workshop offerings
At Living Hyphen, we want to go deeper than representation and move towards truly cultivating diverse voices by creating an inclusive space and supportive community to encourage a practice of tender and courageous storytelling.
Perhaps your community is new to writing and has never really put pen to paper before, or maybe they’ve always been writing and are simply in need of a little nudge to push them deeper into their creative practice. At Living Hyphen, we have a number of workshop offerings to meet you where you are on your journey. All workshops are available in both virtual and in-person formats.
Scroll below to see which one of our workshops is right for your community.
DISCOVERING DELIGHT IN THE DIASPORA
MIGRATIONS & MELANCHOLIA
DISTANCES WITHIN & BETWEEN US
LIVING BETWEEN CULTURES
INTERGENERATIONAL IMAGINATIONS
REVELING IN THE “ROUGH” DRAFT
LOVE FROM AFAR
FILIPINX FEELS
CULTIVATING CARE
ABOUT OUR FACILITATOR
Justine Abigail Yu is the Founder and Curator of Living Hyphen. She is an award-winning writing workshop facilitator whose work with Living Hyphen has been featured on national and local media outlets including the Toronto Star, the Globe & Mail, Yahoo! News, CTV National News, and the CBC. She is also a freelance writer whose work has been featured in publications such as the Philippine Reporter, Intermission Magazine, Metro News Canada, and Makeshift Magazine.
She was also named a “Changemaker” by the Toronto Star in October 2021.
For those of us who identify as Indigenous, Black, and/or people of colour, we are asked all too often to default to our stories of hardships, trauma, and oppression. But we are all of that and so much more. Our stories are beautiful, heartbreaking, uplifting, contradictory, and constantly unfolding.
What does it mean to lather ourselves in joy? To indulge ourselves in delight? This writing workshop is an attempt to dip our toes in exactly that.
2-3 hour workshop. No writing experience necessary.
“This workshop brought me back to writing in an affirming and warm way. It was wonderful to get to spend two hours with other people, not over-thinking it, working on the same prompts, sharing unique interpretations and perspectives. We got emotional together! And it was so lovely! Justine is a fantastic facilitator, giving structure and just the right push to just get some words down and let the magic of creation happen.”
David Eng and Shinhee Han, coined the concept of racial melancholia, an ongoing mourning as it comes to our identity.
Those of us living in the diaspora never quite properly mourn or get over the losses of our homeland, of our language, of our culture. As assimilation is a never-ending, always evolving process, so too is this sense of loss.
In this workshop, we’ll pay homage to that melancholia we feel through migration.
2-3 hour workshop. No writing experience necessary.
““Living Hyphen’s writing workshop allowed me to be vulnerable in a space filled with empathy and compassion. Being very new to writing, it is scary to share something so personal with a group of strangers. But as you go through the process and listen to the stories of others, you’re hearing similarities, shared histories, common fears and wishes for the future. The session was well-paced, allowing you time to reflect on the writing prompts and the stories of other participants. The encouragement participants give to each other motivates me to keep writing and improve the ways in which my writing engages others, looking for those universal points of engagement that we all share though we come from different places and backgrounds. ””
"Revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us." – Audre Lorde
This writing workshop series aims to be a brave and reflective space that digs into the distances and differences within and between those of us from racialized communities – differences that white supremacy has created.
Over the course of four 2-hour sessions, we’ll examine the complexities of our identities through writing prompts, storytelling exercises, and critical but caring conversations. No writing experience necessary.
““Justine was excellent, and I learned so much from her, especially about Indigenous lands, how to provide good feedback, and how much we can actually produce when challenged to write.
I learned a lot from my classmates, too—about the tightrope we walk between honoring our past and needing to critique it, about how living in a new land can be liberating, but how keeping connected to the past can strengthen our identities. It sure gave me a lot to think about, and I hope to take another class from Justine again someday.””
Identity, history, and home have layers; for many of us, they involve multiple geographies, two or more worlds. Over the course of four 2-hour sessions, we’ll examine the complexities of our diasporic identities through writing prompts, storytelling exercises, and discussion. We’ve designed this workshop to be intimate and generative, with writing prompts that will spark your creativity and give you the time and space to share your story in a safe and positive environment. In our final session, we’ll celebrate the work we’ve done together with a reading of our favourite stories.
No writing experience necessary.
““This intimate workshop created a wonderful space to explore big questions of identity, citizenship, and the meaning of home. Justine is an excellent facilitator, and struck the perfect balance of providing context and inspiration, prompting writing exercises, and encouraging sharing and feedback. She and the other participants inspired me, and I look forward to improving the pieces I started.””
As hyphenated individuals living in between cultures, we are, as activist Eboo Patel describes it, “standing at the crossroads of inheritance and discovery, trying to look both ways at once.”
In this workshop series, we write to honour our ancestors and imagine the path we lay for the generations to come. We ask ourselves, who are our ancestors? We look to our ancestors - biological or otherwise - and honour all they have given us, while letting go of that which no longer serves us.
We then turn to the future, to the possibilities that lay before us. Have you ever considered yourself as a future ancestor? As an elder with wisdom to share and possibilities to create? In the second part of our workshop, we ask ourselves, what riches do we inherit and what discoveries are left for us to bestow upon future generations?
“Living Hyphen’s writing workshop was a gift. Being in a room with others who felt the same experiences and struggles as me, but yet were so diverse, made me feel less anxious to write freely and share my work. I felt so heard and welcomed. It was encouraging to see different age ranges, voices and writing styles in the room. ”
If you are someone who has always wanted to put pen to paper, but you have no idea where to start – this five-week workshop is for you!
This course is all about letting go of our preconceived notions of what it means to write and become a writer, to release our flawed frameworks of perfection, and simply to revel in the "rough" draft. We will find the joy of happy accidents and messy pages!
Absolutely no writing experience necessary.
“You’ll find yourself exploring thoughts that you may never have considered writing about. If you’re feeling nervous about sharing your writing, just know that you’re not alone - your fellow participants will be learning and growing and stretching too! You will thank yourself for taking this time out to write and share among a group of friendly writers.”
For those of us who are part of a diaspora, we know all too well what it means to love and care from afar. This new virtual writing workshop was developed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and dives into questions of home, distance, and belonging during this uniquely uncertain time, but more broadly as well.
If you are an aspiring or emerging writer who is looking for more structured, consistent, and intentional time with your writing, this writing workshop is for you and takes place over four 2-hour workshops. No writing experience necessary.
“I enjoyed the organizers’ clear intention setting from the get-go, so that we formed an intimate group of folks in and from transnational diasporas. Writing can be so vulnerable, especially when drawing inspiration from lived experiences. I recently started writing deeply again, as part of my inner healing work and I found the workshops to be a safe environment for me to write and share my lived words. I loved the emphasis on including all writing styles and decolonizing writing/language in itself. It was very liberating!”
During this writing workshop, we’ll explore how we can honour our Filipino heritage while also living in between cultures, peoples, and places as part of a diaspora. What does it mean to be a hyphenated Canadian/American? To embody that hyphen in our own being? To act as a bridge between homeland and adopted country, between past and present, between our ancestors and descendants? What does it mean to do all that in the context of the tyranny that our homeland finds itself under today?
This 2-hour writing workshop is designed for Filipinx in the diaspora of all writing levels, but especially those who are amateur or emerging.
“As a Filipino-Canadian who would like to honour my heritage and family’s stories, and discover the art of writing, this Filipinx Feels workshop was the perfect opportunity to do. I appreciated how Justine facilitated a safe and positive space with thought-provoking writing prompts. It has motivated me more to get out of my comfort zone, reflect on my culture, and to continue to practice my writing.”
Cultivating Care is a writing and storytelling workshop that explores what it means to live in between cultures, peoples, and places as part of the Filipino diaspora and what it means to give and receive care from afar during a global pandemic.
This 2-hour writing workshop is specifically designed for Filipino frontline workers.
Pwede rin mag sulat sa Tagalog kung mas comportable para sa iyo. Marunong mag Inglis at Tagalog yung tagapagturo. Our facilitator is fluent in both English and Tagalog.
“The writing workshop ‘Cultivating Care’ was the first time for me to be in the same space with fellow Filipinos abroad. Having moved to Canada during the peak of the pandemic had limited my opportunities to connect with people in general. It felt good to make new friends. It felt good to be with my kababayans. Although the workshop was conducted online, the energy and the stories we shared made me feel so at home. The provision of care is very much ingrained in our culture. We put such premium on being “maalaga” —of looking after other people. The workshop, however, gave me the opportunity to direct that care towards myself. So self care and Filipino fellowship all in the same evening. It was really more than what I can ask for.”
OUR COMMITMENT
At Living Hyphen, we believe that representation matters. We need to see ourselves in the media that we consume to be able to imagine ourselves in experiences. We need to see ourselves in the media that we consume to aspire for opportunities greater than what may be available in our immediate world.
But more than representation, we need programming, resources, and mentorship to turn that imagining into action and into reality. That's why we've spent the last year creating programming where hyphenated Canadians feel compelled and confident to share their stories.
OUR PARTNERS
We’ve been very fortunate to work with a number of different community-based organizations and institutions to deliver our writing workshops across Turtle Island. If you’d like to work together to develop programming for your community, please don’t hesitate to get in touch! Drop us a line at hello@livinghyphen.ca.
