When I first conceived of the idea for Living Hyphen, I didn’t really expect much to come of it. I thought a few of my friends and maybe a few of their friends would share their stories and we’d put together a kickass zine to express how we felt about our hyphenated experiences. We’d share it at an art fair somewhere, and that would be that.

I truly had no idea that it would blossom into what it has become: a flourishing community of storytellers and a thriving multimedia platform!

We live in a country under a colonial government that claims to celebrate multiculturalism but that has a history of systematically erasing the many rich and diverse languages of the Indigenous nations who were the original inhabitants of this land, and that has a current reality of shaming and discriminating against the many immigrants who speak many beautiful languages of our vast world.

The supremacy of the English language is an extension of white supremacy in this colonial land.

At Living Hyphen, we strive to move beyond the limitations of language — more specifically, we strive to move beyond the colonial standard of “excellence” that is English. Continue reading for all the ways we do that.

For those of you who have been following Living Hyphen’s journey, you know that over the last few years, our writing workshops have become one of our core offerings for our community. In fact, since we started delivering cultural programs back in the fall of 2019, we’ve organized and facilitated nearly 120 workshops with over 1400 people!

These writing workshops are our way of actively and tenderly cultivating, nurturing, and mentoring racialized writers — many of whom come into our workshops highly reluctant to even call themselves that.

These writing workshops are, for me, the most radical thing we do at Living Hyphen. Radical, of course (though it shouldn’t be), because of the voices that we prioritize, but even more radical because of our approach and pedagogy.

Living Hyphen is a community that explores what it means to live in between cultures as what we’ve been calling “hyphenated Canadians” — that is, anyone who calls Canada home but who may have roots elsewhere.

But what does it even really mean to be Canadian?

This Canada Day, I want to take a moment to reflect on this question of what it means to be Canadian much more deeply. I challenge you to do the same.