what it means to live in between cultures.

On my second day, one of the men – we’ll call him Mark – came in and right as he sat down, he told me quite gruffly that he struggles with reading and writing and that he has "some kind of disability".

"Is that going to be a problem?" he asked me sharply.