When I approached Living Hyphen in the summer of 2020 about a podcast, all I wanted, really, was a conversation.
Unanchored amidst the endlessness of those early quarantine days, I had found much comfort in reading the magazine, which at the time only had its first issue out. I was lucky to be in spaces that placed me in proximity to BIPOC writers and artists, but maybe due to the particular isolation of that year or thanks simply to the vast skill and raw vulnerability of the Living Hyphen community, I found myself flipping through the pages of that first issue and wondering what it would mean to hear from the voices—literally—behind all the art and writing featured in the magazine.
I was fresh out of studying both ancient history and languages in university, and as one of the few students of colour in those departments, I had found myself resenting at times the unfairness of seeing so much effort and thought go into preserving long-gone Western civilizations. I couldn’t help but compare this to how so many of the names and languages in my homeland, the Philippines, have been lost to both centuries of colonization and a legacy of ensuring the West continues to be prioritized in how Filipinos define things like education, success, progress, beauty. In such a culture, I can’t help but see any form of preservation and interrogation as crucial ways of resisting the forces that seek to simplify and overwrite history. 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.
Justine began Living Hyphen as a rejection of the lack of diversity in Canadian literature. She wanted to amplify stories that complicated the Canadian narrative, stories that asked us to interrogate what it meant to be Canadian. The hyphens in our identities didn’t just encompass living in that in-between state of this or that; it also meant, above all, holding multiple truths of our identities, difficult or complex as some of them might be, with equal weight. One can be both a refugee and a settler on stolen land. You can reap the rewards of being white-passing and still feel isolated from the racialized community that deems you not enough of who you already are.
That limbic existence—or rather, the multiplicity of being a complex being—is something audio understands by nature. Just as a horror movie can cultivate its atmosphere far less effectively without the right music, audio is a form of storytelling that strips its object to its most raw without flattening it to a single element of itself. Even a static-ridden voice memo you send to a friend has its irreplaceable specificities: the hum of your bedroom fan in the background, the laugh in your voice you’re trying to hold back so you can finish whatever story was too long to send as a single text. Audio is revealing in unexpected ways, and in that, there is a specific kind of honesty I love.
When I first pitched the Living Hyphen Podcast, I meant only to offer support in allowing all the magazine contributors space to further explore the honesty and life palpable in their stories. I had done my fair share of journalism work, but back in 2021, investigative podcasts that prioritize BIPOC voices were still few and far between. There was Paola Mardo’s Long Distance, which held a spotlight to nonfiction stories from the Filipino diaspora, but only later would there be a more stable audience for shows like Conflicted: A History Podcast and Against Japanism: Destabilizing Japanese History from the Left – both of which challenge and untangle long-accepted history narratives. But I thought: what about the poetry, the art, the short stories? Are they not pieces of history worthy of documentation?
Every show from the On Being Studios spends an hour in conversation with a poet, a thought leader, a writer, but where are the ones dedicated to those specifically from racialized communities? To those still sitting in the margins of a publishing career? To those who have never felt comfortable calling themselves a writer but do have a story to share in their own voice, on their own terms?
There is always an impulse to believe that fiction and poetry from writers without PhDs or career milestones is less necessary, or less worth the effort and attention that goes into producing a podcast. But how sad is it that stories from BIPOC voices need to be backed by years of academia and award-winning novels for a chance at the microphone? Are our lived experiences not primary sources, too? Do our very voices not stand for their own importance?
This is the second lesson I have learned: that there is no such thing as apolitical, and especially so in art, where our very experience constitutes the network of social, cultural, and political forces that led to us putting our words on the page—and, in this case, to the mic.
I think the world has a hard time giving space to stories from and about racialized identities when they aren’t ultimately about the wider history, the struggle, the intergenerational difficulties of juggling a hyphenated identity, the trauma, and the guilt and the shame. The cost of the West undergoing a series of what’s been popularly referred to as “racial reckonings”—the spotlight on the Black Lives Matter movement, the pushback against the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the wake of COVID-19—is that it has been easy for the systems we live among to write these off as shifts in market trends. So you get publishing giants opening up submissions for prospective BIPOC authors, you get organizations rushing to launch grants and fellowships, you get all these systems trying to tell us Yes, yes, we hear you, and for their solution to be an offer of a spot within the very systems we are trying to resist and deconstruct.
This was true in 2020, when we worked on Season 1, and it remains true now, in 2024, working on Season 2 as the violence in Gaza, in Congo, in Yemen, and Sudan and so many more continues to escalate to unthinkable heights.
On the grand scale of things, it feels absurd to think that in the beginning, my only fantasy about the Living Hyphen Podcast was to interview the featured writers I knew from the magazine. For here is a third lesson: not every story has to be justified, or explained, or diluted in terms of questions such as, What do you hope people will take away? The stories stand for themselves, and our only role in envisioning this podcast was to give them the literal microphone and to share that with the world.
That’s how I like to think of being the producer of this podcast: that it’s a matter of archiving, like a librarian trying to make up for the histories of all our ancestors that never had the chance to be recorded or preserved even in fragments. A funny thing about working with audio is that it isn’t magic. I came into the Living Hyphen Podcast sure that I would not want to tell our writers how to read their own stories. It isn’t my place, after all, to dictate what kind of emotion and intonation goes into every word they themselves have written and chosen to share.
My job, simply, is to edit, to stitch together little tapestries that people have spent their lives knitting into existence. To find the pauses, the music, the structure in the wider context, to allow stories the room to breathe. But everything else is so wholly the writer’s that privilege doesn’t even begin to describe the experience of recording with the many, many artists we have featured on the podcast. Capturing their voice, their tone, their emotion, even the background sounds of wherever they’re calling from in Turtle Island and beyond.
The Living Hyphen Podcast has changed in shape so many times since that first email I sent to Justine, and always because we didn’t realize what was needed until we were there, until we were in it, until we were taught by all the people who have lent the podcast their voice, time, and artistry.
Even going into Season 2, with one season’s worth of production behind us, I thought we would know enough not to start from scratch. But the world continues to change, to give us different opportunities to broaden our horizon, our vision for the podcast, and our very ideas of the stories we feel need telling. I find that incredible, because once all those ideas and emotions are made tangible, the human voice remains an irreplaceably tactile, concrete thing.
How apt, maybe, when so much of our resistance in the West is to ask to be heard. It’s so sobering, when I put it like that. That we have to ask, to demand, just for someone to listen to what we have always known—have always lived as such—to be wrong. I don’t mean to advance the podcast as being on the same level as all the necessary protests and continual undeniable proof that we do not stand with the injustices of this world. But there is resistance in speaking your own voice—to speak of what is true for you, to make yourself heard on a physical level, to share your story for no other reason than the fact that it’s yours.
As Justine once wrote in Issue One: Entrances & Exits, “We hold the contradictory knots of the hyphenated identity in question, in tension, and just as importantly, in celebration.”
That’s the beauty of the Living Hyphen community. That our experiences are sad and traumatic but joyful and beautiful, and the audio format of the podcast has just been one more way—one true, tangible, unignorable way—for us to support people in saying:
We’re here.
We have voices.
And we will be heard.
