"It's up to authors to spark the imagination of their readers and to help them envision alternatives to how we live.”
Ursula K. Le Guin shared these words in 2014 as she accepted the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and we’ve been sharing it in almost all of our writing workshops and storytelling gatherings this past year. While she speaks specifically of authors, we know that this sentiment extends to any and all creatives who are telling stories in their own magical ways.
The past year has continued to awaken us to a heightened sense of the harm and violence taking place across the globe. From the devastation of living through a climate crisis to the despair of witnessing multiple genocides unfold before our eyes, we at Living Hyphen feel the immense weight and urgency of our times. We take seriously our role and responsibility as storytellers to push for justice. And we know the power of our stories to heal relationships, to resist systems of oppression, and, as Ursula K. Le Guin urges, to envision and create alternatives to how we live.
That’s why throughout 2024, we’ve embraced even more fully our commitment to working across racial and religious lines to dismantle all systems of oppression and towards our shared liberation through our gift of storytelling. We’ve facilitated many open mic nights and storytelling workshops across Turtle Island – each gathering a model for the wider world we strive to create. A world dedicated to revealing stories and experiences that all too often go unheard. A world open to holding complexity with courage and curiosity. A world committed to approaching each other with care and reverence.
As we move into our 6th year, we honour all we have done together as a community and the worlds we are creating together.
Embracing the Political Through Our Writing Workshops
We hosted 35 workshops in classrooms, libraries, art galleries, and community hubs from the unceded and unsurrendered territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations in K'emk'emeláy̓/Vancouver to unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory in Odawa/Ottawa. At Living Hyphen, we focus not so much on the finished product of our writing, but on the joyful, healing, and nourishing process, and we brought our radical approach to nearly 400 storytellers across Turtle Island.
We worked with school boards across Ontario, including the Peel District School Board and Halton District School Board on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabek Ojibwe Michizaagiig Nation, as well as Blue Water District School Board on the traditional land of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. We shared our pedagogical approach to decolonizing classrooms with educators striving to create more inclusive and equitable spaces for newcomers and racialized students. Central to this work has been dismantling our ideas of English as a signifier of excellence and moving beyond the limitations of language to share our stories and engage more deeply and meaningfully with one another.
We also leaned more heavily into the political with our wider community, expanding our workshop offerings to explore how our writing and stories can serve as a ritual that nourishes and builds our resistance against oppressive systems and towards our collective liberation.
ARCHIving our histories
At Living Hyphen, we know the importance of archiving the history of our diverse communities; histories that have, all too often, gone undocumented, unheard, untold, and outright stolen. That’s why we partnered with the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (PAMA) to support curating their latest exhibition, Stories of Home: Finding Community and Belonging in Peel, alongside Sheridan College.
With an opening earlier this fall and on display for the next few years, this exhibition looks at the migration stories of the many diverse communities in Peel. Throughout history finding a home in Peel has been exciting, overwhelming, and, at times, difficult. This exhibition explores the ideas around establishing connection to place and creating a sense of belonging that strengthens community. Through personal stories, video, images, and objects, this exhibition showcases the connections between Peel’s past, present, and future, and is a powerful testament to the contributions of the many diverse communities in the region.
We know that institutions like museums have historically left out the stories of racialized communities – or even outright stolen our artifacts – which is why working together in this partnership has been so important and meaningful to us. The Stories of Home exhibition at PAMA is a vibrant example of community partnership in practice and the importance of care in our process. This was a unique and powerful opportunity to create new pathways in institutional settings.
Dismantling White Supremacy On Our Podcast
After a long hiatus, we brought back the Living Hyphen Podcast with our second season dedicated to unpacking the ways in which white supremacy has created a separation within and between racialized communities. With the theme of Distance, we examined the complex ways in which white supremacy has created differences and division, and the myriad ways in which our communities create and build the bridge(s) we need to close these gaps.
Our season began inwards and moved outwards, starting with the distances cultivated in our own minds without our even realizing it – internalized racism, sexism, and other -isms. From there we moved out a step to the distances found in our relationships with loved ones, and then a step further again to the distances found within and between our communities, and then to the greater world we occupy as hyphenated Canadians.
Activist and writer Audre Lorde once wrote: "Revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us”. This latest season of the Living Hyphen podcast featured 20+ storytellers from across Turtle Island who poignantly captured the messy experience of examining, interrogating, and attempting to dismantle that piece of the oppressor within each of us. It’s one of the most challenging projects we’ve had the privilege of working on and one that we are extremely proud of. If you haven’t yet, give it a listen and share widely!
Navigating Mental Health with Youth
We live in a nation-state where, according to the 2021 census, more than 8.3 million people – or almost one-quarter (23.0%) of the population – are foreign-born individuals who have immigrated. How do we ensure that we build the care systems necessary to support newcomer and racialized youth through the varied impacts of migration? We begin, first and foremost, by bearing witness to their experiences and their emotions.
We partnered with the On Canada Project to create Expect It All – an initiative spotlighting the widely nuanced mental health experiences of newcomer and immigrant youth. Through the power of storytelling, we amplify the unique and compelling voices of youth who boldly and honestly speak their truths in all their complexity.
Through a series of gentle and generative writing workshops, we brought together an intimate group of youth from diverse backgrounds to share stories of mental health. These youth then developed their stories further to create an array of music, monologues, photography, and spoken word poetry.
Storytelling As Solidarity
Living Hyphen is a community largely made up of people from diasporas from all around the world, and, as we reckon with our role and responsibility as settlers on this stolen land, we also sit with the difficult fact that we and our ancestors are from places around the world whose histories are similarly bound up in colonization, imperialism, military occupations, and racist immigration policies in our own homelands. This kind of violence is the reason why many of us end up migrating in the first place.
Today we continue to see the violence and harm stemming from these systems of oppression everywhere. We have been watching Israel’s genocide against Palestinian people unfold for over a year on our small screens. While our mainstream media does not cover these stories in full, we know that this violence has also been unfolding in Sudan, in the Congo, in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, to Uyghurs in China, and so many more places and people around the world.
This is why we’ve dedicated many of our open mic nights and storytelling gatherings this past year to embodying the spirit of the truth that “none of us are free until we are all free”. In 2024, we facilitated 7 gatherings with over 40 performers who spoke to our interlocking struggles for justice and freedom, while also honouring the immense grief that comes from the violence that has led to so much disconnection, destruction, and loss.
We invite you to be moved by their stories.
In his new book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates' reflects on the value of storytelling with these words:
"...such power must serve something beyond my amusement – that it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence I saw around me, that beauty must be joined to politics, that style possessed must meet struggle demanded.
It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt – to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams...to make people feel all that is now at stake."
Similar to Ursula K. Le Guin’s quote we shared at the top of this reflection, while Coates' speaks specifically of writers, we know that this sentiment extends to any and all creatives who are telling stories in their own magical ways.
This is our work at Living Hyphen. To tell our stories and lived experiences to haunt. To make people feel all that is now at stake. And to envision alternatives to how we live.
We anticipate that the year ahead will be even more challenging with the political reality of this moment and while this may be daunting, we are buoyed to know that we will be doing this important work alongside so many of you.
In loving solidarity.