Last weekend, I attended the Writing Thru Race conference; an event to support the CUPE 3902 strike; and Room Magazine‘s International Women’s Day event in Toronto. It was a busy week-end, and I was immersed in concerns about social justice. I wanted to post sooner about some of the things that stood out to me, but a full week-end meant an even busier week. I finished up a last round of edits on my story “The Museum of Wooden Hearts” (appearing soon in The New Quarterly) and continued picking away at my creative writing thesis. This week, I am also in the midst of leading two creative writing workshops at Parkdale Collegiate, not to mention my regular paid work. So, lots going on.

Here’s a quick list of the highlights from the Writing Thru Race conference:

1. Lillian Allen‘s advice on being an artist and writing thru race: be aggressively subjective.
2. Lee Maracle on the racialized writer: you are colonized when someone else is in the room. The rest of your life and you are much bigger than that.
3. Shani Mootoo: The writing, and the pleasure of it, comes first.

I didn’t know it while I was at the conference, but Lillian Allen was on the lineup at the CUPE event. And can she dubstep! So I saw and heard her twice that day. She sang, she danced, she had everyone bringing their hands together in rallying support.

The Room event was fantastic! It started with readings from featured writers (including yours truly!), and then followed with a panel on Feminism in the Arts. The reading introduced me to Rebecca Fisseha, a writer I hadn’t known about before. Her story “What Grows” was fanciful and heartbreaking, and I recommend reading it. The panel talked about many things, but it especially made me aware of the gender gap on the internet, when it comes to coding and so on, and how that can threaten women. It made me appreciate initiatives like Ladies Learning Code, which I haven’t taken part in before, but I am thinking I should look into now.