Living Hyphen turned 3 this month and it cannot be understated just how much we‘ve grown over this last year. I’d even go as far as calling 2021 our breakout year!
From opening ourselves up to new storytelling formats to expanding our workshop offerings, from branching into more in-depth anti-racism work to garnering national media attention, 2021 was a game-changer.
As I’ve done in the last couple of years, I want to take a pause and share a look back on the year that was, to take stock of all we have accomplished and to express gratitude to the people who helped make it happen.
But before running through all the meaningful, powerful, and significant things that Living Hyphen has manifested and been a part of this last year, I want to also acknowledge and hold space for how difficult this year was.
In many ways, 2021 did not feel all that different from the chaos of 2020. The last year has felt like a blur as we continued to live in the midst of this pandemic and all the uncertainty, loss, and grief that laced our everyday. I have personally felt disconnected and sad as we remained virtual in our programs, continuing to contend with lockdowns, restrictions, and the threat and anxiety around our collective safety. It has felt lonely and tiring. I have been missing the magic of our in-person community events and that electricity, that undeniable vibration we all feel when connecting face-to-face.
There continues to be so much loss that we are still grappling with, still processing.
But as I wrote in my birthday recap last year, despite all of this––or rather, because of it––the pandemic has “illuminated new paths for us, clarified our direction, and reinvigorated us in our mission to reshape the mainstream and to turn up the volume on voices that often go unheard.”
And so just as the chaos of our world has not subsided, nor has the clarity we gained in our work been diminished.
I mean it when I say that 2021 has been a breakout year for us. Let me tell you all the ways…
The Intimacy and Power of Sound
We brought the stories of hyphenated Canadians across the country beyond the page and into sound with the very first season of our podcast!
We launched in early May and our first season spoke specifically to what we were/are all still very much living through — the pandemic. For nearly a year, we were asked to stay at home, to quarantine, and to ultimately, maintain a “social distance” from our loved ones.
We were challenged to find new and creative ways to show our love from afar. And for those of us who are part of a diaspora or who have been displaced in some way — voluntarily or forced, right here on this land or abroad — that was nothing new. We’re experts at that, aren’t we?
And so, for this first season of the Living Hyphen Podcast, we invited storytellers across what we now know as Canada to explore this concept of “homestuck” — whatever home might be, whatever one’s relationship to their home(s) might be, and whatever being stuck can mean.
The newest member of our team, our phenomenal producer, and my brilliant co-host Trisha Gregorio.
As the newest member of our team, our phenomenal producer, and my brilliant co-host Trisha Gregorio says, “With the audio format we were able to dial in on a different kind of intimacy. Living Hyphen has always been about the closeness and warmth of having a storytelling community to belong to, especially for those of us from underrepresented communities. So there’s something so special about getting to hear all these stories in the podcast directly from the voices behind them, and to be able to bring these stories, in this form, to listeners.”
We may not have been able to gather in-person for our storytelling nights but as Trisha so beautifully captured, we were still able to bring that closeness and warmth of
being a part of this community in such an intimate way.
As we slowly begin to lift restrictions here in Canada and slowly emerge from being “homestuck” during this pandemic, I know that the lens through which we framed our stories might one day be a relic, an artifact, a #TBT. But the stories our guests shared? That’s forever.
Thank you to our talented storytellers Kathleen Zaragosa, Kyle Jarencio, Desiree McKenzie, Micaela Comeau, Natasha Ramoutar, Joelle Kidd, Brittany Scarfo, Christine Vu, Grace Lau, Zehra Naqvi, MJ Pascua, Alison Isaac, Thunderclaw Robinson, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, Hannah Atkinson Renglich, Micaela Pereira Bajard, Nimra Bandukwala, Kasper Samantha, Linda Trinh, Shohana Sharmin, Linh S. Nguyen, Christie Wong, Carmen Lee, Cassandra Lobo, Sam Castaneda, Sonia Nicholson, Vanessa Vigneswaramoorthy, and Anne Claire Baguio. It was an honour and privilege to hold, carry, and share your voices and stories with our wider community.
Taking Our Stories to the Stage
We didn’t just take our stories from page to sound, we also turned them into a performance on stage!
Stories from our community were adapted into nowhen, a Canadian Stage production in collaboration with the Department of Theatre, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University, presented in partnership with Summerworks as part of the Dream in High Park programming.
Scene from nowhen. Photo by John Lauene
In nowhen, audience members were invited to gather at one of seven different entry points in High Park to experience one of seven choreographed narratives adapted from stories featured in our magazine. Each path told the story of someone’s migration to or origin on this land. We were then led to the park’s amphitheatre where all the paths converged.
For me, nowhen served as a metaphor for our migration and movement stories as we converge on this land we now know as Canada. It is a celebration of our relationship to this place that we all find ourselves in today. It is a piece of important theatre that sits in this moment where, now more than ever, we see how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and other systems of oppression endure to create the deep and ravaging inequities of today. It is a powerful meditation and urgent challenge for us to act in solidarity to share and care for this land and for each other.
And to bear witness to these stories at an outdoor physical place during a time when we have had to stay indoors to protect each other made the piece all the more salient. In the words of our honorary team member, the immensely thoughtful and wise nowhen director and creator, Alison Wong, “This piece is a deep dive into our connection to place and how place shapes our personal stories. Having this incredible palette of writing from the Living Hyphen community to work with in the creation of nowhen has really allowed us to realize the immense power of the park as a place that brings people, and stories, together.”
The play was a collective creation led by York University Theatre and Canadian Stage MFA Candidate Alison Wong with
Me and nowhen director Alison Wong.
Cole Avis, César el Hayeck, Djennie Laguerre, and Miquelon Rodriguez with stories originally published in our magazine. Thank you to writers Anika Rasheed, Victoria Liao, Lance Morrison, Thunderclaw Robinson, Alison Isaac, Ayla Lefkowitz, Emily Kedar, Nariné, Karen Lahura, and Dee Stoicescu for sharing so much of yourself, your families, your ancestors, and your lineage in all of the stories you tell.
Continuing to Cultivate A Culture of Storytelling
We pivoted to virtual writing workshops last year and the move has only continued to bear more fruit for us. We’ve since expanded our program offerings to include workshops that touch upon decolonizing our minds, that hold space for the loss and grief of migration, and the joy and delight that comes from living our hyphenated identities.
At our Cultivating Care virtual writing workshop for Filipinx frontline workers
We delivered 50 workshops with over 800 attendees and even forged partnerships with school boards in Ontario, post-secondary institutions, newcomer and settlement agencies, and so much more.
Earlier in May, we also hosted our very first virtual storytelling night celebrating and featuring writers who have participated in our programs. With over 80 people across Turtle Island joining us online, we know this will be a new way for us to continue sharing our stories and cultivating community.
At our very first virtual storytelling night: Moving Through Time
We remain committed to creating cultural programming where hyphenated Canadians feel compelled and confident to share their stories.
Working Towards Racial Justice
Living Hyphen has always been political. We are, after all, a community made up of people from diasporas from all around the world, as well as Indigenous people from many nations. We are a community that explores the complex experiences of migration, home, and identity, and we simply cannot do that without addressing how colonialism, Western imperialism, and white supremacy has impacted our peoples and cultures here in what we now know as Canada, as well as in our homelands.
As our solidarity statement reads:
We strive to work in solidarity with the struggles of Indigenous nations for sovereignty, land, and freedom. We strive to work in solidarity across racial lines to dismantle white supremacy and towards our shared liberation.
We have built upon the Indigenous allyship and anti-racism resources we have developed in previous years and are now delivering writing workshops for our community that specifically tackle anti-racism and that aim to dismantle the colonial and white supremacist mentality that exists inside each of us.
Beyond our immediate community, we’ve also been actively working with school boards across Ontario and select organizations and businesses to deliver anti-racism presentations and workshops for students and staff alike.
Humainologie’s Empathy Week discussing anti-racism after the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement.
Launching Issue 2.1: Resistance Across Generations
While it took us a lot longer than we expected to put out our second issue, our timing couldn’t have been more pertinent.
In the midst of the surge of anti-Asian hate crimes, the police brutality against Black communities, the enduring Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, the abhorrent immigration detentions of the Latinx community, the continued colonization of Indigenous nations, lands, and culture, amongst so many other issues across racial lines and intersections of identity and throughout the generations, we launched Issue 2.1: Resistance Across Generations.
We made a 122-page magazine capturing the very essence of our indomitable resistance, celebrating all the powerful ways in which we, our ancestors, and our descendants rise.
This latest issue brings you a collection of over sixty pieces of poetry, prose, photography, and visual art capturing a fierce expression of survival, defiance, triumph, and legacy from storytellers across the country with roots from all around the globe. It is an issue that speaks volumes about who we are and what we stand for.
Recognition in Mainstream Media
We felt like such a media darling all throughout the year as newspapers, radio shows, and television broadcasts featured all the different facets of our programming. From on-screen coverage by Filipino ethnic media on our writing workshops to niche magazine features on our founder, from radio broadcasts about our podcast to interviews in digital media about our play, we got a whole lot of love from the mainstream media.
But most notable was our giant features in two of the largest national newspapers in Canada: The Globe & Mail and The Toronto Star. Not only did The Globe & Mail proclaim us to be a “literary empire” (though we prefer the term “ecosystem”,) The Toronto Star also dedicated two full pages sharing our work as part of their “Changemaker” series.
I am so proud that we are being recognized for our role in shifting the conversation on what it means to be “Canadian” in this complicated and messy world of colonization, migration, power, and oppression.
Our aim is to reshape the mainstream and we’ve certainly been doing that a lot this year!
What’s Next?
It’s a question I’ve been getting a lot lately as we grow in new and exciting ways, but it’s a question for which I don’t have an exact answer. Living Hyphen has very much taken on a life of its own now, growing naturally and organically as we take feedback from and listen to what our community needs and wants. So many of our new programs and projects were driven and initiated by the passion and care of members of our community.
While I don’t know what specifically will come out of Living Hyphen in the future, I do know that we are going to continue to remain flexible and open to the possibilities of new ways to tell our stories as hyphenated Canadians to reach even more people. I also know that we will continue to actively partner with different activists, educators, and other storytellers across this country so that we can learn from each other and lift each other up as we rise.
It is, after all, this openness that has made Living Hyphen as beautiful and expansive as it has become.
Until next year!
