Write As You Are: A Federal Prison In-Reach Storytelling Program
Living Hyphen has facilitated writing workshops and storytelling circles to support the mental health and wellbeing of people from racialized communities who are incarcerated in the federal prison system.
Write As You Are is our federal prison in-reach storytelling program designed specifically for those who carry stories shaped by movement across oceans, languages, generations, and borders. It is an invitation to gather, reflect, and write from wherever we find ourselves – geographically, emotionally, and ancestrally. Through writing prompts and generative conversations, we explore memory, heritage, longing, and navigating liminal spaces.
As always, our workshops aim to cultivate a culture of courageous and compassionate storytelling that explores home and heritage, identity and belonging - subjects that touch each and every one of us. We strive to guide these storytellers in (re)shaping their narrative through creative expression and care-filled storytelling.
As we do this work, we affirm the inherent dignity and humanity of people who have been incarcerated and strive to offer tools to express, reflect, and envision new possibilities for themselves and their futures.
We do this work across the Fraser Valley, British Columbia on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of many Indigenous and First Nations peoples including the Sto:lo, Sts’ailes, Semá:th, Mathxwí, Kwantlen, Sq’éwlets, Katzie, and Leq’á:mel.
Indigenous, Black, and racialized people are disproportionately incarcerated by our prison system, and we remain committed to working in solidarity across racial lines for societal change.
BRING LIVING HYPHEN TO YOUR Community
At Living Hyphen, we take a decolonial, intersectional, and anti-oppressive approach to our writing workshops and storytelling circles. We believe in the power of storytelling to heal relationships, reinforce our collective memory, resist systems of oppression, and transform our world.
We are proud to have worked with a diverse array of partners to share our approach to storytelling and create ripples of change. Get in touch to explore how we might be able to work together!