Diaspora Dialogues

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Diaspora Dialogues

Urban Underground

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DD is once again excited to be a part of this year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. The uniquely themed art exhibit entitled Urban Underground, will turn the walls of a portion of Toronto’s popular PATH into the canvas for a series of curated, photo-journalistic images that embody the literal layers of Toronto and what lies underneath the surface of the city. An audio installation will accompany the images presenting a collection of stories and poetry for the audience to imagine the past and present day inner workings of the urban underground world.

Join us, as we pose questions asking: what does one generation layer on top of another, and what is in the soot that remains when the demography shifts? How do city dwellings change with the expansion of underground spaces?

When: Saturday, September 29
Time: 7 pm—7 am
Where: PATH, Simcoe Place, 200 Front Street West

Scotiabank Nuit Blanche is a signature event produced by the City of Toronto.

Word on the Street

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Join DD this month as we return to the City of Toronto’s annual Word on the Street festival. Located under the City of Toronto tent, DD will feature readings from Irfan Ali, Lillian Allen, Heather Birrell, Dorianne Emmerton, and Terri Favro with special host Andrew J. Borkowski. Shortlisted authors for the Toronto Book Awards will also precede and follow DD’s readings, so make sure to check out the tent to catch a sneak peek of this year’s best books!

When: Sunday, September 23
Time: 2:00 pm–3:30 pm
Where: Queen’s Park; City of Toronto tent

Queen West Street Festival

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This September, DD is joining Theatre Passe Muraille for their Queen West Street Festival to kick off TPM’s Theatre Beyond Walls season. The Festival will have a wide range of activities, ranging from performance to local food, interactive learning programs, and everything in between. DD will take the stage with spoken word performances by Angelica LeMinh and Rosina Kazi.

Come visit our booth during festival hours and say hello. Hope to see you there!

When: Saturday, September 15, 2012
Time: 11am–5 pm; Rosina performs at 1:15 pm and Angelica performs at 1:55 pm
Where: Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave. along Wolseley St.

Emerging Author of the Month: Sarena Parmar

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Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in Kelowna, BC. I had taken a creative writing class in high school, but never thought much of it. I went on to pursue my career as an actor. I studied collective creation with One Yellow Rabbit in Calgary and commedia dell’arte in Italy. But my main learning happened at the National Theatre School, where I studied acting for three years. In my second year, we had to create a ten-minute solo-show. And I immediately thought, oh shit! I have nothing to write about—nothing I wanted to say. But eventually, I created a piece called Inheritance. And after that I realized maybe I do have something to say.

My trajectory as a playwright has been a shy, slow growing emergence. Always apologizing for being an actor first and a playwright second. But slowly people showed interest in my work, which allowed me to build skills and confidence. Inheritance was accepted into the Diaspora Dialogues mentorship program, and grew into a one-act, three woman play. I created a one-woman show, Through the Lens, which was invited to be a part of the Summerworks Youth Reading Series. But it has only been in the last two years that I have begun to identify myself as an actor AND playwright. I was part of the Cahoot’s Playwriting Unit last year, which was a huge turning point for me mentally. Currently, I am working on a re-imagining of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, based on my personal experience of growing up as an orchardist. Set in the Okanagan during the Trudeau Era, it follows a Punjabi-Sikh family fighting to save their orchard from foreclosure. The play examines the minority experience in rural Canada and the search for a better life, at a time when multiculturalism was born and anything was possible.

Tell us about the piece you’ve decided to share.

This is the first few pages of a piece called The Park. The play began as a short writing exercise, but I quickly realized, there was something bigger I wanted to explore with these characters.

The play examines what happens when two unlikely strangers meet. Both characters want to connect so badly with another human being, they are blind to the consequences. The Park looks at the dangerous lengths people will go to in order to survive.

When and why did you realize you had a passion for writing?

When I realized there were stories I wanted to tell, needed to tell. And that no one else could tell them; because no one has had my experiences, history, or emotional makeup. I believe we all have that ability and uniqueness in us.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

I don’t know if any one writer has had THE major impact on me. Because I work in theatre and television as an actor, I am constantly surrounded by writers, scripts and stories. I think I took for granted what I’ve learned about playwriting or who I have been influenced by. But it is the everyday events that have the biggest impact on me. I see a moment happen in real life, and it rings true to something so much bigger. I ask myself: why does this move me? And how can I create this feeling in my plays?

What kind of writer do you aspire to be?

A writer that can show the ugliness and beauty of the human condition. We, as human beings, are so complex. It is endlessly fascinating to me.

How and when do you find time to write?

It is definitely hard to find time to write. I’m not the type of person who can schedule only an hour to work and actually get something on the page. It takes me a while to get settled and filter out distractions. So I’ve started creating self-imposed writing retreats. I’ll book off five days and do nothing but write, sleep and eat. It allows me to clear my mind and immerse myself in the play.

Author of the Month: Ibi Kaslik

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Tell us about yourself.

My name is Ibi Kaslik and I am a novelist and freelance writer. I am the author of Skinny and The Angel Riots. I am a creative writing instructor at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies.

When did you realize you had a passion for writing?

I think I always knew. My father is a writer so we grew up eating books for breakfast. I learned to read in kindergarten. It was like unlocking a secret door. Books are power, knowledge and escape; books were everything to me as a child: if I had a book, I was fine.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

Probably, as a younger poet and writer, clichéd as it sounds, Sylvia Plath. I was also very heavily influenced by music, namely David Bowie who created characters like Ziggy Stardust and structured albums around character-driven narratives. The photo I have enclosed reflects my “Heroes” Bowie phase. I admire Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy and American writers like Amy Hempel; Marilynne Robinson; Mona Simpson; Donna Tartt; Joy Williams and many of my colleagues at U of T, namely Alexandra Leggat and poet Catherine Graham.

How and when do you find time to write? / What has been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a writer?

I’m going to group these questions together as my biggest challenge with teaching is finding the time to write. Once you get over the fear of the page, which happens every day, it is okay. You just need the time to think and dream and ponder; that too, is part of the writing process which daily life doesn’t often afford.

How have you changed as a writer over the years?

My writing has always been muscular, fierce and non-linear but, as I’ve grown older I have, hopefully, been able to control it more. The themes I explore are always the same: family, abandonment, betrayal, loss. I am also interested in what makes people self-destruct and make bad choices. I like setting challenges for myself by creating characters who are complex and not necessarily morally sound. I don’t like loveable people in fiction; I think it is more interesting to write about broken people.

Emerging Author of the Month: Irfan Ali

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Tell us about yourself.

I’m a Pakistani-Canadian(-ish) Muslim(-ish) guy(-ish) human who has had the pleasure of being on this Earth for 26 years thus far. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to occupy many different roles in both my personal and professional lives in a handful of different places around the world. Beyond this perpetual need for change, the only other constants in my life have been confusion about my identity (hence the—ish’s above) and an unflinching desire to observe and document the world around me, and especially the people who populate it. It was the latter that ultimately led me to write. While I have spent most of my life writing in various forms, it’s only been within the last two years that I actually built up the confidence to start taking my craft seriously and share it with others.

Tell us about the piece you’ve decided to share.

The piece, Big, started out as a celebration of elephants, my favourite animal. As it grew, it organically became a vehicle for me to explore the inherent beauty of ‘bigness’ (that is so often excluded from social norms of beauty), the power of love expressed through violence, and the subversion of traditional masculinity. Like a lot of my work, it also gave me an opportunity to explore some very personal issues, though I tried to do it in a way that did not alienate anyone. While I’m not sure I was entirely successful in its execution, I really enjoyed the process of creating and editing this piece. At the time I wrote Big, I was reading Geoffrey Brown’s Notice, so stylistically it is definitely inspired by the deliberate repetition of Brown’s poetry.

When and why did you realize you had a passion for writing?

At a very young age. My first serious writing project began at age ten with ‘adventures’—Dungeons and Dragons-like quests without all of the complex math and character sheets of the real game. I would spend hours writing these adventures before allowing my brothers to play the game. Unfortunately, while I was growing up, I was unable to see myself as a writer because of a combination of low self-confidence, having no one in my family who had gone down that path, and a lack of representation both in authors and characters within the majority of the literature I was exposed to throughout my life. I owe a lot to the Toronto Street Writers, a local youth writing group, for helping me overcome a lot of these issues.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

There are a lot of authors that have really influenced my writing including Nizar Qabbani, Leonard Cohen, Anne Wilkinson, Robert Priest, and Pablo Neruda. The two most important poems in my life have been Frank O’Hara’s Having a Coke with You and Faiz Ahmed Faiz’ Bol. The former really opened my eyes to the power of the stream of consciousness and free verse and the beauty of everyday observation, while the latter to me represents a perfect fusion of activism, sexuality, and art through words. I make a habit of reading both of these poems when I feel discouraged to remind myself of why I started writing poetry.

What kind of writer do you aspire to be?

I aspire to be the kind of writer that causes pause when someone is asked to describe my writing [in the future], and finally responds, “Well, I guess his writing is something like a cross between [WRITER A]’s and [WRITER B]’s, but not really.” Also, although I’m not at this level of skill or knowledge yet, I would love my writing to act as a form of social and political activism without being either too diluted or too heavy-handed, which in my mind is what has really set some of the most important artistic works in history apart from their contemporaries and has allowed them to affect lasting social change. Both of these are extremely lofty goals, but a guy can dream can’t he?

How and when do you find time to write?

Wherever and whenever I can. I currently work two jobs and also spend a lot of time DJ-ing so I am generally always short on time. To try to help this, I started using an agenda this year to plan out my days and try to work in some writing time whenever I can. In practice though, the only writing time I get is at night so I often sacrifice sleep to write. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it), writing is enough of a compulsion that I have to do it even if it means only sleeping for three hours. Thankfully, even when I’m disillusioned or too busy to write, I’m surrounded by a group of really amazing fellow writers, friends, and family who support and challenge me to come back to it.

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