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…

We are officially sold out of our inaugural issue, Entrances & Exits.

I’ve had to keep repeating those words to myself over the last week and pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.

In just two and a half years, we’ve sold out two print runs of our beautiful first foray into Canada’s arts and literature scene. That means 1250 people across Turtle Island have had their hands on this jam-packed 124-page magazine. Probably more if you consider that we’re available in libraries from coast to coast, and all the book swaps we’ve been tagged in on Instagram!

How do I even mark a moment as big as this? In “normal” times, we’d throw a big ol’ party complete with a potluck celebration, storytelling, and the warmth and exuberance of our community. But alas, the times we’re living in won’t allow for that just yet and we’ll have to wait just a little bit longer to gather again in person. So in the meantime, I’ll pay homage to this milestone in the best way I know how — by writing about it.

By now it should no longer be news that COVID-19 has brought devastating and disproportionate loss, anguish, and incredible stress to Black and brown communities around the world. The Filipino/a/x community, — that is, my community — has been hit particularly hard as we make up a large part of the care industry and the frontlines of this pandemic.

All around the globe, we can be found working in hospitals as nurses, as nannies to children of wealthy families, as caregivers in senior’s homes, as in-home and personal support workers to the sick.

34.4% of internationally-trained nurses around the world are from the Philippines — that’s fully a third of the world’s nurses. In Canada specifically, Filipino/a/xs make up 1 in 20 healthcare workers and more than 90% of the migrant caregivers providing in-home care under the Live-In Caregiver program.

But those are just the numbers. Those are the faceless and forgettable statistics.

They don’t tell you the stories of my titas, my titos, my ates, and my kuyas—blood-related or not — and the textured lives that they lead, not just as frontline workers, but as human beings.

Cultivating Care Through Our Writing Workshops

A few months ago, I had the sincere privilege of facilitating writing workshops on behalf of Living Hyphen, specifically for Filipino/a/x caregivers, nurses, personal support workers, and other essential workers in an attempt to move past these cold and unfeeling numbers and get to the heart of our caregivers’ stories. The stories of the people who are working day in and day out to serve, protect, and keep each and every one of us safe during this global pandemic.

In partnership with North York Community House (NYCH), a multi-service settlement agency, we developed Cultivating Care — a writing and storytelling workshop that explores what it means to give and receive care from afar.

Where are you from?

At the heart of it, Living Hyphen was born out of this question. Our inaugural issue of Entrances & Exits invited artists and writers from all across Canada and from over 30 ethnic backgrounds to contribute their work in exploration of this question.

When I was putting the magazine together so many moons ago, I opened each story with the artists’ name and their “hyphens” or “where they’re from”. I assigned these “hyphens” based solely on the contents of the story they submitted or the sound of their name.

But mid-way through this process, I stopped myself. I was making assumptions about people I didn’t really know.

So I reached out to each contributor, and I asked not “where are you from” but rather, “how do you identify?”

And let me tell you, that simple shift in questioning opened up entire worlds to me.