I can hardly believe it but Living Hyphen turns five this October! From a little nugget of an idea in my heart, Living Hyphen has become a thriving arts community held, carried, and co-created by thousands of people across Turtle Island.
We started as a magazine back in 2018 and have grown quite a bit since then. We’ve now published three issues of our magazine. We host a podcast. Some of our stories were turned into a stage play with Canadian Stage in 2021. We’ve facilitated writing and creative storytelling workshops with over 2100 people across the country and beyond. We've cultivated partnerships with school boards across Ontario, post-secondary institutions, libraries, museums, and many more arts, culture, and media organizations across the country. And that’s just scratching the surface of all that we’ve done these last few years.
Community members celebrating at our launch party in 2018. Photo by goodbird.
When we launched the first issue of our family-funded and independent magazine in 2018, we sold out of our first print run of 500 copies within a month. We quickly reprinted and sold out of that batch again. We quickly reprinted again.
People asked me how often the magazine would be published and urged for higher frequencies. People asked me if it would be distributed more widely across Canada, if I would consider selling the magazine on bigger platforms that would expand our reach exponentially. People asked me what was next, what else would we do, how could we make Living Hyphen even bigger? I was swept by our success and the resounding praise and the calls for more, more, more. I thought I should do more, more, more.
After all, go big or go home, right?
But after hosting a number of small storytelling gatherings with independent bookstores, community hubs, local cafes, and flower shops I realized that the value and magic of Living Hyphen lies in our intimacy. The value and magic of our work lies in the delicate connections we cultivate deeply with those in our community through story sharing and conversation.
Magazine contributors and workshop participants at our Healing Across Generations launch. Photo by Cristhian Ramirez.
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.
At Living Hyphen, our mission is and always has been to reshape the mainstream and to turn up the volume on voices that all too often go unheard. And that, as social activist Grace Lee Boggs once said, is about "critical connections rather than critical mass."
As opposed to focusing solely on getting bigger and expanding, scaling up for us actually means going deeper. It means strengthening our relationships with our contributors, partners, and all the different people who hold and carry our work with them in some way. It means deepening our capacity for empathy and vulnerability, for courageous and tender storytelling.
Spoken word poet Khushu and Justine at our “Honouring the Land” storytelling celebration. Photo by Azia Jonelle.
Every year around our birthday, I do a round up of all that we’ve done at Living Hyphen. I share the ways we’ve grown, the magazines we’ve published, the new projects that we've put forth. But this year, I don't have too much to share. At least, not in terms of tangible "output". We didn’t publish another issue of the magazine. We haven’t launched the second season of our podcast. No plays have been made. No new projects are out in the world.
Instead, we’ve been planting seeds and tending to our garden of connections. We have been growing our relationships with school boards across Ontario, cultivating our partnerships with media platforms, caring for our friendships with arts and culture organizations, and nurturing our community of writers, artists, and storytellers across the country.
All of this cultivation requires care, attention, and time. All of this sowing is needed before the harvest.
Photo by Azia Jonelle.
In August 2021, we were immensely humbled and honoured to receive a glowing spotlight of our work in The Globe & Mail, a national newspaper here in Canada. They shared our journey in uplifting racialized voices in arts and literature, while highlighting the ways in which we have created and supported our community through the years. That kind of national recognition and exposure is absolutely huge for a community organization like ours and we were ecstatic.
The headline, though, praised us for building a "literary empire" and while I understand that the word “empire” has become a kind of shorthand for growth and expansion, it's also a word that reinforces systems of control and domination. It is a word that has a heavy and inextricable history of colonization, violence, and exploitation.
As someone who has made a career and a life out of weaving words, I know the power of language. I know how it can shape the way we move through the world, how it can shape how we are perceived, and how we perceive ourselves. And so, it’s important to me that we are precise in our language, that we are as impeccable with our word as we possibly can be. My good friend and co-founder of Cambio & Co., Gelaine Santiago, helped me find those words.
At Living Hyphen, we are building a storytelling ecosystem.
At our “Honouring the Land” storytelling celebration. Photo by Azia Jonelle.
In an ecosystem, every living thing and the environment work together to grow, nourish, and support each other. It’s the same with our community. At Living Hyphen, all the beautiful members of our community, our writing workshops, and our multimedia platforms are all part of an ecosystem that feeds into each other to create a shared space where all voices are heard, valued, supported, and celebrated.
Now I know “ecosystem” isn’t nearly as sexy as “empire”, which we equate with success, luxury, and riches. But maybe we should ask ourselves why that is. Why do we value and glamorize systems of exploitation over the abundant and endless giving of our natural world?
The most important legacy Living Hyphen leaves behind will not lie in our organization alone. Our legacy will lie in the richness of the soil, the depth of our roots, the flowers that bloom, and the new life we sustain through this ecosystem we create together.
Living Hyphen community at our first birthday. Photo by Karla Danan.
Over these past five years, I have been collecting the poetry books, the novels, and the memoirs that our contributing writers and podcast guests have gone on to publish since first submitting their work to us or that budded from attending our storytelling workshops. I have been attending many of the exhibitions, plays, and gallery openings of the contributing artists who have shared their talents and crafts with us. I have been promoting and connecting people to the organizations and collectives that our workshop attendees and contributors have gone on to create and steward in their own communities.
Our legacy lies in each of these different people, places, and pieces of beauty. It lies in the books, art, plays, podcasts, organizations, projects, and collectives that storytellers across the country go on to create for themselves and their own communities.
After five years, I am left in awe of all that has been created already. I am in awe of this legacy that we are all building together for future generations.
Thank you for being such a vital part of this journey. Thank you for co-creating this vibrant ecosystem with us.
May there be many more years of deepening and growing together.
With deep gratitude and in solidarity always,
Justine
Photo by Stef Levin.